“The reality is, there are just not a lot of POC authors out there,” writes Ellen Oh in her essay on non-white authors. “We are not representing the 37% of our population when we only amount to 10% of publishing.”
Publishing’s Other Imbalance Problem
Mad Money
Modern day celebrities aren’t the only victims of Photoshop. Paula Byrne, a Jane Austen biographer, believes that Austen has been “airbrushed” on her £10 Bank of England note. The portrait makes her look like “a pretty doll with big doe eyes” and diminishes her reputation as an author, Byrne argues.
Queens’ Libraries Speak the Mother Tongue
In many of Queens’ 62 library branches, copies of books are being borrowed are in Korean, Chinese or Spanish. A library branch in Astoria, responding to its own diverse readership, carries children’s books in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese and Gujarati. Striving to cater to the intensifying globalization of its surrounding streets, the New York neighborhood library speaks your language as never before.
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Based on a True Story
Jon Methven (of This Is Your Captain Speaking) has a problem: one of his characters trashed his novel on Amazon.
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The Best Episode of Science Friday Ever?
Public radio program Science Friday has quite a lineup on tap this week: “Science and art often seem to develop in separate silos, but many thinkers are inspired by both. Novelist Cormac McCarthy, filmmaker Werner Herzog, and physicist Lawrence Krauss discuss science as inspiration for art and Herzog’s new film on the earliest known cave paintings.” (via @maudnewton)
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Sans Serif
Garamond or Helvetica? Times New Roman or Le Monde Journal? The stories behind your favorite fonts.
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Get the Stories
When you sit down with Junot Díaz , “lunch conversation runs like an advanced literary seminar taught by a bilingual stand-up comedian.”
“Time is the substance from which I am made.”
Yesterday was Jorge Luis Borges‘ 112th birthday, and you can celebrate belatedly by reading his Paris Review interview and his treatment in The New York Review of Books.
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