"Commercially, it simply doesn’t stack up. ... Most survive and subsist largely either on unpaid labour or grant funding" - or both. And that leads to burnout, not to mention grant funds drying up. - The Guardian (UK)
A precious domain of imaginative and intellectual freedom is menaced by crude authoritarian politics. Exposure to the wrong words is corrupting our children, who aren’t even learning how to decipher the right ones. - The New York Times
"That provided a lifeline, but, it was pretty widely said, also a risk: What if the billionaires tired of the money they were losing, and abandoned the field? As things are turning out, the risk seems a somewhat different one." - Second Rough Draft
"On Thursday, it announced a new partnership with the left-leaning magazine The Nation, and that its next print issue would arrive in August. … Readers can expect the publication to look much the same. It will continue to publish quarterly, and the staff … will remain the same." - MSN (The Washington Post)
Want to be a novelist here in 2023? Well, there are thousands of people on hand to encourage you, tutor you and wave you on your way. Unfortunately, you are liable to end up writing for the very audience most writers want to avoid — people like yourself. - The Critic
"The Four Corners of the Heart … was discovered seven years after Sagan's death in 2004 by her son, and ends on a cliffhanger. … Despite the suggestion that a novelist such as Leïla Slimani or Anne Berest might finish it, it has been published in its incomplete state." - The Guardian
One day in 1990, I was flown first class from Dublin to Phoenix, Arizona, to read at the Irish Cultural Centre there. Five people turned up to listen to me. None of them had read my books, and it was clear that none of them had the slightest intention of doing so. - Esquire
"The (Davis School District) committee's reversal is the latest development in the debate over a Utah law allowing parents to challenge 'sensitive materials' available to children in public schools." - AP
"The lawsuit, one of several challenging Florida's policies for launching local book objections, aims to require Lake County officials to make the book — And Tango Makes Three — available to all students" and to have the state's notorious "Don't Say Gay" education laws declared unconstitutional. - Politico
“There’s a class issue that we don’t always talk about in writing and publishing, where you need to be able to afford this life. The average annual income authors earn from their writing is around $10,000. - The Walrus
He first visited Istanbul in 1961, where, after a long writer's block, he was finally able to finish Another Country. He spent most of that decade living off and on in Turkey, where he wrote most of The Fire Next Time and No Name in the Street. - The Yale Review
Vicky Varga, a twenty-four-year veteran of Edmonton Public Library, described how the city had moved toward fully integrating social work into the activities of its main library branch. - The Walrus
Candace Hicks: "No one else is reading the same books as me in the same order, so in a way, my reading is my life’s work. The hand-stitched notebooks that I make recording the coincidences I uncover are a by-product of that process." - LitHub
"Kingston-based publisher Tanya Batson-Savage, founder of Blue Banyan Books, likens the region's literary support system to a three-legged stool with international media and festivals, book prizes in the UK, and the rising influence of social media in the book world providing crucial support." - NPR
"I'm in Camazotz, I think as I drive to see my Dad. I identify most strongly with the book's Meg Murry, the ornery teen who not only shares my name and the anguished isolation I felt as an adolescent, but also my emotional reactivity and stubbornness." - Salon
