So: a victory for high literature, for inevitability, for oppositional culture, for men. But for the obsessives who have been attending to the saga of the Nobel Prize in literature over the past decade, it’s also something of a bummer. - The New Republic
A report by charity Inclusive Books for Children found that of the 2,721 books surveyed, only 51 featured a Black main character, down by 21.5% since 2023. - The Guardian
“Terri Lesley was fired as the library system director in northeastern Wyoming’s Campbell County in 2023, two years into the dispute … over books with sexual content and LGBTQ+ themes that some people complained were inappropriate for youngsters and sought their removal from youth shelves … at the library in Gillette.” - AP
“Often described as postmodern, Krasznahorkai is known for his long, winding sentences, dystopian and melancholic themes, and the kind of relentless intensity that has led critics to compare him to Gogol, Melville and Kafka. Satantango, was famously adapted into a seven-hour film by director Béla Tarr.” - The Guardian
The Warsaw book heist was not an isolated incident but one of the final stops on an unprecedented grand tour of bibliophilic crime, which snaked its way from north-east to south-west Europe between spring 2022 and winter 2023. - The Guardian
Baker & Taylor let go about 520 employees yesterday and plans to wind down the business by January. Employees who were laid off had their severance plans canceled as well. B&T had undergone some layoffs earlier this year, but recently had as many as 1,500 full-time and part-time employees. - Publishers Weekly
“The Poems of Seamus Heaney will feature his 12 collections interspersed with poems published in magazines, journals and newspapers, plus 25 poems selected from Heaney’s large number of unpublished works.” - The Guardian
As of November 3, Lee Enterprises is ceasing seven-day-a-week print editions at all of its papers that hadn’t already done so. Those titles include the St. Louis-Post Dispatch, Omaha World-Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, Buffalo News, Quad City Times (Iowa/Illinois) and Richmond Times-Dispatch. - MediaPost
Fiction by Rabih Alameddine, Megha Majumdar and Karen Russell and a memoir of family tragedy by Yiyun Li are among … five nominees in each of five competitive categories. ... Winners, each of whom receive $10,000, will be revealed during a Nov. 19 dinner gala in downtown Manhattan.” - AP
“How can you write in a way that shows somebody working day after day on a piece of work?” asks Richard Holmes, with the triumphant twinkle of someone who has an answer to his own question. “How do you actually narrate that?” - The New Statesman
“In the long, ignominious history of American book banning, portrayals of sex have been cited again and again as beyond the pale for schools and libraries, but in recent years the list of forbidden topics has grown.” - The Atlantic
Andrea Bartz “was furious that the writing she had labored over for years got vacuumed up and fed into an algorithm, without her permission.” Then she (and others) did something about it. - The New York Times
Romancelandia is big, and “the rest of the industry wants to emulate this success, but as many editors know, chasing a trend can be a futile endeavor.” Imagine “HistoryLandia” or “BookerNomineeLandia.” - The Atlantic
Of course all, or at least many, books are cool. But the Goldsmiths Prize is for fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form.” - The Guardian (UK)
