Reminder: don’t put food in your books
Remember that whole “Don’t have a bookmark?” meme that horrified bibliophiles everywhere last fall? The one where everyone from Chex Mix to Vitamin Water to Steak-Umm suggested using their products as… Read more »
Care to rent Dashiell Hammett’s old apartment?
Do you love noir fiction, have $1850 per month, and could handle living in something (alarmingly) called a microstudio? If the answer to those questions is yes, then you’ll be… Read more »
New Carol Shields Prize for Fiction will pay big for women and nonbinary authors
Like many of us, Canadian novelist Susan Swan was disheartened to learn that female writers continue to lag behind male writers in terms of coverage and literary prizes. Despite modest… Read more »
New bill threatens to jail Missouri librarians over “age-inappropriate” content
Remember when that library in China got caught burning books deemed subversive by the government? Well, Missouri has decided to throw its hat into the dystopian ring with a bill… Read more »
Turns out AI writes bad poetry
Over at LitHub, Dennis Tang penned an essay examining the poetry of GPT-2, an artificial language program created by a San Francisco-based research firm called OpenAI. In the grand tradition… Read more »
There’s a lot to unpack in the controversy surrounding American Dirt
If you were even remotely tapped into the American publishing industry in 2019 you likely heard about Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt. Positioned by publisher Flatiron Books as the book… Read more »
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University discover a lost copy of an early essay on gay rights
In 1873 John Addington Symonds, an English essayist and poet, wrote “A Problem in Greek Ethics,” an essay celebrating the Greeks’ liberal approach to sexuality in contrast to Victorian England… Read more »
Teens in Argentina push for a gender-neutral Spanish language
Language evolves much slower than vocabulary. It is something the average person probably doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about, but the question of gendered language is a large… Read more »
A Chinese library burns books and sparks outrage
Remember when time travel was just a really cool idea in science fiction where your biggest concern was either correcting a dystopian future or not hooking up with your mom?… Read more »
Amazon orders are up again
Earlier this month, Jim Milliot at Publisher’s Weekly reported that Amazon had been slashing orders to publishers since late October. Milliot is back, writing that Amazon orders are increasing and publishers… Read more »