Category: words

Remember last fall and winter? Well, there were plans: “Months ago, in what now feels like another era, publishers planning their 2020 schedules hoped to avoid releasing books in the fall, typically the industry’s biggest season. Editors and writers worried that new releases would be lost in the deluge of political news leading up to the presidential election, so publishers jammed some of their biggest titles into the spring.” – The New York Times

Jill Lepore: “The literature of contagion is vile. A plague is like a lobotomy. It cuts away the higher realms, the loftiest capacities of humanity, and leaves only the animal. “Farewell to the giant powers of man,” Mary Shelley wrote in “The Last Man,” in 1826, after a disease has ravaged the world. “Farewell to the arts,—to eloquence.” Every story of epidemic is a story of illiteracy, language made powerless, man made brute. But, then, the existence of books, no matter how grim the tale, is itself a sign, evidence that humanity endures, in the very contagion of reading.” – The New Yorker

“It is the middle of a plague — ‘a pestilence so great and universal, that already it has been three months since it started, and many have died and many more continue to die.’ This does little to stop a group of scholars who have sealed themselves off from the world in a Mexico City convent, where they toil on a series of volumes devoted to indigenous knowledge.” Carolina Miranda recounts the story of the Historia General de las cosas de la Nueva España, a 12-volume manuscript from 1576 now known as the Florentine Codex. – Los Angeles Times

“Book festival Wordplay, originally slated to take place in Minneapolis in May, will now happen virtually in April and May in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. All of the original 100+ participants, including Alison Roman, Michael Ian Black, Charles Yu and Scott Pelley, are still slated to take part in the festival.” Steph Opitz, Wordplay’s founding director, tells a reporter how it’s coming together. – Forbes

With little advance notice, the 84-year-old film-maker’s book arrives at a time when much of the world is preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic. Arcade is an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing and a Skyhorse spokeswoman said no decisions had been made on whether Allen would give interviews. – The Guardian

“This is the first time in our history that we have had to have a layoff,” owner Nancy Bass Wyden Bass Wyden wrote in a statement. Employees will receive a week of pay in addition to payment for any vacation time they have accrued. “We are also working with our union and our providers to extend health insurance as long as possible.” – Publishers Weekly

No one seems to fully agree on why reading books or watching movies about apocalyptic pandemics feels appealing during a real crisis with an actual contagious disease. Some readers claim that contagion fiction provides comfort, but others argue the opposite. – The Conversation

Mo Willems, Grace Lin, Gene Luen Yang, Amie Kaufman and so many others are offering drawing lessons, read alouds, virtual book tours and so much more online. Oliver Jeffers: “We are all at home, but none of us are alone. … Let’s be bored together.” – The New York Times

After days – and lots of angry tweets, posts, and other pushback from staff who said they had no masks, no gloves, no hand sanitizer, and were still being forced to take cash – and the CEO saying “his stores are ‘no different to a supermarket or a pharmacy’ as he vowed to keep the book chain open,” he has at last closed for the duration. – The Guardian (UK)