"The rules are always the same: 30 minutes before the meeting’s official start time, people can come, share what they are reading and find a place to sit. Then someone rings a bell or makes an announcement, and it’s reading time. For an hour, that’s it." - The Washington Post (MSN)
Small presses play a crucial role in the American literary landscape, publishing books that have artistic merit but little commercial potential. Without S.P.D., it could be far more difficult for small presses to get their books to readers, or for those books to exist at all. - The New York Times
"Several authors have turned down awards and awards nominations from PEN America, citing unhappiness with the literary and free expression organization’s stance on the war in Gaza." - AP
"The new report, Banned in the USA: Narrating the Crisis, reports 4,349 book bans recorded across 23 states and 52 public school districts from July to December 2023. ... More book bans were recorded during the first half of the current school year than in the entire 2022-2023 year." - Publishers Weekly
Income from commercial translation work has fallen significantly since the beginning of 2023. The loss of non-literary streams of income for literary translators will mean the “raising of the bar to entry into the industry, with only those with wealth able to translate literature for publication”. - The Guardian
"Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Sourcebooks announced that they have joined the initial plaintiffs, which included PRH, the Iowa State Education Association, four renowned authors (Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, Malinda Lo, and Jodi Picoult), and a group of teachers and students." - Publishers Weekly
The generative-AI boom, despite promises to bridge languages and cultures, may only further entrench the dominance of English in life on and off the web. - The Atlantic
“The goal of Smut, says Scollard, is to 'champion work that might find it difficult to get published elsewhere – maybe a bit risqué or provocative. But the main basis is that we want to work with queer artists.'" - Irish Times
Library workers aren’t happy. "The City is denying Seattleites 1,500 hours of learning, checking out books, applying for jobs, talking with neighbors, sheltering from bad weather, and, though librarians should not be de facto social workers, perhaps overdose prevention, workers said." - The Stranger (Seattle)
Emi Mahmoud has been trying to bring Sudan to life for non-Sudanese people for years. But now, the poet’s urgency has increased due to the country's last year of intense civil war. - NPR
"What a remarkable change it would be if corporations would allow their employees to do the best job they can with each book that the company has chosen to buy, rather than allowing them to flail.” - LitHub
“I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other, and coming for me in just this way. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, ‘So it’s you. Here you are.’” - The Guardian
"During the years leading up to his death in a Russian prison, the Russian opposition leader was writing a memoir about his life and work as a pro-democracy activist. Titled Patriot, the memoir will be published in the United States by Knopf on Oct. 22." - The New York Times
According to the recordings, Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of generative AI, told executives that the company had used almost every book, poem and essay written in English available on the internet to train models, so was looking for new sources of training material. - The Guardian
