Literature

I had a strange mood today and started and finished this in one 10 hour sitting. It was excellent, but simultaneously not as excellent as I had hoped. I enjoyed lots of the short stories in Dubliners more, I think. The "avant garde" structure often felt superfluous - although not always. The color symbolism was interesting, but I felt it fell away in the second half of the book. In fact, the entire middle portion (those gigantic sermons, my god!) was a bit rough to get through. But I do appreciate that it really evoked the sensation of being in a washed out, weary, hypnosis sort of state - and it did leave a psychological impression in the following sections, like you really "remembered" that part of Stephen's life. The discussion on Stephen's philosophy of art was the highlight for me, along with a bunch of tiny little fragments of test that felt like beautiful lucid clear thoughts. It did evoke the feeling of going through life in a largely automatic blur, with a few powerful moments sticking out. I especially enjoyed that the powerful moments were often completely mundane events made powerful only via Stephen's feelings in the moment. His struggles with expressing and capturing this elusive sensation were beautifully portrayed. And the switch to first-person at the end felt delightful in its regressive irony (according to Stephen's point of view), as it represented the "lyrical form" in some rough sense.

Anyways, curious if anyone else has thoughts on it to share. I couldn't find any discussion online about the red/white color symbolism. I interpreted it as a representation of cold lifeless religiosity vs hot vivacious "mundanity". But I'm not sure if the York/Lancaster origination of the symbols is meant to lend more to it, etc., or if maybe I've missed that entirely. The green and maroon were clearly political and I found lots of discussion on that. I'd love to hear what anyone else's favorite/least favorite aspects were.

The stores I’ve stopped in are all different, with their own stock and their own personalities. There are stores on tree-lined streets, and in urban centers, strip malls, old homes, and refurbished warehouses. Once, I pulled into a dirt parking area convinced I was lost, until I saw a bright awning confirming there was indeed a bookstore there. Yet no matter where I went or how far from home I traveled, I felt welcomed every time I stepped inside. I was reminded that I’m part of a community that transcends geography and countless divisions—a community of people who read. Regardless of our favorite books or chosen genres, we believe in the value of language, creativity, and communication.

At Bookery Cincy in Ohio, Sierra told me about an annual bookstore crawl across the city, and how what had started with just a few stores now has two dozen places participating. At Joy and Matt’s, also in Cincinnati, Joy and I swapped book recs (she told me to read Amor Towles, I said I couldn’t stop thinking about The Safekeep). At The Novel Neighbor in Webster Grove, Missouri, I discussed with three booksellers who should read Greenwich first, based on the shelves of staff picks (shout out to Haley—I hope the ARC got to you!). I talked horror with Stevie at Foxing in Louisville, and Liz Moore with Jessica at Subterranean Books in St. Louis.

At Skylark in Columbia, Missouri, I got to tell Matthew behind the register that my editor grew up nearby, and then check out her favorite childhood ice cream spot, Sparky’s. (It was eleven AM, raining, and sixty degrees, and no that didn’t stop me. Get the mango if you’re in town.) At Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas, I felt the bookseller’s excitement when I said I was publishing my first novel. “You’re a real author!” Tom at Trident exclaimed once I’d made it to Boulder. Over and over, I had the thrill of hearing that my book was already in stock at some stores, and the excitement of introducing it to others. I took home notecards, T-shirts, novelty socks. I bought a lot of books. When I asked a pink-haired bookseller at Left Bank Books in St. Louis how long the store had been around, they proudly said it had been founded in 1969 by “hippies and queers,” and that today the store is keeping up the legacy. That’s what I kept thinking about after every mile and every new stop. This fight for free speech isn’t new, and independent bookstores have been fighting it for a long time.

Capitalism isn’t going to save us. But supporting independent bookstores isn’t just about personal consumer choice—it’s civic engagement. For every book that’s banned, and every library that loses its autonomy over curation, we’re going to need community action and mutual aid to get books into readers’ hands. Buy books from indie stores, gift books to those who can’t access them, show up at local meetings, and speak against censorship. None of us can afford to look away, even if it isn’t our library, our county, or our book that’s on the chopping block.

I am African Australian—the one is not exclusive from the other. I am a daughter of the Wajita people of Tanzania, and now I live in Melbourne, Australia. I am a daughter of the land that belongs to the Wurundjeri and Boon-Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. The creative space where I tell stories is literary speculative fiction: I write and perform short stories, novels, novellas, prose poetry, creative nonfiction. I write across genres.

The road to publication has, for me, been fraught because I was not always at ease with the self and other—until I realized the power of fiction. Speculative fiction is a safe space that can, like any fiction, help us understand other perspectives. It allows for a different kind of writing with foundations to cultivate inclusive worlds.

Maria Montalvo speaks with emotion, her eyes shining as she recounts her reading experiences. She says she especially enjoys books by Isabel Allende, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Erika L. Sánchez and John Grisham because, in her words, “reading makes you wiser and you learn how people live in other countries. It takes your mind to other places you can’t travel to.”

Montalvo isn’t an ordinary reader. During her incarceration at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, a prison in New Jersey, she has participated in the activities of Freedom Reads, a nonprofit organization that has been promoting reading in U.S. prisons since 2020.

“Freedom Reads has brought books on different topics, and it’s very important to read because it makes you wiser,” Montalvo, 60, said in an interview with Noticias Telemundo. “Books change the prison climate; they change the way people think about themselves. This opens your mind and makes you want to change.”

When I first call Ros Hemmings, I expect her to be surprised. A widow in her 60s living in rural North Wales, she has never received a call from an investigative journalist in London. But instead she tells me: “Oh no, I have a very good idea why you are ringing.” She has been waiting for this call for years.

Hemmings rightly suspected that I wanted to ask her about a woman she knows as Sally Walker. Millions of people around the world know Sally by a different name: Raynor Winn. She is the author and protagonist of one of the most successful British non-fiction books in recent years. The Salt Path traces Raynor and her husband Moth’s 630-mile journey along the sea-swept South West Coast Path.

A heartbreaking “true” story of two people in their early 50s forced out of their rural home in Wales and weighed down by a sudden diagnosis of Moth’s terminal illness, The Salt Path went straight to the top of the bestseller charts, selling more than 2m copies worldwide since its publication in 2018.

Winn has since written two sequels and has a lucrative publishing deal with Penguin to produce at least one more. Five weeks ago The Salt Path reached new audiences when it was released in the UK as a film, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, and Winn is a co-producer.

Standing proudly on the red carpet outside the Lighthouse Cinema in Newquay, Raynor, 60, told TV cameras at the film’s UK premiere that the experience was “almost unbelievable”. In that moment, she and Moth seemed like the ultimate examples of British grit and perseverance.

Back in Wales, Hemmings saw a very different picture. Because she knew something about Winn that almost everyone – her publishers, her agents, the film producers – had missed. She knew that Raynor Winn wasn’t her real name and that several aspects of her story were untrue. She also believed she was a thief.

Barbara Kingsolver points out that Trump’s “so-called Big Beautiful Bill” could be devastating for Appalachia, with its cuts to the National Park Service, the Weather Service and disaster preparedness – just last year the area was hit by the devastating Hurricane Helene – and cuts to Medicaid, which could cause havoc in an already under-served area. “The damage will be unimaginable. Lots of people will die, lots of wild lands will be destroyed. The damage is terrifying.” Does she think her Trump-voting neighbours will change their allegiance if such terrors come to pass? “Will they connect the dots when our hospital closes? I don’t even know the answer to that,” she says, shaking her head, fearing that the TV and radio stations that told them to vote for Trump in the first place will “come up with some other reason why your hospital closed. For those of us who are in the information business, that’s a depressing subject.”

Anybody who ever lighted a fire without matches has probably gained some proper respect for “low” or “primitive” or “simple” technologies; anybody who ever lighted a fire with matches should have the wits to respect that notable hi-tech invention.

Nowadays we associate the word “prodigy” with precocious children, but in centuries past the word was used to describe anything monstrous. Victor Stott clearly qualifies as a prodigy in the modern sense, but he qualifies in the older sense too: Not only does he frighten the ignorant and superstitious, he induces a profound terror in the educated and intellectual. Seen in this light, the first novel about superintelligence is actually a work of horror SF, a cautionary tale about the dangers of knowing too much.

We are standing on a precipice.

At its simplest level, our job as artists is to respond to the human experience. But the art we make is a commodity, and our world wants things quickly, cheaply, and on demand. We are rushing toward a future where our novels, our biographies, our poems and our memoirs—our records of the human experience—are “written” by artificial intelligence models that, by definition, cannot know what it is to be human. To bleed, or starve, or love.

AI may give the appearance of understanding our humanity, but the truth is, only a human being can speak to and understand another human being. Every time a prompt is entered into AI, the language that bot uses to respond was created in part through the synthesis of art that we, the undersigned, have spent our careers crafting. Taken without our consent, without payment, without even the courtesy of acknowledgment.

In our writing, we drew on our lives: the losses of our parents, the births of our children, every love affair we’ve lived or imagined. Stories of human heroism and human depravity. These stories were stolen from us and used to train machines that, if short-sighted capitalistic greed wins, could soon be generating the books that fill our bookstores. Is this the end goal—to fully remove us from the equation so that those at the very top of the capitalist structure can profit even further off our labor than they already do? Rather than paying writers a small percentage of the money our work makes for them, someone else will be paid for a technology built on our unpaid labor.

The writing that AI produces feels cheap because it is cheap. It feels simple because it is simple to produce. That is the whole point. AI is an enormously powerful tool, here to stay, with the capacity for real societal benefits—but the replacement of art and artists isn’t one of them.

Like fashion trends, fads in book covers come and go. One year, the backs of women’s heads might be all the rage; the next, soft focus photography. And who can forget the exploding flower craze? Or the proliferation of flames on jackets, from thrillers to science fiction to self-help?

But the look that’s commanding today’s runways — a.k.a. bookshelves — is not so incendiary. It tends to lay blaringly bright type in a sans-serif font atop a painting, usually a few centuries old but not always. Facial expressions are baleful or dyspeptic; an aggressive burst of spray paint can change the tone entirely.

These covers are the new signifiers of stylish literary fiction, telegraphing gravitas, wit and cool. They make a bid for a certain kind of reader — more city than suburb, more pét-nat than chardonnay. They wouldn’t be caught dead alongside a volume decked out in pop art or, god forbid, metallic lettering.

Thomas Haggerty, a senior account manager at Bridgeman Images, which licenses paintings for commercial projects, credits the trend to “the power of juxtaposition.” Gregg Kulick, executive art director at Hachette Book Group, agrees: “Poppy type” reads as fun, he says, while the paintings “hint at the academic.”

So how did this ripped-from-the galleries craze get off the ground? After all, paintings have graced the covers of novels since “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” but it appears that “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” (2019) might be the trailblazer for this century’s spate.

Here’s the story behind that one, plus eight descendants out — or soon to be — this year.

Like the two Naomis [Wolf and Klein], conservatives and progressives become warped mirrors of one another. The progressive campaign for bodily autonomy is co-opted to be the foundation of the anti-vax movement. This is the mirror world, where concerns about real children – in border detention, or living in poverty in America – are reflected back as warped fever-swamp hallucinations about kids in imaginary pizza restaurant basements and Hollywood blood sacrifice rituals. The mirror world replaces RBG with Amy Coney-Barrett and calls it a victory for women. The mirror world defends workers by stoking xenophobic fears about immigrants.

But progressives let it happen. … Progressives cede suspicion of large corporations to conservatives, defending giant, exploitative, monopolistic corporations so long as they arouse conservative ire with some performative DEI key-jingling. Progressives defend the CIA and FBI when they're wrongfooting Trump, and voting machine vendors when they're turned into props for the Big Lie.

This thoughtful, vigorous prose and argumentation deserves its own special callout here: Klein has produced a first-rate literary work just as much as this is a superb philosophical and political tome. In this moment where the mirror world is exploding and the real world is contracting, this is an essential read.

ISBN 9780374610326 (don't buy from Amazon or its subsidiaries)

When UN spokesperson Darren Melvik posts a provocative image in a private Facebook group, he never imagines the storm it will unleash. What begins as an act of personal frustration soon spirals into a global scandal, implicating powerful religious and political leaders in a conspiracy to manipulate international institutions. As Darren navigates the labyrinth of digital surveillance and institutional cover-ups, he is drawn into a web of intrigue linking his own heritage to a Cold War-era research program designed to control minds through religious symbolism.

In a story blending real-world diplomacy with psychological conspiracy, The 13th Apostle and the UN exposes the hidden levers of power and the fragile line between personal conviction and global consequence.

Victor Modström, drawing from over a decade within international institutions, crafts a narrative that delves deep into the complexities of bureaucracy, identity, and the human cost of institutional decisions. This debut novel not only unveils the shadows lurking within the UN but also questions the nature of truth and the price of standing by one's principles.

I just finished Advocate, book 3 of Daniel M. Ford's The Warden series. I've been really enjoying this world. The first two books ended on cliffhangers, and the year wait between entries was killing me. Book 3 ended with a nice wrap up of one arc and a setup for another, both building up the bones of a larger story that's been looming ominously.

The problem is, it looks like Tor has dropped the series. The Warden and Necrobane were available in hardcover, but Advocate only got a TPB release. I can't find anything concrete about book 4, and according to a friend of a friend (and taken with the appropriate grain of salt) sales weren't good enough on the first book (?!?) to warrant re-upping the series.

I'm bummed. I found out about Ford's first series, Paladin, through word of mouth. I thought it was okay - a little tropey in places, but once he found his pace it was entertaining enough. Then he did some detective stuff that I had no interest in, but when I heard that he was doing another fantasy series, and that it got picked up by Tor, my interest was piqued. The result so far has been a marked improvement from Paladin, and one of the few things to poke through my deep depression these past few years. And now it's all in limbo.

Maybe I'm overreacting. I'm not going to pretend the know the machinations of the publishing world, and maybe someone else is going to pick up the series. It's just frustrating to find something nice and get it yanked away.

Anyway, rant over. I enjoyed my time with this series regardless of its future. If anyone else has read it (or has heard any news about continuation), I'd love to hear your thoughts.

In the year in which the groundbreaking activist would have turned 100, a new book looks at the enduring impact of his words and how they resonate today

The Afterlife of Malcolm X is a new book about the great Black leader who was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, 100 years ago; who in the 1950s converted to Islam and dropped his “slave name”; who rose to fame as the militant voice of the civil rights era; and who was assassinated in New York in 1965, aged just 39.

The book is not a biography. As the author, Mark Whitaker, puts it, his book tells “the story of the story of Malcolm, the story that really made him the figure he is today, even more so than what he accomplished while he was living.

I ran into this from a Reddit comment on r/Futurology absent the context that it was fiction. This eventually becomes apparent, but the past couple of hours have been a wild ride.

This is chapter one, of which there are eight. It is well-crafted sci-fi and ultimately (as tends to be the case in the genre, as there's not much drama to everything going well) lands somewhere quite optimistic.

What the human condition could be if we stopped all the bullshit, profit motive and oligarchy.

Providing an excerpt from longform fiction is somewhat pointless, but the writing is sharp, and the story flows well.

Over the past few weeks, there’s been a flurry of “takes” on what people think we should do about libraries (one wildly bad idea was that they should be replaced with bookstores so people could pay 30 bucks per hardcover instead of paying their goddamn taxes and getting use of a community space). The response to these garbage articles was overwhelmingly in favor of keeping libraries open! Hell yeah. Let me tell you, though, there’s a lot more you can do for your local branch aside from posting a well-intentioned tweet. The thing about libraries is . . . we need you to use them. All the time. Get your ass to the library. This week I’ve compiled a handy lists of dos and don’ts so you can continue to support your libraries and librarians and library staff. I’m generous that way; you’re welcome.

“I recall Midwestern summer nights, standing on my grandparents’ hushed lawn,” Ray Bradbury told me in 2010, “and looking up at the sky at the confetti field of stars. There were millions of suns out there, and millions of planets rotating around those suns. And I knew there was life out there, in the great vastness. We are just too far apart, separated by too great a distance to reach one another.”

For the young Bradbury, who would grow up to make that great vastness feel, to many, as almost as tangible as home, there was one celestial body more captivating than any other: Mars.

Mars: The fourth planet from our sun, some 140 million miles from us on average. The only planet in our solar system, other than our own, deemed by scientists and stargazers over the centuries to be—possibly, at one time—hospitable to life.

The planet has been part of our collective imagination for centuries, from the tales of ancient mythology, to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, to David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars. Ray Bradbury may have been yet another in a long line of artists dreaming about Mars, but he was the first science fiction writer to elevate the planetary tale beyond the marginalized gutter of “genre fiction,” with his 1950 story cycle The Martian Chronicles.

While Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 is often cited as his crowning achievement, it was The Martian Chronicles—arguably a superior work—that put his name on the literary map. The Martian Chronicles was published by Doubleday 75 years ago, on May 4th, 1950. Until that point, science fiction had been mostly dismissed by the firmament as “kids’ stuff,” littered as it was with pulpy tropes such as ray guns, little green men, and scantily clad damsels in distress. But The Martian Chronicles subverted all that, addressing a range of vital, vexing, timeless societal themes in the midst of McCarthy era America: nuclear war, genocide, environmental destruction, the rise of technology, corporatization, censorship, and racism.

Lamentably, these themes still tower over us in the Trumpian zeitgeist all these years later, but their continuing relevance only underscores the point: The Martian Chronicles is a serious book about serious human themes. It is science fiction as a reflection of modernity. The writing is exquisite, showcasing Bradbury at the dizzying height of his poetic prowess, lyrical, rich in metaphor, pastoral, with stunning passages of seemingly effortless prose, eschewing the occasionally purple passages of certain other works, like Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the more dialogue driven polemics of Fahrenheit 451. It hits the sweet spot between poetic exposition and complete narrative originality. With its publication, Ray Bradbury, not quite 30 years old, had pulled off a tour de force magique—he had created literary science fiction, and the intelligentsia quickly took notice.

I was thinking about this today. Where there stories in the past where the magic world and the normal world separate. The only Olden times stories i know of are myths and religious stories and i don't think those count since people already believed in the magic world, so no reason to say the everyday people where not aware of the magical world(except in cases like religion). I remember watching an OSP video(Trope Talk: Save The World). She talks about how The concept of the world or even a world being a modern day thing. People use to live in secluded areas from one another and so had no knowledge of a world, Most stories back than involved saving villages or towns or even islands. In Modern Marvel, all kinds of Magical worlds exist and normal people know of them and still go on about there day(Granted Most of those magical world revealed themselves to in modern time as not fuck up history). That's the only case of i know where both the magical world and the normal world exist side by side with everyday people knowing about them.What are your thoughts?

so! like the title says, what is your favorite genre for reading, and maybe what is a genre that you aren't so crazy about?

for me, I love fantasy, especially urban fantasy. it's tricky for me to find stuff I hit it off with all the way for that unfortunately, because I'm usually not interested in the romantic aspect being pushed so hard. but I love how authors will approach supernatural species and magic systems. plus, of course, I like to see character development.

I have been looking in YA because it's been a long time since I've seriously tried to read (since I was in high school, actually) and I'm really excited about trying a book called Legendborn. it looks amazing, and I've been told the magic system is excellent. admittedly, I haven't had the best luck with adult fiction just because, again, I don't enjoy most of the ways romance is written.

I don't really vibe with things like historical books, just because I don't consider myself great at history. I do enjoy learning things, but the ones that don't explain much leave me feeling lost. I also have that kind of issue with hard sci-fi, because even with explanations, that one can leave me feeling like I'm not understanding.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/323887

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Keep it going, guys.

Meta exposé tops bestseller chart despite company’s attempt to ban its promotion Sarah Wynn-Williams’s account of her seven years as a Facebook executive is number one on the New York Times bestseller list and has flown off the shelves in the UK

An exposé by a former employee of Meta has become a bestseller despite the social media company banning the author from promoting the book.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of global public policy at Meta’s precursor, Facebook, topped the New York Times bestseller chart and will be fourth on the Sunday Times nonfiction hardback chart this weekend.

The book “sold a staggering 1,000 hardbacks a day in the first three days on sale in the UK, despite Meta’s legal tactics to silence the book’s author”, said Joanna Prior, CEO of publisher Pan Macmillan. “This early success is a triumph against Meta’s attempt to stop the publication of this book.”

archive.is link

On May 10, 1996, 43 climbers attempted to reach the summit of Mount Everest. By the following day, five of them were dead. The tragedy—occurring at a time when the commercial guiding business was ramping up on the mountain and the dream of summiting Everest seemed suddenly available to anyone able to afford the $68,000 price tag—electrified the public. The most celebrated account of the disaster came from journalist Jon Krakauer, first as a barn-burning feature in Outside magazine, which had commissioned him to cover the climb as a participant, and later as the bestselling book Into Thin Air.

People have been arguing about the catastrophe ever since, from the 1997 book The Climb, by Anatoli Boukreev, a Russian-Kazakhstani guide who felt he’d been unfairly portrayed in Into Thin Air, to a present-day YouTube campaign against Krakauer. The latter, conducted by a lawyer in Irvine, California, named Michael Tracy, was purportedly triggered by a rash of recent YouTube videos from various creators, all excoriating another climber who was on the mountain that day, Sandy Hill Pittman. One of the most viewed of these—titled “Ungrateful Socialite Endangers Climbers on Deadly Mount Everest Excursion” and narrated by a creepily soft-voiced therapist who makes videos about famous true crimes and seems to have a sideline in “analyzing” the women climbers he blames for various mountaineering disasters—gives a pretty good sense of the tenor of these debates. For his part, Krakauer has long shown himself ready to return fire to his critics.