News & Notes is a weekly Saturday post featuring book- and publishing-related news, links to interesting articles and opinion pieces, and other cool stuff
Bookish News
- Hachette pulls Woody Allen autobiography after criticism from Ronan and Dylan Farrow, his estranged children, and after a walkout by a number of Hachette employees. Dylan alleges Allen sexually abused her at age 7. Ronan Farrow’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein won a Pulitzer Prize; his book on how powerful men avoid accountability for sexual assault was published by Hachette. (CNN Business)
- AO3 Blocked in China (Mike Glyer, File 770) China, which routinely censors what its citizens can see on the internet and other media, has apparently blocked fanfic site AO3, also known as Archive Of Our Own.
- Edelweiss E-mail Hacked and subscribers exposed to phishing attack. (Publishers Weekly)
- Coronavirus is hitting international book fairs hard. The London Book Fair and Livre Paris book fair have both been called off. (The Guardian; Livre Paris press release.) But BookExpo, BookCon to Proceed as Planned (Publishers Weekly)
- How the coronavirus outbreak is roiling the film and entertainment industries (Vox) Film production and releases have been shut down in China. The new James Bond film is delayed until November, so as not to experience poor ticket sales as people around the world decide to avoid crowds. Mission Impossible III shut down production in Venice, which is in a region of Italy hard-hit by the virus. Emerald City ComicCon (Seattle) is postponed, and SXSW (South by Southwest, in Austin) is cancelled altogether.
- MacMillan may be reconsidering its library ebook embargo (Publishers Weekly)
- A 6-foot pencil sculpture has been stolen from the Gloucester Writer’s Center in Massachussets. (Gloucester Times)
Worth Reading/Viewing
- Are novelists obliged to tell the story of their private life? (Layla AlAmmar, The Guardian) Like the author of this piece, I support the call for more diversity in publishing and more #OwnVoices books, but that doesn’t mean fiction authors should be forced to prove their “right” to tell a story that may or may not draw elements from their own experience. (Frankly, authors should be, and for generations were, allowed a measure of privacy.)
- Oprah, Macmillan Promise ‘To Do Better’ to Amplify Latinx Voices (Claire Kirch, Publishers Weekly)
- How J. Edgar Hoover Used the Power of Libraries for Evil — in particular, the power of the card catalog. You may not know (as I did not) that Hoover began his Washington career as a clerk at the Library of Congress. He took the information-organization techniques he learned with him to the Justice Department and then the FBI. (Alana Mohamed, Literary Hub)
- Fever dreams: did author Dean Koontz really predict coronavirus? That’s not actually the focus of this article, which explores how fiction about pandemics tends — as humans have done for millenia — to attribute agency to the disease’s existence and spread: gods, aliens, mad scientists, bioweapons. (In reality, as the author points out, “disease has no agency.”)
- Why I Keep a Reading Journal And How To Start Your Own (Megan Mabee, Book Riot) This article isn’t about keeping track of your reading, but about having a place to write down the quotes that strike you from the book. Personally, I’m not sure I would call it a “reading journal,” since to me that encompasses much more than simply a collection of quotes… but I’m not sure what else to call it. I use my own version of this type of journal only for quotes that inspire or comfort me; most of them have to do with either creativity, or faith and spirituality.
Lists
- 14 of the Best Fantasy Heist Novels (Book Bub)
- Twelve SFF Stories Told From Second-Person Perspective (Natalie Zutter, Tor.com)
- 9 Bookish Mugs To Sip From During Your Next Marathon Read (Book Riot) (Just a heads-up, though: at least one of the links, the one for the house mugs, was incorrect when I wrote this post. If you want a house mug, try this link instead.)
Nicole @ BookWyrmKnits
Thanks for the link to the fantasy heist books! I enjoy a good heist book, but always forget to look for them.
And I’ve seen lots of comparisons of the COVID-19 stuff to Mira Grant’s FEED. Minus the zombies, of course. 😉
Nicole @ BookWyrmKnits recently posted…#YARC 2020 ~ Year of the Asian Reading Challenge