ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

WORDS

Alt-Weeklies Are Not, In Fact, Dead (Despite The Long Casualty List)

The many postmortems after The Village Voice closed in 2017, plus the disappearance of alt-weeklies in Philadelphia, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Baltimore, the Bay Area, and St. Louis, made the situation seem bleak. Yet in many other US cities, alt-weeklies thrive — and in some places they’re healthier than the daily papers. - Columbia Journalism Review

How Our Reading Is Changing

Plenty of people still enjoy traditional books and periodicals, and there are even readers for whom the networked age has enabled a kind of hyper-literacy; for them, a smartphone is a library in their pocket. For others, however, the old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading has become almost anachronistic. - The New Yorker

How AI Can Refocus History

Like most people who work with words for a living, I’ve watched the rise of large-language models with a combination of fascination and horror, and it makes my skin crawl to imagine one of them writing on my behalf. But there is, I confess, something seductive. - The New York Times

How The Fake Research Publishing Game Works

The paper mills have various techniques to take advantage of desperate or lazy researchers and to trick publishers: some operate as a marketplace in which extra authorship slots on already--accepted papers are up for grabs. Others take published papers and use AI to tweak text and graphics to escape plagiarism detectors. - Nature

Publisher Releases Facsimile Edition Of García Lorca’s Secret Homoerotic Sonnets

While “Sonnets of Dark Love” was once published in translation in France, it had never appeared in the poet’s homeland or native language because his family kept the collection hidden. In 1983, an anonymous group hoping to force the family’s hand had the sonnets published and sent to 250 influential figures. - The Guardian

Figuring Out The “Ulysses” Phenomenon

The fate of Ellmann and his Joyce biography highlights the disorienting transformation of literature as a field of study. The canons dismantled during the Theory incursion of the 1970s and ’80s introduced a more inclusive world of letters, even as the upheaval left English departments fragmented. - The Atlantic

Data: Why We Still Need Women’s Writing Prizes

Our analysis of the dataset shows how there is still a ways to go before women’s writing is valued — awarded, remunerated and read — equally to men’s. - The Conversation

Writing Joy Where Publishers See Only Pain

“What does it mean when the majority of the African LGBTQI+ narratives lauded as ‘important,’ ‘urgent,’ or ‘powerful’ are ones where queer black bodies are tortured, shamed and violated? And what kind of reading culture is fostered by a publishing industry that prioritizes those particular narratives?” - LitHub

Booker Shortlist Nominee Wins Women’s Prize For Fiction

The Safekeep, a novel by Yael van der Wouden about a family in the 1960s Netherlands whose house is filled with secrets, wins the fiction prize. - BBC

Remaking Biography, Again

“Biography alters as we do, as our conceptions of motive evolve, as theories of personality float into fashion or fade away. It offers a snapshot of our working notions of selfhood.” - The New York Times

Dear Literary Writer, Sure, You Might Be The You Know What

Or not! “You’re not doing anyone a disservice by declining to share your art.” - LitHub

Podcasts Drive Massive Books Sales For Conservative Authors

Especially audiobook sales, it turns out. Authors of other political backgrounds are taking note. - The New York Times

Canada’s Currently Reigning Major Prairie Poet

As these credentials suggest, there is a widespread view, if not a consensus, that she is one of the major poets writing in English today. - The Walrus

Why Literary Prizes Are A Bad Idea

As I got older and developed a more mature understanding of what literature is, the prizes started to seem increasingly bizarre and then sort of embarrassing. - Persuasion

The Resurrection of Lapham’s Quarterly Begins

“The literary journal Lapham’s Quarterly is relaunching its website and podcast this summer under the editorial guidance of the writers Donovan Hohn and Francine Prose — a fortuitous and surprising turn for a magazine that seemed on the brink of extinction” following suspension of publication in 2023 and Lapham's death last summer. - The New York Times

Our Free Newsletter

Join our 30,000 subscribers

Latest

Don't Miss

function my_excerpt_length($length){ return 200; } add_filter('excerpt_length', 'my_excerpt_length');