Once Again, this December we will be hosting our Year in Reading series, and this year’s installment is shaping up to be our most fascinating and star-studded yet. While you wait, enjoy last year’s series all over again, and please consider learning about the five easy (even free!) ways you can support The Millions and our year-end extravaganza this holiday season.
Year in Reading Coming Soon!
Football Fiction
Recommended Listening: Michael Nye reading his new short story about a former NFL lineman, “Beauty in the Age of Chaos and Savagery,” for The Kenyon Review. For more Nye, read his 2013 Year in Reading post.
New Murakami on the Way
Today is Haruki Murakami’s birthday, so what better day to announce the title of his next work, Kishidancho Goroshi (Killing Commendatore)? The novel, which is divided in two parts – Arawareru Idea (Emerging Idea) and Utsurou Metaphor (Moving Metaphor) – is slated for a late February release in Japan. As of this writing, very little is known about the novel’s plot.
#DiverseCanLit
We’ve been following the raging debate about diversity in the publishing industry, which recently re-triggered when BookExpo America released a speaker list of “29 white people and a cat” (as The Toast summed it up). The panel was rebalanced, but debate around the root issue continues: recent data indicates, for example, that while the US has become more diverse in population, the number of multicultural childrens’ books has remained flat under 10 percent for two decades. Follow the continuing debate on Twitter hashtags like #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #DiverseCanLit, or look to this helpful round-up of blogs and articles at BookRiot.
The Importance of Conversations with Mira Jacob
For Auld Lang Syne
“A perfect example of what the short story can do when the form is at its best: containing as much of an emotional blow as that of a 800-page novel, regardless of its brevity.” The Guardian awards its 4th Estate BAME short story prize to “Auld Lang Syne” by Lisa Smith. The prize was launched in 2015 in response to a report “which found that black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) writers struggled both to get published and against stereotypes imposed by the UK’s overwhelmingly white publishing industry.”