Kuang, author of bestseller Babel, says her new novel came to her almost fully formed. "Publishing was going through what seems like all these watershed moments, having conversations about change and diversity and caring about marginalized writers, et cetera, and I was feeling a bit cynical." - Los Angeles Times
The protagonists are cut from the same cookie cutter mold. "Readers, let us all take a moment to silently contemplate her self-sacrifice, the definitive characteristic of exemplary single motherhood." - LitHub
Shakespeare was Shakespeare. The rest is idiocy. "While to most of us, a poem explicitly mentioning Shakespeare and crediting him with writing 'The Rape of Lucrece' would bolster the case for Shakespeare’s authorship, to truthers the poem is suspect." - Slate
That is, the Eurovision Book Contest. "In March, the literary festival asked the public to submit their favourite fiction from any of the 37 countries that take part in the music competition each year." - The Guardian (UK)
Irby "received hate mail from fans who believed had somehow blasphemed their beloved Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda. Her response ... is an entire chapter devoted to her ideas about changing up episodes of the original series, like having Aidan murder Mr. Big." - The New York Times
There are parts of the jail system that we no longer visit, because we don’t feel safe there. Other parts have lost library access because we don’t have enough staff. - The New Yorker
"These days libraries are bustling community centers, where being at least somewhat noisy is the new normal, especially when kids are involved. As someone who led hundreds of circle times at my library, I can tell you there's no quiet way to do the Hokey Pokey." - MSN (The Washington Post)
"The strands of medicine, consciousness expansion, intoxication, addiction, and crime were tightly entangled in fin-de-siècle Paris, where ether and chloroform circulated among bohemian demi-mondaines" such as Guy de Maupassant and Jean Lorrain, in whose works and lives the effects of the fumes were quite evident. - The Public Domain Review
Kindle is to literature what Instagram or TikTok are to visual images, or Spotify to music. They have their uses, but it would be absurd for the British Library, the National Gallery or the Proms to rely on them to preserve our heritage, let alone declare themselves redundant. - The Critic
"The decades-long transition from a comic originally serialized in the pages of an alternative magazine to a mainstream, foundational, and even, yes, educational book has created a tension between the kind of text it is and the kind of text it's expected to be." - The Nation
Quite quickly, I figured out that if you want an AI to imitate Raymond Chandler, the last thing you should do is ask it to write like Raymond Chandler. That produces a tepid, banal rip-off. - The Atlantic
Penguin Random House will release En agosto nos vemos (We'll See Each Other in August) throughout Latin America in 2024. The roughly 150-page book will consist of five separate sections about a protagonist named Ana Magdalena Bach (no relation to the composer). No English version has been announced. - The Guardian
"Washington University professor Carl Phillips has won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his most recent book, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020. The collection chronicles an era of American culture roiled by crises of politics, identity and the pandemic." - St. Louis Public Radio
