Category: words

“French authors, booksellers and publishers are imploring the French government to allow bookshops to stay open because reading is ‘essential’, as the country enters a national four-week lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus.” – The Guardian

“We’re not closing our doors, but we’ve gone through all of our savings. We are 80% down since the beginning of the first wave. We’ve now gone through all of the bookshop savings, which we were lucky to build up, and we have also been making use of the support from the government, and especially the furlough scheme. But it doesn’t cover everything, and we’ve delayed quite a lot of rent that we have.” – The Guardian

“The Nigerian playwright and poet, who became the first African to win the Nobel prize for literature in 1986, published his widely celebrated debut novel, The Interpreters, in 1965. His second and most recent novel, Season of Anomy, was released in 1973. Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth, which will be published in Nigeria before the end of the year [and internationally in 2021], will be his third.” – The Guardian

“Peter Florence, the founder and director of the Hay festival, has been suspended from his position after allegations of bullying from a staff member. … Finance director Tania Hudson has been appointed interim chief executive of the festival in Florence’s absence, alongside international director Cristina Fuentes La Roche.” – The Guardian

There are more than 5,000 English-as-a-Foreign-Language schools in the country — about 20% more than in China, which has more than 10 times the population. And their lessons come on top of the English classes included in Japan’s public school curriculum. And yet the Japanese rank among the worst in Asia in English proficiency. So what purpose do all the EFL schools there serve? Several purposes, actually. – Metropolis (Tokyo)

Owner Nancy Wyden said “the call for help produced a boom in business on Saturday: a single-day record of 10,000 online orders, so many that the website crashed. That day was also the best single day in the month of October that the flagship store, near Union Square, has ever had, and the best day ever at the Strand’s Upper West Side branch, which opened earlier this year. In the 48 hours since the plea went out, the store processed 25,000 online orders, compared with about 600 in a typical two-day period.” – The New York Times

“Caitlin McNamara was the curator of the first sister festival in Abu Dhabi, which was feted as an opportunity to promote freedom of expression, human rights and women’s rights in the UAE. … She [has] accused Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan” — the Emirates’ minister of tolerance — “of sexually assaulting her on 14 February, 11 days before the festival began.” – The Guardian

In a country where publishing is so concentrated in the hands of just a few conglomerates who have acquired some of Britain’s most successful small presses, the chances of British novelists who are neither English, nor published by major London publishers, winning seems to be getting smaller. And for non-English UK novelists published by small presses (self-published works are ineligible for the Booker), the Booker is simply not a plausible option. – The Conversation

Laymon: “That word memoir, in some way it distracted me from the hard shit that I was writing. … Having the memoir title helped me sort of get through the heart work, in this fucked up way.”  – LitHub

In Seattle, and likely everywhere, it’s time to think a little bigger. “A different kind of literary institution means reinterpreting what a core mission, vision and values mean when cast upon a wider field. Many arts institutions today are ‘committed to racial equity’ but don’t have the courage to take a position on upzoning, land use policy or ending the sweeps of homeless encampments. In this era, the arts are an active practice. Housing, human services, the role of government—these are the defining fights of our time and will shape the future of our city.” – LitHub