Category: words

The great reckoning now sweeping across pop culture has been working through the stacks of literature for far longer. The effects of time are twofold: Most books have fallen into dust, along with the racist values they imbibed. And those few texts that survive have been subjected to rigorous — and ongoing — debate. – Washington Post

“The final collection of early stories from the late Terry Pratchett, written while the Discworld creator was a young reporter, will be published in September. The tales in The Time-travelling Caveman, many of them never released in book form before, range from a steam-powered rocket’s flight to Mars to a Welsh shepherd’s discovery of the resting place of King Arthur.” – The Guardian

“Our sales go up with political and economic turmoil and down during times of prosperity,” says Jake Stevens of Verso. “It’s really amazing to see all the different types of books that we experimented with as a publishing company, and the varied directions our publishing vision has traveled,” says Jisu Kim of Feminist Press, “but also how much we still stick to our foundational editorial pillars.” – Publishers Weekly

Since 2017, Ms. Canedy, 55, has been the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, overseeing a period when the awards have acknowledged an increasingly diverse body of work, including the music of Kendrick Lamar. Before that she worked at the the New York Times for 20 years, and winning a Pulitzer. – The New York Times

Reading Ibraham X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning or How to Be an Anti-Racist, or maybe cuddling up to Asha Bandele and Patrisse Cullors’ When They Call You a Terrorist, may be great for catching up on what should have been in our educations already. But “fiction gives you a window into both lives you know and recognize and ones you don’t. It helps you to put yourself in the shoes of those characters, even when you have a different perspective when it comes to race, gender or sexual identity.” – Time

Last year, official figures revealed that almost 800 libraries had closed since the implementation of austerity in 2010. “We do think these current announcements could be the ‘canary in the coalmine’ for a fresh wave of austerity cuts to local services,” warned Nick Poole, chief executive of the librarians’ association Cilip. – The Guardian

“The study … found that only 11,000 people were habitual Gaelic speakers, after a rapid decline during the 1980s when the density of native speakers fell below 80%. … The language is rarely spoken in the home, little used by teenagers, and used routinely only by a diminishing number of elderly Gaels dispersed across a few island communities in the Hebrides.” – The Guardian

The prison library program will give each of the 1,000 prisons the same 500-book collection selected by the project’s leaders. The collections, which Dr. Alexander called “freedom libraries,” are to include a broad variety of nonfiction, fiction, poetry, science, social thought and more. – The New York Times