Words

Combining recent controversies – a statement King made about the Oscars and the reaction to American Dirt – author Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez explains what publishing is like for many Latinx writers. “MODERATOR: Hello, ladies and gentleman! Thank you for coming to the event today. As you can see, we have here with us today one of the nation’s leading white voices, the white male ‘writer,’ Stephen – hold on. I’m not sure how to pronounce your last name. Do you say it with a British accent? (Purses lips like the Queen’s arsehole, LAUGHS.) ‘King.'” – Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

The author got a seven-figure advance, the first print run is half a million copies, the book jacket features gushing blurbs by famous writers, and the book got loads of coverage in The New York Times. But then the Twitterverse came after it, observers called out plot points that strain credibility, and even Cummins herself said, “I don’t know if I’m the right person to tell this story.” And then Oprah got involved. – Vox

Some three-and-a-half weeks after Mehta’s death, the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf has appointed Reagan Arthur, currently senior vice president and publisher at Little, Brown, to succeed him as president and editor in chief. While few people knew this before the announcement, Arthur was Mehta’s own choice for the job. – Los Angeles Times

Once upon a time, none of these stories had yet been fixed on a page (or a clay tablet), but were carried in the physical bodies of the people who committed them to memory. Long before Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press, and 1,000 years before cloistered monks and their illuminated manuscripts, the principal storage facility for history, poetry, and folktales was the human head. And the chief means of transmitting that cultural wealth, from generation to generation, was the human voice. – LitHub

On the surface, yes, of course they were — and there are some modern-day emoji that look surprisingly like their Pharaonic predecessors. The differences, though, are deep. – The New York Times

Philippa Chong asked them. “Critics were understandably ambivalent towards amateur reviewers despite their appreciation for general readers’ enthusiasm about books. … If the critics I interviewed were concerned that amateurs did not bring enough analysis to their reading or lacked credentials to speak to a book’s artistic merit, they had equal concern … that literary scholars couldn’t always ‘code-switch’ to make their specialist form of criticism accessible to general readers looking for a straightforward review.” – Literary Hub

Should Jeanine Cummins have written the book? Lauren Groff doesn’t know. Should she have reviewed it? She doesn’t know! “Perhaps this book is an act of cultural imperialism; at the same time, weeks after finishing it, the novel remains alive in me,” she writes. – The New Republic

We seem to project enormously intense feelings onto books, feelings that make us protective of them and furious toward those we perceive as threatening them. We think of our books as symbols of our taste, our intellect, our moral vigor. And when we hold books in such high esteem, those who treat them as objects rather than as symbols become infidels. – Vox

Arthur Brand has recovered one of the oldest surviving copies of the Divan of Hafez, one of the most important and beloved works in all of Persian literature. The volume was the only still-missing item from a collection of manuscripts stolen in 2007 from the estate of a collector in Munich; the rest had been found, along with their thief, in 2011. – artnet

Students of Asian American literature have often been far more familiar with what is wrong with Aiiieeeee! than with Aiiieeeee! itself. From the earliest days of its publication, many Asian Americans did not hear themselves in the scream of Aiiieeeee!, did not see themselves in the “our” of its “fifty years of our whole voice.” They chafed against what they saw as the editorial limiting of “authentic” Asian Americanness to “Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese Americans, American born and raised.” This act of border drawing, by excluding Pacific Islander, Korean, and South Asian Americans (among others), further contributed to critics’ rejection of Aiiieeeee!’s brand of Asian American cultural nationalism as more divisive than unifying. – Paris Review

“Dutch design company Jora Vision will use Pushkin’s works as inspiration for the 17,000-square-meter Lukomorye park, named after the mythical Slavic land in which Pushkin’s fairy tales take place. … The amusement park will consist of three zones — a palace, a city and a harbor — each based on imaginary places in Pushkin’s stories. The park will also feature a swan lake, a fairytale forest and a ‘yarmarka,’ or Russian fair market. ” – The Moscow Times

The conventional wisdom that now governs book publishing—that things are, for the first time in a long time, not that bad—is wrong. At the very least, it overlooks the fact that Amazon has spent the last decade accumulating yet more power and leverage, and that its ambitions have since moved past simply being the world’s largest bookstore. On Tuesday evening, The Wall Street Journal surveyed one of the most important recent developments in the industry: Amazon is finally publishing work by some of America’s biggest authors. – The New Republic

Normally terrific, WaPo book critic Ron Charles goes lightly on Amazon, whose CEO owns the paper. So it’s time to consider some issues he missed. “E-books and audiobooks have greatly improved the reading experience over the past decade for those who can afford to pay Amazon for Kindle and Audible digital books. We have yet to figure out what the cost of Amazon’s dominance of e-books and audiobooks will be to the broader digital book ecosystem.” – Inside Higher Ed

And actually, Jacqueline Woodson says, that’s a good thing to know on a deep level, so that she doesn’t only despair at lead poisoning in Flint or the rise of asthma after 9/11. “It’s so important to know that whatever moment we’re in, we’re not in it for the first time. … Knowing that something like this has happened before, and that we survived it, is really important for me as a writer.” – The Guardian (UK)

Toronto’s libraries have increased program attendance by more than 30 percent in the past decade, but funding has not kept up – not at all. The libraries say they want to get going on a plan to stay open longer (especially on Sundays) and provide more programs. Will Toronto come through? – Toronto Star

You’ve probably heard of the French Resistance, but do you know about the great-grandmothers of Ethiopia in 1935? Ethiopian novelist Maaza Mengiste’s second novel (partly) concerns the women who fought back against Italy in its invasion of Ethiopia – and she went to Italy to learn more At a reading, she met a man who said, “‘My father dropped poison on your people. How do I ask for your forgiveness?’ And he started crying. It was at that moment that I said to myself: ‘My God, this history is not done, this war that feels distant but is not distant.'” – The Observer (UK)

“Fifty years after Samuel Beckett won the Nobel prize for literature, newly opened archives reveal the serious doubts the committee had over giving the award to an author they felt held a ‘bottomless contempt for the human condition’.” – The Guardian

The first way of reading is non-evaluative, at least at the level of craft or technique; the second is only evaluative, and wagers everything on technical success, on questions of craft and aesthetic achievement. – LitHub

The store hadn’t had any sales that day, perhaps for the first time ever, says the manager. He sent out a tweet and Twitter readers responded with a thousand pounds worth of orders. – The Guardian

Under the parental oversight of public libraries bill, which has been proposed by Missouri Republican Ben Baker, panels of parents would be elected to evaluate whether books are appropriate for children. Public hearings would then be held by the boards to ask for suggestions of potentially inappropriate books, with public libraries that allow minors access to such titles to have their funding stripped. Librarians who refuse to comply could be fined and imprisoned for up to one year. – The Guardian

The consequence of identifying so closely with the literary community is that critics often don’t feel that they’re part of the reviewing apparatus. They feel like they’re subject to it. This has two consequences. First, they live in a certain fear of it, because the kind of reception that their future books will have might be contingent on their relationship with the person they are reviewing. Second, there’s a lot of insistence that the book reviewing world is going through some challenges, but there’s very little consensus about who is responsible for making changes. – American Scholar

“In July, the audiobook company owned by Amazon announced Captions, an additional function for the existing app that would allow customers to read the text as it was read, as well as looking up words and translating them. … Seven publishers, including the ‘Big Five’ – Penguin Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Macmillan – sued Audible in August, a move that was also backed by bodies representing authors and agents,” all of whom maintained that the captioning was unauthorized reproduction of the printed text. – The Guardian

“Between 1992 and 2017, archivist Greg Priore smuggled some 300 documents worth more than $8 million out of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, where he served as sole manager of the rare books room. … He then delivered the items to bookseller John Schulman, who subsequently re-sold them to unsuspecting clients. On Monday, the two men pleaded guilty … [and] will be sentenced on April 17 of this year.” – Smithsonian Magazine

The more popular the book, the more pervasive the SlideShare piracy. Searches for the top five fiction and nonfiction books on the New York Times bestseller list (which includes authors ranging from Malcolm Gladwell to Delia Owens to Ronan Farrow) produce multiple pages of pirated e-book links on SlideShare for each title. – Fast Company

“In fact, while his novels and stories may have won him global renown, journalism was his first calling. Not only was it foundational to his development as a writer, but it also remained integral to his work and public persona throughout his life, from his early days as a cub reporter in Colombia until his death in Mexico in 2014.” – The Nation

“Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown, would have made the Top 10 list and might have topped it, the library notes, but for the fact that ‘influential New York Public Library children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore disliked the story so much when it was published in 1947 that the Library didn’t carry it … until 1972.’ Who was Anne Carroll Moore, and what was her problem with the great Goodnight Moon?” Dan Kois looks into the matter. – Slate

‘The’ tops the league tables of most frequently used words in English, accounting for 5% of every 100 words used. “‘The’ really is miles above everything else,” says Jonathan Culpeper, professor of linguistics at Lancaster University. But why is this? – BBC

“Any man who’s ever killed a chicken knows that it’s best not to look it in the eye. [With his Sportsman’s Notebook, Ivan] Turgenev forced his fellow landowners to do that, look the serfs in the eye. Alexander II acknowledged the role these stories played in guiding him to issue the Emancipation Edict that freed the serfs in 1861.” – Literary Hub

Is fiction more like the covert violation of the liar, or like the overt violation of the ironical speaker? Unlike the liar, the fiction author doesn’t hide her untruthful intentions: they’re on the book’s cover, or announced by a library classification sticker. However, unlike in the case of irony, the fiction author’s words have their regular meaning. The apparent flouting doesn’t trigger the expected nonliteral reinterpretation of the author’s words in order to restore adherence to the maxims. – Aeon