"Not once did I catch a whiff that (Reese) Witherspoon, (Jenna Bush) Hager, (Oprah) Winfrey, or any of the other celebrities are not die-hard readers. … While I fully believe that celebrities aren’t playing some nefarious game of imprint chess to benefit themselves, the pieces are still visible on the board." - Esquire
Where a photojournalist trades in photographs, a poetjournalist, according to Dworkin, would trade in “newspoems.” He could think of a few examples from the past: Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, say, or O Captain! My Captain!, Walt Whitman’s lament of the assassination of President Lincoln. - NiemanLab
"A little more than three months after Small Press Distribution abruptly closed, leaving some 400 independent presses without a trade distributor, publishers and distributors alike are moving forward even as damage assessment continues. Approximately 25% of the stranded publishers have found new distributors." - Publishers Weekly
Apparently, the struggle to find the right word is real and has been for some time, because the Oxford English Dictionary has its own category for these terms, labelled “thing or person whose name is forgotten or unknown”. - The Conversation
By taking a similar look at "excess word usage" after LLM writing tools became widely available in late 2022, the researchers found that "the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words" that was "unprecedented in both quality and quantity." - Ars Technica
“While the library patrons say removing the books constitutes an illegal government squelching of viewpoints, county officials have argued that they have broad authority to decide which books belong on library shelves.” The review may back the county. - AP (US News & World Report)
“Once a niche that independent booksellers largely ignored, romance is now the hottest thing in the book world. It is, by far, the top-selling fiction genre, and its success is reshaping not only the publishing industry, but the retail landscape as well.” - The New York Times
“Natalie Miroshnyk was at the Warsaw Book Fair for Ukrainian publisher Vivat when she heard that a Russian missile had hit her country’s biggest printing house, killing seven workers, injuring 22 others and destroying 50,000 books.” - Irish Times
Australia’s largest online bookseller announced the move on Wednesday, two weeks after it went into a voluntary suspension of share trading. - The Guardian
We make something more likely, more widely believed, by saying and repeating it. Our rhetoric encourages or discourages. Which is why sports teams chant a version of “I believe we will win.” - LitHub
"Just as modern-day government workers suffer neck and spinal injuries from sitting at desks and arching forward to stare at screens, ancient Egyptian scribes endured comparable physical stresses from hunching over papyrus for prolonged sessions." Scribe skeletons show evidence of serious osteoarthritis in the neck, collarbone, arm, thigh, and spine. - Artnet
Especially cruel realities face a struggling field like literary studies, with its disappearing majors, budgetary pressures, abysmal job market, fears about academic freedom, and more. Literary critics have good reasons to be downcast. Downcast and, at times, spiteful. - LA Review of Books
"Works targeted for banning typically involve race, gender and the LGBTQ+ communities. … Although scattered through different states and cities, the cases have a common factor: there are usually politicians behind them, and in most cases, they support the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro." - The Guardian
