For Whom The Bell Tolls

You may have heard that Noah Berlatsky wrote a book about the early days of Wonder Woman. The book explores gender dynamics in Wonder Woman comics from the forties. At The Rumpus, Berlatsky talks with Arielle Bernstein about early comics, radical politics and the mind of William Marston.

Have you ever gotten stuck in a book? Here’s a delightful little comic by Grant Snider that explores the process of losing oneself in reading.

“And now An American Marriage, with its ruminations on masculinity, married life, and what constitutes marital debt, manages the trick of arriving at the right time while also feeling utterly untethered to just one era.” BuzzFeed News profiled writer Tayari Jones about her life, oeuvre, and fourth novel, An American Marriage. Pair with: Jones’s 2017 Year in Reading entry.

Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Alexander Stein takes a look at lip-syncing, gender performativity, and the greatest television show ever made, RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Chick authors who avoid the “chick-lit” stigma.

“Bertelsmann’s 7% decline in 2016 revenue was due entirely to a drop in sales at Penguin Random House. The lack of a big new bestseller hurt results at the company, and it divested some smaller divisions in the year.” For those interested in inside baseball, Publishers Weekly takes a look at how the world’s 50 largest publishers are faring. (TL;dr: Although their total revenue topped $50 billion, more than half of the list’s publishers reported sales declines – oh, and Harry Potter still really, really sells). As a counterpoint to all that capitalism, read our own Edan Lepucki‘s survey of self-published authors.