In 2019, after years of management turmoil and falling revenue, James Daunt (who turned around British chain Waterstones) was brought in to fix things. He says that though the cafe and newsstand business hasn't yet recovered from COVID, book sales are up more than 5% from 2019. - Publishers Weekly
There’s an appealingly simple sociolinguistic view, one my grizzled inner skeptic appears to have embraced, whereby words function as vectors of status: where vocabulary and diction map faithfully to acculturation and lifestyle, where every social stratum has its vernacular and every vernacular its social stratum. - LitHub
"A team using techniques more commonly used to track wildlife estimates that 68 percent of chivalric and heroic works produced in medieval Europe survive today. For individual manuscripts, or handwritten copies of literary works, that figure drops to 9 percent." - Smithsonian Magazine
Scholar Silvia Ferrara suggests that — since we don't have a Rosetta Cord giving us a text side-by-side in Inca knots and Spanish letters — we take an approach something like the way Amy Adams's linguist character in Arrival deciphered the aliens' squid-ink emissions. - Literary Hub
"My background as an author is in young adult fiction, an area in which sensitivity readers are common, especially in the US, so I’m less fazed. I have also been a sensitivity reader, informally." - The Guardian
The state House of Representatives has approved an amendment that removes the exemption libraries, museums, and schools had from a longstanding law against exposing minors to "pornography," including any verbal descriptions of sexual excitement, and "any other harmful material." - Boise State Public Radio
A physical bookstore "requires superb customer service, dedicated staff who provide knowledgeable advice about what to read, an inviting environment in which to browse and shop, and literary activities. ... Most of all, it demands a deep commitment to the local communities that sustain us." - Washington Post
A close reading of Auden's "Musée des Beaux-Arts" reveals a lot about Europe just before WWII - and, perhaps, about our own times. - The New York Times
This metaphor might not work for younger writers, but: "I was suddenly free of the 'logical order' I had thought was so important. ... It was fun. It was hard. It was like making a mixtape for the crush I had on all of my characters at once." - LitHub
Ferrante: "I don’t like artists who imagine themselves shamans, and I would prefer that we definitively stop making the alphabet sacred, that we complete the secularisation of literature, that we stop feeling we’re just below the gods and directly inspired by them." - The Guardian (UK)
After the 2016 election, Fowler couldn't see the point in writing her book about John Wilkes Booth and Lincoln. "I knew pockets of the country clung to the Lost Cause , but I thought they weren’t hugely populated." - The Guardian (UK)
"His health was failing, but he gave every reading his histrionic last ounce. ... As Ruskin explained it, Dickens 'chooses to speak in a circle of stage fire.' The reason the books are melodramatic is that they are melodrama. If you're looking for something else, read Anthony Trollope." - The New Yorker
Leaving nothing to chance after the previous book banning, the new works will be written, drawn and edited by what’s described as a group of writers and artists from “diverse racial backgrounds.” - Deadline
Both birdsong and language are passed culturally to later generations through vocal learning. Geographically distant populations of the same bird species can make small tweaks to their songs over time, eventually resulting in a new dialect. - Smithsonian
"History textbooks are basically designed to alienate students. Instead of enlightening them, textbooks prevent students from understanding history and why it's important. ... If we want to fix history education in the U.S., we have to lean into primary and secondary sources." - Mic
