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
- The Locus Awards announced their top 10 finalists for 2021. The winners will be announced June 26, 2021.
- SFWA announced this year’s Nebula Award winners. Congratulations to Network Effect (Martha Wells), Best Novel; Ring Shout (P. Djèlí Clark), Best Novella; A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking (T. Kingfisher), Andre Norton Award for Best MG & YA Fiction; and all the other winners.
- UK libraries and museums unite to save ‘astonishing’ lost library from private buyers (The Guardian) The Honresfield collection includes manuscripts by Emily Bronte Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Burns, and letters by Jane Austen. If the funding drive is successful, the materials will remain in public hands, and will in many cases go to museums or libraries dedicated to the author in question. For instance, the Bronte poems would go to the Brontë Parsonage Museum; the Austen letters to the Jane Austen House; Sir Walter Scott’s manuscript of Rob Roy to Abbottsford, Scott’s home, now a museum; and so on.) If you would like to donate (I did!), you can donate here.
- ABA Brings Back #BoxedOut Marketing Campaign to highlight Amazon’s domination of the book market. (Publishers Weekly)
Worth Reading/Viewing
- Okay, Do Superheroes Bone or Not? addresses the question of why superheroes don’t get it on—at least when they are being superheroes. (Emmet Asher-Perrin, Tor.com)
- How Loki became a genderfluid icon in Marvel fandom (Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, Daily Dot)
For Writers (and anyone interested in the craft)
- This Twitter thread on logistics and worldbuilding is interesting. Too often, writers neglect the obvious questions of where the foods, metals, tools, etc. that appear in their books actually come from — and what that might say about their society. Does the society trade for what it uses? With what? Are they colonizers? Who are the laborers, and what is their relationship to the consumers?
Books, Movies, and TV
Lists
- 11 Modern Fantasies Based in Classic Mythology (Tor.com)
- 54 Brand New Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books to Add to Your June Reading List (io9) These are the June SFF releases, listed by release date. (You’ll need to click the “continue reading” button for the whole list. It’s probably under Bethany Morrow’s A Chorus Rises.)
- Librarians in Romance (Wendy the SuperLibrarian) A remarkably thorough list, divided by subgenre. It includes all the ones I thought of, and I’m sure I’ll be reading others from the list.
Nicole @ BookWyrm Knits
I saw that Twitter thread (and in fact emailed it to myself to save for future reference and reminders). Very good reminders about trade and labor that gets forgotten all too often.
And I somehow missed the #BoxedOut campaign last year, even though one of the few places I was going when I left the house was to do curbside pick-up at my local bookstore. I’m not sure if I missed the campaign window, or if they weren’t participating. I’ll be curious to see if they do anything for it this year.
Nicole @ BookWyrm Knits recently posted…Update ~ Spring 2021 TBR
Lark_Bookwyrm
I saved the Twitter thread too, in a bookmarks folder called “Writing.” In case I ever get serious about it…