Adapting an alphabet-based machine to produce the thousands of different brush-stroke characters used in Chinese was a seemingly impossible challenge. But, in the 1930s one Chinese linguist-inventor in Manhattan succeeded. But only one of his typewriters was ever made, and that one was feared lost. - The New York Times
“Patrick Soon-Shiong will retain majority ownership of the Los Angeles Times in his planned public sale, which will be limited to $75 million after the paper is combined with some of his other media ventures.” - TheWrap
The plan addresses national policy, library legislation, and local connections. “While libraries serve as a cornerstone of democracy the world over, we operate within the circumstances we’re provided,” they said. “We grow and ebb and flow with the communities we serve. - Publishers Weekly
“As more companies explore AI literary translation, the rapid progression of the technology and what that could mean for the future has divided the book industry.” - The Bookseller (UK)
Prolific writers are simultaneously envied and dismissed, admired and snarked about. There is the sense that a writer can write too much, that whatever results can’t be very good.
On 9 June, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, the journal’s publisher, abruptly canceled the release. In an email to the issue’s contributors, the publisher cited “a number of complex issues”, shocking authors and editors alike, the Guardian has learned. - The Guardian
What made libraries so exciting? They were hardly novelties. Roman writers like Cicero and the two Plinies assembled rich collections of books in their city houses and country villas. - London Review of Books
Patrick Soon-Shiong, the pharma billionaire who bought the L.A. Times in 2018 (and was seen as a savior at the time but no longer), said that he is planning to “take L.A. Times public, (for it) to be democratized. And allow the public to have ownership of this paper.” - The Hollywood Reporter
Unhelpful incentives around academic publishing are blamed for record levels of retractions, the rise in predatory journals, which publish anything for a fee, and the emergence of AI-written studies and paper mills, which sell fake papers to unscrupulous researchers to submit to journals. - The Guardian
Does silence have its own language, I wonder? And if it does, what is it? Is it that of benumbed Russians, lost to resurrected, wooden Soviet propaganda – forever young, forever courageous, forever successful in replacing the grim realities of Dostoevsky’s world with a cheery ‘paradiZe’? - Eurozine
As for Dostoyevsky himself, there is something dark and dangerous, perhaps even depraved, about his work which makes him more relevant to contemporary readers than even Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev. - Unherd
Even when James was nominally assessing a particular work, he was in fact taking stock of its author’s more general bearing. In his determinedly novelistic hands, criticism becomes a human drama. His reviews are nothing so much as delightful character sketches. - Washington Post
What has been labeled the “bible of the racist right” has influenced American culture in a way only fiction can—by harnessing the force of storytelling to popularize ideas that have never been countenanced before. - The Atlantic
I’m currently in a WhatsApp group for ex-Unbound authors which is a bit like Alcoholics Anonymous: we introduce ourselves then tell our unique but familiar tale of missing money, obfuscating management and disgruntled readers. - The Critic
By claiming literary fiction to be trope-free, we can pretend that literary fiction is not a genre in its own right. If we admit that literary fiction is a genre subject to common devices and plots, then we start running out of legitimate reasons to keep popular fiction separate. - Commonweal
