WORDS

What Virgil Thought About Bees

“(The Latin poet) recognized that bees had what we might call social being — co-dependent, organized, enterprising — and he praised them for having all the virtues of a Roman citizen: industrious, hardworking, loyal, and (willing) to die to defend the colony.” - Literary Hub

BookTok Is Turning Some Authors Into Bona Fide Stars, And Hollywood Is Noticing

“The streamers are newer. They don't have established libraries of ‘80s and ‘90s movies to reboot, and yet they're still looking for familiarity of titles. (Finding hot titles on BookTok to adapt is) one way to compete at an IP level.” - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)

U.S. Authors’ Incomes Are Down. New Study Looks At Why.

“(The Authors Guild research) found that only 25% of print books and e-books read in the past month were bought new or through a paid subscription. ... Average author earnings, now pegged at about $10,000 annually, have declined about 42% since 2009, the year Kindles first entered the market.” - Publishers Weekly

Collateral Damage From Trump’s Iran War: W.H. Smith, The Big Airport-Bookstore Chain

“The retailer, which operates 1,200 outlets globally in airports, railway stations and hospitals, … has already experienced a fall in revenues in its UK airport operation due to the conflict in the Middle East, (and) said North America had now also been affected.” - The Guardian

Forgotten Manuscript By JRR Tolkien Found In Oxford Library

“The Lord of the Rings author’s translation of a medieval religious text from the early 13th century had lain forgotten in the Bodleian Libraries’ collections until now. His reworking of Sawles Warde, an early Middle English prose homily, which he titled Soul’s Ward ..., is to be published for the first time.” - The Telegraph (UK)

As Russia’s War Rages On, Kyiv Hosts A Busy Literary Festival

“A sign of the nation’s complete engulfing by war was the presence of so many soldiers on the stages; writers who had become soldiers, soldiers who had become writers. The Russia-Ukraine war has dragged on so grievously, and for so long, that entire publishing cycles have turned since 2022.” - The Guardian

Have You Ever Really Looked Carefully At The Declaration Of Independence?

It’s poetry, philosophy and polemic, all in a little more than 1,300 words and all represented in its second and most famous sentence. - The New York Times

Utah Bans Alice Sebold’s Memoir “Lucky” From All Public Schools

“The ban comes amidst a lawsuit challenging these state-sanctioned bans filed in February, and it comes after banning 15 other books in 2026 alone.” - Book Riot

The Problem With Responses To AI Creations

At its core, this is a debate about values. A short story implies a human artistic act with intentional imaginative labour—the exact practice whose future is now at risk if the literary world doesn’t take a stand. - The Walrus

Audiobook Sales Up 9 Percent In 2025, To $2.4B

General fiction accounted for the largest share of audiobook revenue at 27%, with science fiction/fantasy, romance, and mysteries/thrillers/suspense rounding out the top genres. The fastest-growing genres in 2025 were humor, general fiction, and children's, including YA. - Publishers Weekly

Do We Really Care If Memoirs Are Truthful?

“The facts may not totally line up, but the emotions are all present and accounted for.” - Washington Post (MSN)

Sure, Write What You Know, But Write What Scares You

“When you sense a story, or glimpse a scene, or feel a character coming to life, you stop, step back, consider what in that might scare you most. … Let that dread jolt you loose. Then—and this is key for me—find a way to make it worse.” - LitHub

A New Edith Wharton Story Highlights The Human Inability To Deal With War

“The story, on two typed and undated manuscripts that appeared to be different drafts, centers on a dinner party hosted at the same table where, earlier in the war, an army surgeon had performed amputations.” - The New York Times

Mary Shelley’s Sisters

“Fanny’s few surviving letters testify to her interests in poetry, education, art history, literature, current affairs, social politics, and the wellbeing of her extended family. … She counted Aaron Burr (former USA vice president), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poet), Humphry Davy (scientist), Charles and Mary Lamb (writers)” as acquaintances. - LitHub

Two And A Half Centuries On, Someone May Have Figured Out The Mystery Of The Declaration Of Independence

Pretty cool: “Scholars have identified about 17 distinct broadside editions created in print shops across the colonies in July and August 1776, usually in runs of hundreds of copies.” One was anonymous - but perhaps not anymore. - The New York Times

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