Publishers Weekly shares a conversation with Lauren Groff at Winter Institute, the American Booksellers Association’s annual conference, which Groff attended in February to prepare for the opening of the Lynx, an independent bookstore she and her husband, Clay Kallman, will open in Gainesville, Florida, next month. “Groff hopes that, with an inventory that emphasizes books by BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors that deal with such issues as race, gender identity, and sexuality, the Lynx ‘will reverberate outwards, and be a beacon of hope’” at a time when efforts to ban or limit access to books has reached a fever pitch nationwide, particularly in Florida.
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Workers at a Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side of New York City have voted to unionize, reports Publishers Weekly. The Upper West Side store is the sixth Barnes & Noble nationwide to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
The American Booksellers Association (ABA) and Small Business Rising, a group that represents independent businesses, have dubbed March 20 “SBA: Dump Amazon! Day” The occasion is meant to pressure the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) to dump Amazon as a sponsor of the administration’s National Small Business Week, which will be held April 28–May 4. “Amazon’s co-sponsorship is little more than a disingenuous PR stunt, allowing it to whitewash its anticompetitive behavior and all the harm it is doing to small business,” says a statement by the ABA.
The New York Times sends a dispatch from the London Book Fair: “For those who weren’t there to close deals, the fair offered the opportunity to map out the minutely graded power structure of the publishing industry.”
Kristen Arnett, Naomi Klein, Hisham Matar, Lorrie Moore, Kayla Upadhyaya, and other writers will not participate in this year’s PEN World Voices Festival due to PEN America’s stance on the crisis in Gaza. In an open letter the authors write: “Palestine’s poets, scholars, novelists and journalists and essayists have risked everything, including their lives and the lives of their families, to share their words with the world. Yet PEN America appears unwilling to stand with them firmly against the powers that have oppressed and dispossessed them for the last 75 years."
Palestinian American author Susan Abulhawa spoke with Democracy Now! about her recent visit to Gaza, during which she brought food and other needed materials and managed to conduct a writing workshop. “You know, we talk so much about the physical needs, because it’s immense—you know, water, food, shelter. But there’s the psychological, the intellectual needs,” says Abulhawa, who is the executive director of Palestine Writes, “the only North American literature festival dedicated to celebrating and promoting cultural productions of Palestinian writers and artists.”
On Literary Hub Maris Kreizman offers a critique of a new publishing company called Authors Equity, which will reportedly rely on a staff of freelancers: “Rather than offering book workers the stability and benefits of full-time employment, Authors Equity will rely on the gig economy to get the job done. ... [T]hese kinds of cost-cutting measures also very rarely make the finished output better,” writes Kreizman.
The American Library Association has released data on book-banning efforts in 2023, reporting that the number of unique titles challenged in public and school libraries increased 65 percent since 2022. That sets a new record: Last year’s “efforts to censor 4,240 unique book titles…tops the previous high from 2022, when 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship.” Read about how librarians and others have been resisting book banning in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
The winners of the inaugural Libby Book Awards have been announced; among them are James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store for Best Adult Fiction and Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You for Best Audiobook. The awards in seventeen categories are judged by seventeen hundred librarians worldwide.
Black Lawrence Press of New York will publish the winners of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry from Fresno State University in California, which offers $2,000 and publication of a poetry collection; Black Lawrence’s first title in the series will be S Is For by William Archila, chosen by Douglas Kearney for the 2023 award. Winners of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry were previously published by Anhinga Press of Florida.
In the Atlantic author Phil Klay lambastes Guernica for retracting an essay it published by a Jewish woman living in Israel that many interpreted as insensitive to the ongoing crisis in Gaza, which reportedly has killed more than thirty thousand Palestinians, including more than thirteen thousand children. In January the International Criminal Court ruled that it was “plausible” that Israel’s retaliatory war against Gaza after Hamas’s October 7 attack, which killed twelve hundred Israelis, was tantamount to genocide.
More than a dozen staff members of Guernica have resigned after the literary magazine published an essay by a Jewish writer living in Israel, with one editor calling it a “genocide apologia,” reports the Los Angeles Times. Guernica has since retracted the essay and reportedly removed it from its website. A Jewish writer who has published in the journal said the essay merely “presents an Israeli as human.” Guernica’s editors have also “received complaints that their magazine lacked a complexity of voices.”
The longlist of thirteen nominees for this year’s International Booker Prize—which awards novels and story collections translated into English and published in the U.K. and/or Ireland—have been announced. Check out what the prize judges, including U.S. writers Natalie Diaz and Aaron Robertson, have to say about their selections here.
Chinese fiction writer Mo Yan, who won the Nobel Prize in 2012, is being sued by a blogger in China who claims Yan’s books “smeared the ruling Communist Party’s reputation,” violating a 2018 law meant to combat “historical nihilism” in the country, writes the Associated Press.
Contemporary Russian literature is in the midst of a renaissance, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, with many authors—particularly women—under the age of thirty-five publishing diverse works in response to post-Soviet politics.
Libraries are struggling to keep up with the demand for e-books, which for libraries are much more expensive than hard copies of books, reports the Associated Press.
Meg Day is this year’s poet-in-residence at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the third poet to hold the title. Read more about the residency, a museum collaboration with the Academy of American Poets, in Poets & Writers Magazine.
Publishers Weekly interviews Anjali Singh, who has launched her own agency, Anjali Singh Literary. Most recently an agent with Ayesha Pande Literary, Singh has also served as the editorial director of Other Press and as an editor with Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Vintage Books.
The fashion industry has taken a literary turn recently, with books inspiring clothing collections, interior design, and more. Author Simon Chilvers’ discusses the trend on a podcast from the Financial Times.
A NASA spacecraft, which in October is set to travel to Jupiter’s moon Europa, will carry an engraving of a handwritten poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón called “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.”
Literary Events Calendar
- March 19, 2024
Writing the Loess Hills: Letting Landscape Guide the Pen"
Online7:00 PM - 9:00 PM EDT - March 20, 2024
How to Promote Your Book—A Free Workshop
Online12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EDT - March 21, 2024
Strong Women Strange Worlds Quick Read
Online7:00 PM - 8:00 PM EDT
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