In the blurb-saturated present, authors can decry blurbs as corrupt and silly all they like. When they publish new books, however, they will be conscripted to marketing duties, obliged to solicit blurbs, and most will provide glowing snippets to hype their friends and colleagues too.
Does the author-read audiobook offer a perfect confluence between person, authorial persona, voice, and aesthetic form?
Don’t question Angela Davis’ manuscript, Toni Morrison warned her publishing colleagues. Davis was not “Jane Fonda” but, rather, “Jean d’Arc.”
“In a world where the imagined purpose of the novel is to entertain—not to teach or spark further inquiry—The Last Samurai dissents.”
Even the most successful authors—like Phillis Wheatley and W. E. B. Du Bois—fail to publish all they’d like. What can that reveal about literature?
America’s premier literary magazine promises to offer a cosmopolitan view of the world beyond New York City. Does it deliver?
A fundamental truth about bestseller lists? They are not a neutral window into what the public is really reading.
People who use audiobooks are expanding what reading is and can be. But they are also incentivizing publishers to change, in unexpected ways.
Industry is already using data to remake culture. To reverse the tide—to make culture more equitable—we need to decode that data for ourselves.
They claim there is a “People of Donbass.” There is not.
“I didn’t pay much attention to what was being put in the archives… there are letters that, if I had been paying attention, wouldn’t be there.”
Empathy will not close the refugee camps, nor will it aid refugees. So what will?
The “papers” of Toni Morrison can be accessed through a Princeton computer terminal. But where do these digital drafts end, and Beloved begin?
We don’t judge books by their covers, but we do sort people based on which academic presses match their personality types.
“There was something about the resilience of an organization like this. We are the longest-running feminist publishing house in the world.”
The Public Books Database is collecting the resources being offered for free by academic presses during the COVID-19 crisis.
Fifty years ago, almost every publisher in the United States was independent. Beginning in the late 1960s, multinational corporations consolidated the industry ...
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So here it is at last: the end of Knausgaard’s struggle. It is 1,160 pages long, divided into three parts. Part 2 consists of a long essay on Hitler. Both ...
