"Half a century after its publication, (this) epic biography of urban planner and city-destroyer Robert Moses needs no revival. From the moment it was published, … (it) has never gone away. Its durability resembles that of Moses’s own prodigious creation, the redrawn arterial map of New York." - The New York Times Book Review
"A group of scientists and scholars … filed a class action lawsuit against Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publications, Taylor and Francis, and Springer Nature last week. The complaint outlines 'a scheme' that they say resulted in 'perverse market failures that ... slow dramatically the pace of scientific progress.'" - Inside Higher Ed
Improving literacy is urgent, but the “crisis” framing can encourage quick fixes over substantive change—and promote top-down solutions that exclude the perspectives of professionals in the classroom. - Harvard Magazine
Throughout my career as a translator, I’ve been told that my job is to “capture the spirit” of the foreign text. But I have often wondered, why do I have to capture it? Why does it have to be contained? And what about the body? What makes it so corruptible? - Poetry Foundation
The Observer, first published in 1791, has been owned by the parent company of The Guardian since 1993, and the papers' content is integrated on the Guardian website. Guardian Media Group was approached by startup Tortoise Media, which pledged to invest $33 million in The Observer's content and marketing. - Reuters
Today’s culture of censorship and censure in literary magazines is stifling writers’ careers at their most vulnerable stage. Our experience at Crab Creek Review offers a case in point and a warning. - Persuasion
The actor “has become a curator, rather than an object, of sexual fantasies. Want, a new book released next week, is a collection of anonymous fantasies written by women from all over the world, selected and introduced by Anderson.” But - not to make a pun - why would she want to do this? - Slate
And not 40-year-olds, y’all. “Truly older characters remain very rare in literature, with around only two to three percent of protagonists aged eighty or above. … highlights a gap in representation for our aging population, but also underscores the attributes that society deems worthy of fiction.” - LitHub
Romero, of course, is known as a director - his most famous movie being Night of the Living Dead. But an archivist working on Romero’s papers “found the manuscript of a sprawling supernatural novel — one Romero had clearly worked on extensively, and apparently in secret.” - The New York Times
Some of the fiction nominees are also on the Booker Prize Longlist, but this list adds many others, including short story collections, as well. - Washington Post (MSN)
Over the last several decades, a quiet revolution has taken place in American fiction: The novels recognized by major literary prizes have largely abandoned the present in favor of the past. Contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary. - The Nation
"The StraightForward Foundation ... acts like a pro bono literary agency. It connects Russian authors, writing about sensitive topics, to publishers abroad, who publish their work in different languages. The foundation only requires that the authors agree to post the Russian versions of their manuscripts online for free for readers back home." - NPR
Under a settlement agreement, the School Board of Nassau County (along the border with Georgia, about 35 miles northeast of Jacksonville) must restore access to 36 titles with LGBTQ content which it had ordered removed. The authors of one of those books were plaintiffs. - AP
This decision harms libraries. It locks them into an e-book ecosystem designed to extract as much money as possible while harvesting (and reselling) reader data en masse. It leaves local communities’ reading habits at the mercy of curatorial decisions made by four dominant publishing companies thousands of miles away. - MIT Technology Review
