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!)
SenLinYu, 34, started off writing Harry Potter fanfiction that blew up online during the pandemic, racking up more than 20m downloads. Sen’s Draco and Hermione (“Dramione”) fanfic, heavily inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale, has now been rewritten – with third-party IP necessarily removed – and published traditionally as Alchemised. - The Guardian
Because the majority of books don’t earn out, most people in publishing have the disappointing experience of working on a book they love that, for whatever reason, didn’t hit: “If you’re a fair person, you know it’s not the author’s fault. It’s just the realities of a very difficult market.” - The Walrus
"I am now the most banned author in the United States — 87 books," he tweeted. "May I suggest you pick up one of them and see what all the pissing & moaning is about? Self-righteous book banners don't always get to have their way. This is still America, dammit." - Newsweek
Tstisi Dangarembga, novelist and filmmaker: “We are never completely free; we have moments of freedom. Freedom is a desire. Achieving it requires us to move towards it.” - El País English
Hurray for research! “The archivist led her into a reading room and handed her a cream-coloured box. She lifted the lid, hands shaking, and opened the volume. There, professionally typed, were revised versions of the NYPL stories, with hundreds of stylistic changes.” - The Guardian (UK)
How about this one, from 1929? “In Out of the Void, Stone didn’t imagine the future so much as she imagined a different present. Imagine, she asked her readers, … that the oppressed could rise up and achieve justice for themselves and the generations to come after them.” - Reactor
“The beauty, the moral authority, of high Christian tradition is just very persuasive. The beauty of it all seems right. It seems as if it opens the universe in a way that very few kinds of thinking actually do.” - The New York Times
“We have been living in a moment of constant crisis and existential dread for years now. Many use this as the reason horror is having a moment, but I say it is more the icing on the horror cake.” - People
