This week! Books! I saved up quite a few links while I was away on vacation, so let’s get to them! Book banning is spreading like wildfire as groups take advantage of new digital tools and strategies to try to enact a wave of challenges and lawsuits. Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter surveyed the […]
This Week in Books
The novel that predicted Putin’s war (This week in books)
This week! Books! People have been searching for answers for Putin’s senseless war in Ukraine, and at least one intriguing piece of the puzzle comes from Mikhail Yuriev’s 2006 utopian novel The Third Empire: Russia as It Ought to Be, which starts with an unannounced war in eastern Ukraine, and culminates in the entire world […]
Be wary of unsolicited literary agents in your inbox (This week in books)
This week! Books! Publishing scam watchdog Writer Beware has relaunched at writerbeware.blog. As it moves away from its accrispin.blogspot domain, it’s a time to honor the legacy of Writer Beware’s late co-founder Ann Crispin, a really lovely person who dedicated so much energy to helping authors. She was one of my early blog inspirations, and […]
Censorship (the real kind) sweeps the country (This week in books)
This week! Books! While newspaper editorials continue to clutch their pearls about “cancel culture” (say it with me: SHAMING IS NOT CENSORSHIP), there is real honest-to-god censorship sweeping the country, particularly targeting antiracist and LBGTQ books, with plenty of others caught in the crossfire. Two articles this week profile people fighting back: Odette Yousef at […]
The Great Resignation hits publishing (This week in books)
This week! Books! The Great Resignation. Publishing style. Editors are creaking under chronically low pay, ever-expanding publisher expectations, publisher under-investment in support infrastructure like contracts departments… and oh yes, all of this is happening amid bonanza years for publishers’ bottom lines. This makes it accordingly more difficult for young agents to get their books read […]
Cormac McCarthy has two new novels (This week in books)
This week! Books! Cormac McCarthy has been quiet since The Road was published in 2006 (and no, he’s not on Twitter), but at 88 he has two new novels on the way this fall. Retention of employees from diverse backgrounds has long been a problem in the publishing industry, and We Need Diverse Books is […]
