“Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them,” Savage, who is 41, wrote. - The New York Times
“F. Scott Fitzgerald was fulsome in his praise and Sinclair Lewis declared it the ‘first book to catch Manhattan”. … As Gatsby continues to be lionised, analysed and republished — and adapted for film and the musical stage — John Dos Passos’s novel Manhattan Transfer remains a niche concern.” - Prospect (UK)
Let’s call this what it is: a case about borrowed books and a legal system struggling to reckon with machines that never ask before they take. - LitHub
“This isn’t about banning books,” Premier Danielle Smith posted on X. “It’s about protecting kids from graphic, sexually explicit content that has no place in a classroom.” (None of the books appear to have been part of any classroom curriculum, nor were students compelled to read them.) - The Walrus
“It’s called performative reading not just because someone might be pretending to read, but rather that they want everyone to know they read. The presumption is that they’re performing for passersby, signaling they have the taste and attention span to pick up a physical book instead of putting in AirPods.” - The Guardian
In the early 1970s, when many American women still couldn’t open bank accounts in their own names and the terms (and concepts) “domestic violence” and “sexual harassment” hadn’t yet been developed, Ms. Magazine helped bring about real change. The staff, meanwhile, got thousands of letters as well as occasional death threats. - The Guardian
“Writing Australia, Creative Australia’s new literature body, launches today, bringing the history of Australian cultural policy full circle: writers were the first artists in Australia to receive government support. … Government investment in the sector is critical – not least because supporting writers is nation-building work.” - The Guardian
Which of America’s founding fathers began writing his memoirs in the early 1770s, a project that remained unfinished when it was posthumously published in 1793? - The New York Times
The least wanted novel contains a mix of “such ostensibly despised elements as stream of consciousness, explicit sex scenes, an extraterrestrial setting, metafictional commentary on novel-writing itself, talking animals, second-person narration, and tennis.” (Tennis?) - Slate
Esther Freud writes novels inspired by her life; now her sister is writing memoir on Instagram. "How strange, over this last year, to read my sister’s interpretation of events. Free from the wiles of fiction, her voice rings out, clear and clean.” - The Guardian (UK)
“The women who run the Atelier Devauchelle in Paris sew and create new bindings. They restore old bindings and torn pages. They create slipcovers and special boxes to protect fragile books.” - The New York Times
The letter “asks them to refrain from publishing books written using AI tools built on copyrighted content without authors' consent or compensation, to refrain from replacing publishing house employees wholly or partially with AI tools, and to only hire human audiobook narrators.” - NPR
One of the bookstores writes, “Author JK Rowling publicly committed to using her private wealth from the Harry Potter series to develop the ‘JK Rowling Women's Fund,’ an organization dedicated to removing transgender rights. … With this announcement, we've decided to stop carrying her books.” -LitHub
“The Johannesburg City Library ... had been closed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The city government claimed the building was undergoing urgent repairs, but ... many sensed a bigger problem. For nearly a decade, Johannesburg had been ruled by an unstable coalition of bickering political parties.” - The Christian Science Monitor
