Their outputs are a mélange of the passion and experimentalism of the amateurs with the polish and ambition of the pros, and they often possess a briskness that feels shaped by an awareness that an endless selection of other stories is mere clicks away. - The New Yorker
In some ways we’re moving backwards from the model of the lay reader versus professional literary critic. Today there are far fewer lay readers than there used to be, but there is also the emergence of extremely invested, specialized nonacademic reader communities enabled by social media, for example. - The Point
Perhaps not for the reasons you might suspect, though. “I found myself longing for someone, Aldridge perhaps, to mine Christie’s exquisite autobiography more broadly and create an entire one-woman play.” - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo)
“We live in an era in which there is too much information but not enough knowledge, and even less wisdom. This excess of information makes us arrogant and then it makes us numb.” - The Guardian (UK)
“Traces of ink lettering visible in the X-ray images” — virtually unrolled and scanned for words by a specially-designed AI program — "revealed the text to be part of a multi-volume work, On Vices, written by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus in the first century BC.” - The Guardian
“President Donald Trump on Thursday fired Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress — the first woman and first African-American to hold the position. She was informed of the decision in a terse, two-sentence email.” - The Washington Post (Yahoo!)
“Some authors say they're out thousands of dollars after carting books and merchandise to Baltimore for the event” — A Million Lives Book Festival — “and not being able to recoup the costs. … “(Organizer) Archer Management has since apologized for the entire event and stated that refunds are being processed automatically.” - CBC
Here’s what happens when the Pulitzer board either (a) considers none of the three finalists submitted by the jury in a category a worthy winner or, as in this case, (b) can’t find consensus on a single choice among the submitted finalists. - The New York Times
Management began reviewing all store materials after receiving a complaint from a customer against profanity on a greeting card. What began as a purge of purportedly profane materials, including greeting cards, stickers and book titles with swear words, quickly escalated into the quiet removal of more than 60 books from the store. - NBCNews
Percival Everett’s James continued its run of awards with the fiction prize, while Benjamin Nathans’s To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause won for nonfiction, Tessa Hulls’s Feeding Ghosts won for autobiography, Marie Howe’s New and Selected Poems won for poetry, and Jason Roberts’s Every Living Thing won for biography. - Publishers Weekly
The library records more than 180,000 annual visits, one of the highest figures in Alabama, in a city of 25,000. It has been called Fairhope’s Taj Mahal. Now, it is also a battleground. Residents have packed meetings of the City Council and the library board, debating books with sexual content or L.G.B.T.Q. themes. - The New York Times
The news hardly comes as a surprise, given the judge’s inclination to rule against the IMLS shutdown. The temporary restraining order was issued just days ahead of a mass layoff of nearly all IMLS employees that was slated to take effect on May 4. - ARTnews
Are male novelists actually in decline? Some metrics certainly say so: of all the writers to appear on the weekly Sunday Times bestseller lists for fiction hardbacks so far this year, just a third are men. - The Guardian
“As children write less and less by hand, we wanted to explore the impact of this on alphabetic and orthographic skills. In other words, we wanted to see whether the ability to learn letters and to assimilate and remember word structure develops differently through manual training or the use of keyboards." - PsyPost
