Asghar's When We Were Sisters "follows three orphaned Muslim-American siblings left to raise one another in the aftermath of their parents' death. The prize jury wrote that Asghar 'weaves narrative threads as exacting and spare as luminous poems.'" - NPR
"If we all know that the largest children’s publisher in the country, the one with the most access to schools, is capitulating behind closed doors and asking authors to change their works ... there’s no way you as a marginalized author can find an audience." - The New York Times
As we await Monday's prize announcements, here's a look back at Jennifer Egan, Colson Whitehead, Louise Erdrich, Colson Whitehead (again), Cormac McCarthy, Elizabeth Strout, Marilynne Robinson, and many more. - LitHub
In Missouri and Texas, state lawmakers have been considering laws that would remove funding from libraries that host drag queen story hours or don't block access to certain books; individual counties in some other states have gone through with such cuts. Many librarians fear things will get worse. - NPR
"Illinois lawmakers greenlighted a bill Wednesday that says libraries in the state must adopt an anti-book banning policy to receive state funding, in a vote that fissured along party lines. … Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he looks forward to signing it." - AP
Until the past year’s insipid Musk-related shenanigans, the platform functioned as an efficient information delivery system that made it unique among its social media rivals — and unique, for that matter, among the media organs that depended on it for readers and ideas. - N+1
As inflation persists, the country is roiled by protests against President Macron's pension reforms, and Fitch downgrades French bonds, Bruno Le Maire has drawn fury for spending his time writing sex fantasy — and hoots of ridicule for one sex scene in particular. - The Guardian
"I have never subscribed to the strained idea that the characteristics of one’s handwriting provides a subtle indicator of one’s personality... but I do think there is something visible that communicates an attitude, a willingness to show through muscular coordination and flair." - LitHub
"The best sales pitch is the threat of censorship. It draws attention to books that might otherwise have gone under the radar." What's more, "we tend to believe that when books are censored, they are obliterated or withdrawn from view. But more often they are edited to increase sales." - The Guardian
A push that began last summer to remove a few children's sexual education books from the southern Manitoba library system has since bubbled up into accusations its staff are pedophiles, as well as a campaign to defund the library — leaving some of its exhausted librarians considering quitting, the library's director says. - CBC
To show you what this process looks like, we trained six tiny language models starting from scratch. We’ve picked one trained on the complete works of Jane Austen, but you can choose a different path. - The New York Times
When Adnan Kivan bought the Kyiv Post, he promised editorial independence; when the paper became too critical of the Ukrainian government for his taste, he sacked the staff. Within a month they launched the online, reader-funded Kyiv Independent, which now has 10,000 supporters. - Press Gazette (UK)
"They have popped up like mushrooms after rain," says one visitor. Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian's chief culture writer, visits three of them. - The Guardian
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, whose new novel incorporates a lot of trademarks in prisons: "Once you go into that for-profit model and also think about the slave labor that the incarcerated people in our country are doing ... there's so much profit existing in the carceral space." - NPR
When you can't find a place to just sit down in the middle of a city, the library is there, with books, newspapers, community meetings, and more. "You won’t get this anywhere else and you can do it all for free." - Irish Times
