The Swedish Academy does not discuss the criteria it uses for selecting Nobel laureates, but here are the basics of how the process works. - Deutsche Welle
The former wife of a man who built a notorious empire by making other people’s books ever easier to buy and, eventually, ever easier to produce has herself produced a novel that seems to have stepped directly into the literary territory that Amazon helped make so fertile. - The New Yorker
The winners in each of the five categories—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people's literature—will be announced at an awards ceremony on November 18. - Publishers Weekly
“On Thursday, the Amazon-owned company introduced three new features that will allow listeners to explore a book’s characters, engage in interactive stories, and view additional imagery and bonus information about landmarks or places mentioned in the book.” Unfortunately, for now this all is available with only one title. - TechCrunch
“In … peer-reviewed journal Digital Medievalist, (two researchers) argue that the manuscript’s folded sheets may have originally been piled on top of each other as ‘singulions’ – like a stack of Christmas cards – but were mis-bound in a more typical ‘nested’ arrangement at some point in the mid-to-late 15th century.” - The Guardian
What are those commas doing there, anyway? By modern usage, they should mark off a non-restrictive clause, but they don’t. Nor are they marking items in a series or natural pauses in speech. - The New Yorker
That is ... not going well (though romance readers are still gaga for M/M, W/W, and M/W hockey tales from more traditional channels). Fans "see the stories as cheap pandering that fails to engage with female and LGBTQ hockey fans’ concerns about homophobia and toxic masculinity in the sport." - Wired
As Substack has become a more respectable platform and mainstream academics have begun to join in some numbers, they have encountered a strange simulacrum of fields they thought they knew intimately. Cultural and symbolic capital seem to work differently here. - Paroxysms
"When you put your finger on every single book in order to type it into a spreadsheet, you really do think, ‘Am I willing to lose my job over this particular book?’ ... I think that is a real concern for teachers around the state." - The 74
"In total, this summer, 13 Ukrainian books have been destroyed by Russian missiles or drones – a third, estimates the government, of all books printed in Ukraine this year." - The Guardian (UK)
Emerging from Reddit, the subgenre is not fully defined, but "books that get called weird girl lit tend to deal in uncanny or dreamlike circumstances." - The New York Times
Writing can be useful cognitive scaffolding for memory and self-regulated learning, but the notion that it is the best process for developing thinking skills is a fairly recent idea, traceable to the 1970s writing-across-the-curriculum movement. - The New York Times
Books Unbanned is designed to give young people multiple ways to access digital books regardless of where they live or what their local library can provide. The library said some participants sign up because their local libraries have been censored or underfunded. - KOMO Seattle
Haitian-Canadian novelist Thélyson Orélien’s C’était ça ou mourir (It Was Either That Or Die) was France’s literary sensation of the fall when another author claimed that Orélien used AI to write the novel. The Prix Goncourt removed the book from contention, but nevertheless, it’s currently the bestselling novel in France. - Rolling Stone
“We spoke with dozens of librarians at the A.L.A. conference this summer. They came from rural towns and major cities, elementary schools and universities, local branches and big government agencies. … They want you to know about book bans and budget cuts, but also about career counseling and pop-up medical clinics.” - The New York Times
