Category: words

“The most widely-read books are translated foreign bestsellers. There is little space for Russian talent — and if you want to be one of the chosen few to secure a book deal, that means satisfying big publishers’ often conservative tastes. … Change, however, is already coming — driven by a new wave of young literary activists and independent startups challenging the status quo. Many are led by young women, on offshoot from Russia’s growing feminist movement. They search for the forgotten Russian writers of the past, look for young new voices, and translate the queer foreign titles that would otherwise never make it into Russian.” – The Calvert Journal

Internet Archive has made more than 1.3 million books available for free online, according to the complaint, which were scanned and available to one borrower at a time for a period of 14 days. Then in March, the group said it would lift all restrictions on its book lending until the end of the public health crisis, creating what it called “a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners.” – The New York Times

The Book Industry Charitable Foundation (called “Binc”) is a nonprofit created to help booksellers. “Since the pandemic started, Binc has seen requests for assistance increase by 321%. And [communications coordinator] Weiss says she fully expects that number to grow.” – LitHub

At that time, says Hilary Mantel, we would have been quarantining more seriously. “Speaking at the Hay literary festival, which is entirely online this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Wolf Hall author said the Tudors ‘were very good at quarantine in those days. They took it very seriously. I think he would have locked us down for a bit longer” – The Guardian (UK)

The awards, announced in a socially distant livestream, contains “A final work that continues on like a river” and poems that “bloom with the beauty the world has to offer as well as those who have created these human-made gifts through the ages.” – The Millions

Note to authors: Don’t go on GoodReads. Just don’t. But when a dog-themed book group reads your book on Instagram, well, things might be different. – The Guardian (UK)

How bleak is it out there? Well, how many politicians are quoting Yeats’s “The Second Coming”? And the poet made it that way deliberately: “Early drafts of the poem illustrate Yeats’s dedication to universalising his message, as he deletes specific references to the French Revolution and the first world war and replaces terrestrial images of judges and tyrants with figures from dreams and myths.” – The Guardian (UK)

Some have become a combination book exchange and pantry. One is cat-focused; another (at a church) has mostly Christian texts. Says one LFL caretaker, “People have been adopting and donating books at an astonishing rate, as well as exchanging other items like art, pet toys and shelf-stable food.” And Little Free Libraries give a map, or some markers, for those long Covid-19 walks everyone seems to be taking. – Seattle Times

“It is 46 years old, weighs nearly four pounds in paperback and is about as ill-suited for the internet age as they come: The book is not even available for digital readers. And yet, in certain circles, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, the 1,246-page tome by Robert Caro, has become a breakout star of the Covid-19 era.” – The New York Times

In a shift of consumer patterns, in the first 16 weeks of the year, 47 percent of Italy’s trade book sales, both in fiction and nonfiction, took place online. In the same period of 2019, only 26.7 percent of those sales were made online. Like France, Italy is a market that buys its books in normal times primarily through physical stores, and some observers wonder if the move to online commerce during the pandemic will permanently change consumer behavior. – Publishing Perspectives