"With all major categories posting increases, unit sales of print books rose 8.2% in 2020 over 2019 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. For the year ended Jan. 2, 2021, units hit 750.9 million, up from 693.7 million the year before. BookScan said the 8.2% gain was the largest annual increase since 2010." - Publishers Weekly
Released as part of the BA's annual membership survey, the number of independent bookshops holding membership at the end of 2020 rose to 967 shops, up from 890 shops in 2019, 883 in 2018 and 868 in 2017. This figure marks the highest number of independent bookshops in BA membership since 2013, as the period of growth was preceded...
Writers have to listen as well as read. "As I read The Waves, I started to 'hear' language as if for the first time. It was as though a window flew open, and the sounds of the author’s words rushed in. I began to notice the sonic patterns of Woolf’s sentences, how she composed a music all her own...
If you have elderly parents and kids to care for, not much. "The pandemic has been through all these different stages and you’re constantly moving between boredom and terror. We recently converted our dining table to a ping-pong table and I felt that was the final stage of getting through the winter." - The Guardian (UK)
That's not the only work making a claim that France has an extremely long way to go in reckoning with gender inequality in every arena of life, including and perhaps especially the arts. The author of I Hate Men: "Feminists have spent a lot of time and energy reassuring men that no, we don’t really hate them, that they’re...
Writer Alyssa Cole explains why it makes sense that romance writers came together to raise money for Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock in the Georgia Senate runoff races (Stacey Abrams, who has engaged in massive voter turnout since her defeat at the ballot box in 2018, is also a romance writer under the pen name Selena Montgomery). "As...
What the actual heck? Well, a lot of people opened bookshops in 2020, during the pandemic, because why not? Their jobs had evaporated, and the bookshops were a long-held dream. But in the UK's third hard lockdown, the numbers may change again - for the far, far worse. - The Guardian (UK)
Highsmith - author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train, not to mention The Price of Salt (renamed Carol to go along with the movie) - had a dark, dark well of self-hate that affected most of her fiction. And yet: "It feels good to be hunted. If you read the genres of suspense – crime...
"Sedition — Merriam-Webster defines it as 'incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority' — is a word that echoes across American history, archaic yet familiar. Historically, charges of sedition have just as often been used to quash dissent … as they have to punish actual threats to government stability or functioning. But to many scholars and historians,...
From the company's announcement: "We did not come to this decision lightly. As a publisher it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints: at the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens, and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy...
Lish’s job on Carver is perhaps too extreme to serve as an example of the role of the editor, but what any kind of boundary breaking always does is to draw attention to the boundary itself—in this case between editor and writer, who together with the text form a kind of Bermuda Triangle within whose force field everything said...
"In a highly polarized culture … the most recent and arguably final example of a great American work of art loved broadly and without reservations by the masses, the elite, and everyone in the so-called middle. Is Peanuts the last American artwork with universal appeal? And what is the spiritual message it conveys that engenders that appeal?" -...
The Sumerians had cuneiform and the Egyptians hieroglyphics, both complex and difficult to master, but who developed the system where each character represents a particular sound and the characters (letters) can be combined to form words the way sounds are? The Phoenicians invented the alphabet from which all the European and Near Eastern scripts (and possibly those of India...
Despite the disastrous rollout of a book that had been advance-hyped by some as a Grapes of Wrath-level work of literature, Jeanine Cummins's thriller about an Acapulco bookseller and her young son on the run from a drug cartel was the top-selling novel for adults of 2020. Here's a report on how the rise and fall and rise of...
There were other fine sci-fi writers, but Ray was the one who first engaged the mainstream audience. He had a huge impact on both American literature and popular culture. He was also one of the most significant California writers of the last century. - Los Angeles Review of Books
