“[I]n the days following the election, one thing became clear: many librarians are anxious about the future.” From Carla Hayden to copyright reform, Publisher’s Weekly has the top 10 library stories of 2016. Also recommended: a piece by Daniel Penev from our own pages earlier this year, about how libraries matter now more than ever.
The Year in Libraries
Let’s Write About Sex Baby
“Her pincers tore at me… I stormed her openings as if she was a beleaguered fortress.” We’re wincing-slash-laughing at Lapham’s Quarterly‘s infographic of authors’ attempts to put sex down on the page throughout history. Pair with author Julia Fierro‘s great piece about trying to *do it* in her first novel.
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Where In The World Is That Book Going?
The Book Depository is “the UK’s largest dedicated online bookseller,” which is all well and good, but their live visualization of which customers are ordering what (and from where) might be the best part of the entire website.
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I Love You
There are an estimated 1,025,109.8 words in the English language. Why, then, do we return to the same three over and over?
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Tuesday New Release Day: Straub; Phillips; Berkhout; Visser-Maessen; Ulman; Gaiman
Out this week: Modern Lovers by Emma Straub; Some Possible Solutions by Helen Phillips; The Gallery of Lost Species by Nina Berkhout; Robert Parris Moses by Laura Visser-Maessen; Hot Little Hands by Abigail Ulman; and The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction by Neil Gaiman. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
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The Dead and the Pre-Dead
“For obit writers, the whole world is necessarily divided into the dead and the pre-dead. That’s all there is.” The Paris Review interviews Margalit Fox, a senior writer for The New York Times, on the complicated art of obituaries.
The World’s Most Powerful Editor
“I think you are abusing your power, and I find it hard to believe that you have thought it through thoroughly.” Norway’s largest newspaper, Aftenposten, has published a front-page letter to Mark Zuckerberg after Facebook censored an iconic image from the Vietnam war. The Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a naked nine-year-old Kim Phúc running away from a napalm attack was deleted from a post about seven images “that changed the history of warfare.”
Tatjana Soli, author of The Lotus Eaters, wrote for us about the legacy of that infamous photo a few years back.
Poe’s Back
After a period of uncertainty, Baltimore’s Edgar Allan Poe House is finally scheduled for reopening. To celebrate the victory, check out Édouard Manet’s illustrations for the French edition of “The Raven.”
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