“‘We’d always been very wary of working together because we’d quite like to stay together,’ says Sharp wryly. She looks at her partner of 13 years. ‘You don’t generally like to work with others.’” - The Guardian (UK)
Try one of Andrew Sean Greer’s comic novel recommendations, even though he says, “nobody knows what a comic novel is. And once you start discussing it, all the fun runs out.” - The Guardian (UK)
"Life of M is a narrative hall of mirrors that only a fool would confuse with a thinly veiled roman à clef about a celebrity. To my mind, only one true mystery remains: Was Portman in on it?” - Slate
“An email sent to publishers by Falade’s agents … said: ‘Jerry Falade produced an incredible manuscript that dazzled us and the top publishing professionals around the world. Unfortunately, we are no longer able to authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion.’”- The Guardian (UK)
Vinita Prabhakar, until recently an adjunct professor at South Florida State College, had used Moshfegh’s “Bettering Myself” in an introductory reading-and-writing course there without incident since 2023. But someone complained about the story's content to the college president, who fired Prabhakar, who’s now suing. - Tallahassee Democrat
“Globally, people currently use roughly 7,500 languages, with English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic and French the most common, counting native and nonnative speakers. That is a lot of languages. But it is a far cry from the peak number historically.” - Reuters (Yahoo!)
The book “Antiquities of Athens,” published in 1858, was returned to the library in the seaside town of Kiama last week by a man who had found it during recent home renovations inside a tea crate bricked into a sealed fireplace, Kiama Library manager Michelle Hudson said. - AP News
“Something’s in the air: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, published last month by FSG, is just one in a recent cluster of genre-spanning books that interpret, adapt, and play with Stein’s legacy, as well as that of her longtime partner Alice B. Toklas.” - Publishers Weekly
“If the odds are against parents who disapprove of artificial intelligence, it’s because there’s an entire ecosystem of AI services designed to insert real children into books … and some relatives can’t resist their ads for specially curated storybooks.” - Wired
The bureaucrat sent an email to him with a dread warning. The books must go, it decreed. There was nothing healthy nor wise in the practice, for the keeping of books on bookshelves is now “the unnecessary storing of combustible materials.” - The Critic
Every time you sit down to write, you’re doing something your brain registers as socially risky. Translating private thoughts into language means exposing yourself to judgment and for most of human history, judgment wasn’t just uncomfortable, it was dangerous. - LitHub
“Freedom Letters … (is) one of a growing number of cultural organizations that have joined forces with bookstores, wholesalers and book-fair organizers to build a literary resistance among the Russian diaspora. Together, they publish, sell and distribute books that can’t get through Russia’s restrictive new censorship laws.” - Bloomberg
I don’t want to totally wave away the issues these pieces are gesturing towards, but I’d argue the fear that we’re sliding into a post-literate society rests on a category error that feels endemic at this point. - Becoming Literary
