"Seventeen plaintiffs — including the ALA's Freedom to Read Foundation, the Association of American Publishers, the American Booksellers Association, and the Authors Guild — will file a federal lawsuit over a recently passed law in Arkansas ... which exposes librarians to criminal liability for making allegedly 'obscene' books available to minors." - Publishers Weekly
"So I'm going to be brutal and say that I obtained a prize I never wanted. The Nobel Prize fell upon me. It fell into my life like a bomb. It was an enormous disruption; since winning it, I cannot write and the act of the writing was always my future." - The Guardian
"I like to imagine that I would survive, thrive even, conveniently forgetting that my life of indoor pursuits, reading, writing, and streaming drama box sets whilst ordering pizza, has probably not provided me with the skills I’d need." - LitHub
Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, isn't sure. And it's a bit weird for her. "Even though is not her first book, or even her first to be a best seller, many readers are coming to her work for the first time." - The New York Times
In 1936, Hughes and artist Elmer W. Brown put together and shopped around The Sweet and Sour Animal Book. No publisher acquired the book, but the original verses and pictures have been reunited for a museum show in Cleveland. - The New York Times
"Volunteers have been transporting the books and other precious documents, which became submerged in water and mud in flooded libraries in the worst-affected areas, to Cesena, where the items will be placed on shelves in temperatures of -25C (-13F) in industrial-size freezers provided by (frozen-food company) Orogel." - The Guardian
"A company called Open Road Integrated Media is trying to (give) a second life to older books. It does that by using machine learning to make those titles more visible online and ... by republishing books that were largely forgotten or had fallen out of print." - The New York Times
The U.S. is the biggest English-language publishing market it the world, yet it’s one of the few large countries without an industrywide conference. - Publishers Weekly
"A parent of a student at Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes objected to the poem, for which they erroneously listed Oprah Winfrey as the author/publisher. … It 'is not educational and have (sic) indirectly hate messages,' the complaint said, adding that the poem would 'cause confusion and indoctrinate students.'" - CNN
"(The novel) imagines the 'first clinic of the past,' in which Alzheimer's patients can visit different time periods of their lives on different floors." As The Guardian's reviewer put it, "this funny yet frightening Bulgarian novel explores the weaponisation of nostalgia." - NPR
In what Maggie Tokuda-Hall described as a “Faustian bargain,” Scholastic made the offer contingent on removing mentions of the Japanese American incarceration that tied that history to a broader past during this “politically sensitive” moment. They also asked her to remove the word “racism.” - Seattle Times
"BBC Culture polled 177 books experts from 56 countries in order to find the greatest children's books ever. From Where the Wild Things Are to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, here's the top 100." - BBC
“Complexity neither disguised the shortcomings of poor essays, nor enhanced the appeal of high-quality essays.” In other words, George Orwell got it right: “Never use a long word where a short one will do.” - Big Think
"The U.S. Department of Education has found that a suburban Atlanta school district's decision to remove some books from its libraries may have created a hostile environment that violated federal laws against race and sex discrimination." - AP
Some of the laws impose severe penalties on librarians, who until now were exempted in almost every state from prosecution over obscene material — a carve-out meant to permit accurate lessons in topics such as sex education. - Washington Post
