Perhaps no writer has been more clairvoyant about our current technological age than Neal Stephenson. His novels coined the term metaverse, laid the conceptual groundwork for cryptocurrency, and imagined a geoengineered planet. - The Atlantic (MSN)
The barrier to attempting lyric poetry is so low it’s basically asphalt. Platforms for the stuff are plentiful, and rotten poems, furred with hyperlinks, abound. - The Millions
The scroll is one of hundreds, all far too fragile to unroll, from Herculaneum that constitute the only intact library from the ancient world to survive, By using machine-learning to decipher scans of the scroll, the students have won the $700,000 prize offered in the Vesuvius Challenge. - Time
"Tender Buttons is a collection which attempts to do with words the same thing that Stein’s friend Picasso did with shapes; to render their familiarity strange and disorienting, to be less concerned with content and meaning than with the interplay of sound." - Literary Hub
"The movie has come at a time when new authors of color are engaging with the same questions posed by Erasure — and publishers have paid substantial sums for novels that satirize the literary world’s racial inequities." - The New York Times
"HB417 would allow ... public school employees to be charged with a class A misdemeanor if they keep materials specifically deemed 'objectively sensitive' available to students. … If found guilty, they could be fined no less than $500 and jailed for a term lasting no fewer than 30 days." - The Salt Lake Tribune
Shades of American Fiction, but make it gay: "If you were a young Black writer in America in the 1950s and early ’60s, it was generally expected that you would write about struggle." - LitHub
“A book’s quality is not dispositive—or sometimes even relevant to book sales. The publisher isn’t going to be able to charge more for my better book. The satisfaction of making a better book is almost entirely personal." - Inside Higher Ed
The concerns were unveiled during an internal all-hands meeting this week, where Audible CEO Bob Carrigan addressed employee inquiries about the company’s focus on competition rather than customer needs, according to a recording obtained by Business Insider. - GoodReader
"The bill would make it so that school boards cannot implement policies that intentionally remove or restrict materials in the library or in classrooms that features stories or themes of people under legally protected classes" such as people of color or LGBTQ+ people. - Book Riot
If contemporary fiction’s capacity for objectivity and thus critique is threatened by first-personalism, these failures are consolidated, Kornbluh argues, by a broader celebration of “formlessness” that manifests as genre-blurring and “medium swirl.” - LA Review of Books
Academia is a serious place, and it takes itself seriously. But it is also, like Hollywood or Washington, profoundly ridiculous — the kind of symbolically overburdened, sociologically peculiar environment that can only really be understood through satire. Luckily, we have an entire literary subgenre, the campus novel, to fulfill that requirement. - The New York Times
Nihar Malaviya, 49, has been at the helm of Penguin Random House for a year — not enough time to turn a battleship, but enough to make some key decisions that give clues to his outlook and goals. - The New York Times
"The Alabama Public Library Service has voted not to renew its American Library Association membership. This comes after some in the state have accused the ALA … of promoting Marxism, supporting keeping sexual content in libraries, and discriminating against religious organizations." - Book Riot
"Following legislation introduced in states like Massachusetts, Colorado, Kansas, and New Mexico, legislators in New Jersey introduced a newly revised Freedom to Read Act into the (state) Senate." - Book Riot
