Category: words

You know, for when we can be together in person again. – The New York Times

Having a Black venture capitalist in your ownership group isn’t exactly the win Tattered Cover’s PR claimed. Danielle Mullen of Semicolon Bookstore in Chicago: “It’s hurtful to Black booksellers who have been doing the hard work—and then they take the same credit without real Black representation. It’s disappointing and almost unbelievable. Especially with the history they have around the BLM protests and why they lost so many customers. It’s ridiculous. … It’s like if Jeff Bezos partnered with a Black person and then said, ‘Amazon is the biggest Black-owned business in the world.'” – Publishers Weekly

Beth Blum makes a compelling case for self-help as an important “shadow genre” for literature – worthy of study in itself and also for what it reveals over time about readers’ habits, desires and values. – Times Literary Supplement

While local bookstores across the country shuttered in recent years, falling victim to lower prices offered by Amazon, Tattered Cover remained steadfast in its role as a locally owned shop known for drawing revered authors to Denver for book signings. – Denverite

“Filling in missing text starts with being able to read and understand the original text. That requires much donkey work. Now an Israeli team [of researchers] has reinvented the donkey in digital form, harnessing artificial intelligence to help complete fragmented Akkadian cuneiform tablets.” – Haaretz (Israel)

In addition to having edited Lit Hub and Granta, John Freeman is the founder of Freeman’s, a literary annual published in several countries around the world. – Deadline

Tone indicators, formed with a slash and one to three letters (e.g., /j for joking, /hj for half-joking, /srs for serious) and inserted at the end of a comment, developed in various online communities of young people as a way to be inclusive of neurodivergent people, who often have difficulty interpreting subtle clues. But they address a problem most of us have had at some point. – The New York Times

If you’re an independent or even a chain bookseller who gets, say, 50 percent of your fiction, 50 percent of your nonfiction, 50 percent of your kid’s books, and so forth from one giant publisher … well, it owns your checkbook. You are in its thrall. – The Atlantic

“The award’s judges said they took the decision because they felt ‘the public had been subjected to too many bad things this year to justify exposing it to bad sex as well’. … But the judges warned authors not to take the cancellation as a ‘licence to write bad sex’.” – The Guardian

“Book critics who know nothing about contemporary poetry learn to live with the terror of exposure. We’re like Cold War spies embedded in enemy territory, waiting for a joke we don’t get or some stray cultural reference that exposes us as frauds.” – Washington Post