Category: words

With author events cancelled, titles delayed and bookshop sales severely hit by lockdown, the survey of 72 small publishers reveals almost 60% fear closure by the autumn. The Bookseller said that 57% reported they had no cashflow to support their business, and 85% had seen sales drop by more than half. – The Guardian

Peter Florence: “In the last three weeks we’ve reshaped the programme we’d been planning for the last 18 months into just 80 online events and we’ve been experimenting with tech platforms to keep that conversation going. I doubt we could ever have assembled the cast who’ll launch our Wordsworth 250 celebrations in real life.” – The Guardian

Artist Sam Winston, as part of his project A Delicate Sight, invited Bernardine Evaristo (co-winner of last year’s Booker Prize), Raymond Antrobus (winner of last year’s Folio Prize for poetry), Don Paterson, and Max Porter, “to spend hours in blackout before writing something inspired by heightened senses, identity, imagination, sensory reduction and rest.” – The Guardian

“In Rousseau’s scheme of things, solitude was the natural human state. By stepping outside of society, by distancing oneself from other voices, one was facilitating a return to oneself. But being with oneself is one thing; writing about the state of being with oneself, another.” – The Paris Review

Whitehead received his second fiction Pulitzer for The Nickel Boys; Brown’s The Tradition took poetry honors; the biography prize went to Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work; McDaniel’s Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America took the history category; the general nonfiction prize was shared by Boyer for The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care and Grandin for The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. – Los Angeles Times

It’s no great mystery why. Poetry is sticky. Prose slips. Barbed and spurred, poems catch in your chest; they get stuck in your head like songs. Still, to admit to liking poetry is faintly embarrassing. – The Cut

In the category of things some of us hadn’t thought enough about before this moment: “Vincent was an avid and multilingual reader, a man who could not do without books. In his brief life he devoured hundreds of them in four languages, spanning centuries of art and literature. Throughout his life, his reading habits reflected his various personae—art dealer, preacher, painter—and were informed by his desire to learn, discuss, and find his own way to be of service to humanity.” – LitHub

Perry (The Essex Serpent) couldn’t even go into her study at first; books seemed items of contempt. But: “Recently I have concluded that all this amounts to a kind of failure of courage. As lockdown continues, I find my imagination has not faltered against this hard reality, but has itself grown harder. Everything which was sad before is sadder now, but everything which was wonderful is more wonderful. Imagination roots itself in feeling, and the novel I’d been working on grew larger and more vivid while my back was turned.” – The Guardian (UK)

There’s even a Twitter account to analyze exactly what’s going on: “As the broadcast industry shelters in place, the bookcase has become the background of choice for television hosts, executives, politicians and anyone else keen on applying a patina of authority to their amateurish video feeds.” – The New York Times

N.K. Jemisin won three Hugo Awards in a row for her Broken Earth trilogy, a science fictional world where the protagonist is a middle-aged Black woman (and mother). But to get to that point, she’d had to bend to publishers’ desires for mostly white characters in her previous trilogy. So excuse her if she now takes on Lovecraftian evil – yes, Cthulhu, but “with a group of diverse characters facing off against it – and against, pointedly, the man-bunned alt-right trolls it recruits to fight for it.”  – The Guardian (UK)