Words

“Whitehead, 50, is the youngest winner of the lifetime achievement prize, which the library has previously given to Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and Denis Johnson, among others. He is the first author to win Pulitzers for consecutive works of fiction — The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, for which he won in April.” – Yahoo! (AP)

As so many of us have been doing, the store redecorated – or rather, some of the chain took what it calls first steps in redecorating. (Might it be useful to hire back some of those content experts who can hand-sell books when it’s safe to open back up, B&N? Oh, smaller front tables instead? OK.) – The New York Times

The 2020 version of the ceremony, scheduled for November 18, will now be online. The executive director: “As a country, and within the literary community, we have all experienced a shift in reality.” – Los Angeles Times

“Co-owners Rebecca Fitting and Jessica Stockton-Bagnulo acknowledged that Black customers and employees have felt unwelcome and disrespected, that poor training had led to racial profiling in their stores, and that the company had not succeeded in creating an anti-racist space.” They say they’ll do better, including talking with the neighbors about gentrification without getting defensive. – LitHub

“[It] wasn’t the funniest issue they ever did, but it would turn out to be incredibly successful because it reflected so many of the emotions that people were feeling after the attacks. The sorrow, the anger, the utter helplessness — all of this was captured by one headline or another, giving most everyone in the audience something to identify with. … Now, nearly 20 years later, the issue is widely considered to be an important part of comedy history — even an important part of the broader cultural history surrounding 9/11.” – Mel

“Government-required public notices have been published in newspapers since colonial times. … But the advent of websites operated by federal, state and local governments gave politicians a money-saving opening to redirect public notices to their own sites. Overwhelmingly, that simply hasn’t happened: … newspapers have managed to retain nearly all their public notice business. And for many, it has become indispensable to survival.” – Poynter

Librarians understand that patrons are nervous about catching or spreading the coronavirus. But not only will paper catch fire when it gets really hot, the scannable security tags on library books contain metal, and we all know what happens when metal gets microwaved, right? (Don’t worry: these days returned library books are being quarantined.) – Tampa Bay Times

The great reckoning now sweeping across pop culture has been working through the stacks of literature for far longer. The effects of time are twofold: Most books have fallen into dust, along with the racist values they imbibed. And those few texts that survive have been subjected to rigorous — and ongoing — debate. – Washington Post

“The final collection of early stories from the late Terry Pratchett, written while the Discworld creator was a young reporter, will be published in September. The tales in The Time-travelling Caveman, many of them never released in book form before, range from a steam-powered rocket’s flight to Mars to a Welsh shepherd’s discovery of the resting place of King Arthur.” – The Guardian

“Our sales go up with political and economic turmoil and down during times of prosperity,” says Jake Stevens of Verso. “It’s really amazing to see all the different types of books that we experimented with as a publishing company, and the varied directions our publishing vision has traveled,” says Jisu Kim of Feminist Press, “but also how much we still stick to our foundational editorial pillars.” – Publishers Weekly

Since 2017, Ms. Canedy, 55, has been the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, overseeing a period when the awards have acknowledged an increasingly diverse body of work, including the music of Kendrick Lamar. Before that she worked at the the New York Times for 20 years, and winning a Pulitzer. – The New York Times

Reading Ibraham X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning or How to Be an Anti-Racist, or maybe cuddling up to Asha Bandele and Patrisse Cullors’ When They Call You a Terrorist, may be great for catching up on what should have been in our educations already. But “fiction gives you a window into both lives you know and recognize and ones you don’t. It helps you to put yourself in the shoes of those characters, even when you have a different perspective when it comes to race, gender or sexual identity.” – Time

Last year, official figures revealed that almost 800 libraries had closed since the implementation of austerity in 2010. “We do think these current announcements could be the ‘canary in the coalmine’ for a fresh wave of austerity cuts to local services,” warned Nick Poole, chief executive of the librarians’ association Cilip. – The Guardian

“The study … found that only 11,000 people were habitual Gaelic speakers, after a rapid decline during the 1980s when the density of native speakers fell below 80%. … The language is rarely spoken in the home, little used by teenagers, and used routinely only by a diminishing number of elderly Gaels dispersed across a few island communities in the Hebrides.” – The Guardian

The prison library program will give each of the 1,000 prisons the same 500-book collection selected by the project’s leaders. The collections, which Dr. Alexander called “freedom libraries,” are to include a broad variety of nonfiction, fiction, poetry, science, social thought and more. – The New York Times

Yes, they has been used in the singular since the late Middle Ages, but people complained about it, and looked for a different solution, back then and ever since. The effort to come up with alternatives has engaged not only lexicographers, writers and teachers but also attorneys, judges, and legislators; the issue even played a role in the fight for women’s suffrage. – London Review of Books

Between 2009 and 2016, the newspapers and poetry magazines published review articles by non-white critics 190 times – 4% of the total for those years. Between 2017 and 2019, non-white critics were published 201 times – 9.6% of the total. – The Guardian

Independent presses around the country said that sales are starting to rebound after two months of declines, due to direct sales, digital initiatives, and a resurgence in demand for topical frontlist and backlist titles. – Publishers Weekly

Haruki Murakami famously wrote his first novel in English and then translated it into his mother tongue himself, resulting in a plainspoken, “neutral” (his word) style far removed from standard literary Japanese. Several critics referred to that style as “translationese.” Masatsugu Ono (both a translator and a novelist himself) makes the case that Murakami, Kenzaburo Oe, Yoko Tawada, Minae Mizumura all write in other languages and translate foreign literature into Japanese, and that this is what has made their work so distinctive. – The Paris Review

Behind the scenes, the media faced a genuine crisis over and above its ordinary instability. Publications folded, mass layoffs ensued, and with months of pre-written content suddenly obsolete, the remaining magazines were left scrambling for new material. A week into the pandemic, editors at every vaguely literary or intellectual outlet seemed to decide it had fallen to them to solicit first-person accounts of quarantine for the benighted historical record. – Drift Magazine

The form of “novel” is young, but its conventions are mostly clear – and the novel of ideas is different. “Whether executed as science fiction, bildungsroman, or more recently, the satirical form Nicholas Dames calls the ‘theory novel,’ the novel of ideas is ‘artful,’ with all the equivocality this term brings. Willingness to court the accusation of relying on overly transparent stylistic devices is a consistent, perhaps even cohering feature of a notoriously unstable genre.” – The Paris Review

Yay for all of the many, many, many, many, MANY ways bookstores have figured out ways to stay afloat and, in some cases, paying all of their staff (shout-out to you, The Ripped Bodice in Culver City), but by Zeus’ curly beard, WE WANT OUR BOOKSTORE BROWSING BACK. – The Washington Post

Sudden, massive fame may seem grand – but it’s not so easy to live through. “My life exploded and I’m still trying to put it back together. I jumped on the rollercoaster, it’s been really chaotic for the last seven years.” – The Guardian (UK)

They’re busier than ever, but “as Black bookstore owners race to meet their demands, many are dealing with complicated, sometimes painful feelings about what the new business means,” and why people are suddenly interested in books on anti-racist work. – NPR

Appreciating social movements in hindsight is a complicated endeavor. Leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Harriet Tubman are often whitewashed to appease modern sensibilities. Some, like Bayard Rustin, are almost forgotten entirely. – The New York Times

The polymath Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz was only one of numerous women in Spain and its New World colonies who became accomplished authors during the 16th and 17th centuries (and who should be better known today). Many of them were, in fact, nuns, and one of them really did run away from the convent, dress and pass as a man, and had some hair-raising adventures in New Spain. – Public Radio International

“Aunt Nellie’s Diary,” a 9,000-word piece written when Alcott was in her late teens, “is narrated by the 40-year-old title character, and follows her observations as a romantic triangle appears to unfold among her orphaned, fair-haired niece” and two friends. The fragment appears in the latest issue of The Strand Magazine, which will “post guidelines in the coming weeks” for writers to submit their own endings. – Yahoo! (AP)