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)
Becoming the (at the time) youngest person to win the Booker Prize wasn’t all fun and games for the novelist, and it took her nearly 20 years to produce another novel. - Irish Times
"If The Best American Poetry captures ‘the zeitgeist of the current attitudes in American poetry,’ we should be asking: Why are those attitudes so fucked up?” - The Defector (Archive Today)
“‘I love Shakespeare,’ Swift said earnestly during the movie, and then made fun of herself for saying something so obvious. ‘It holds up! It’s actually not overhyped.’” - Washington Post (Yahoo)
“It’s been nearly 50 years since punk first set out to smash the vanity and artifice of rock-and-roll. … What a beautiful thrill to see the same demystification tactics being set loose on the self-aggrandizing bloat and pomp of the rock memoir.” - Washington Post (MSN)
Swift’s satirical suggestion that Ireland’s poor breed their children as food for elites wasn’t really an attack on the English (even though he suggested that England would “swallow up” the entire Irish nation if it could). Swift’s actual target was the Irish landowning class and its catastrophic choices about farmland. - JSTOR Daily
PEN America, which has filed a lawsuit challenging removals in the state, reported Florida had more than 2,300 titles pulled from campus shelves last school year. - WUWF
I’ve worked in multiple bookstores (and have moved too many books, too many times) so I understand that 100,000 books is, indeed, a lot of books. But how does that compare to your average corner bookstore, or your big old boxstore, or your little town library, or the largest library in the world? - LitHub
Across the country, the number of untethered readings disconnected from a specific publisher or magazine has skyrocketed over the past couple of years. These series act as dedicated, consistent spaces for people to come together and listen. - Electric Literature
In June, Musk raised eyebrows by promising to “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors,” using his Grok AI. That’s the same one with a nasty habit of heil-Hitlering. - NiemanLab
The online store Bookshop.org is launching a platform through which independent bookshops in the UK will be able to sell ebooks as an alternative to Amazon’s Kindle offering. - The Guardian
PEN America’s “Banned in the USA,” released Wednesday, tracks more than 6,800 instances of books being temporarily or permanently pulled for the 2024-2025 school year. The new number is down from more than 10,000 in 2023-24, but still far above the levels of a few years ago. - APNews
The suit in question concerned the Escambia County (Pensacola) School Board’s decision to block its libraries from stocking And Tango Makes Three, the well-known children’s book about the male penguin couple who raised a chick together at New York’s Central Park Zoo. - WUSF (Tampa)
“From the pages of After Midnight emerges a sense of du Maurier that’s far from the meek, naive narrator of Rebecca. These stories are the work of a protean, restless, and rather dangerous spirit with a decidedly pagan bent and a craving for solitude” — as well as a decided ambivalence about gender and sexuality. - Slate (Yahoo!)
