News & Notes – 4/09/2022

April 9, 2022 Lark_Bookwyrm News & Notes 3

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

Congress Investigates Book Banning in Schools (Publisher’s Weekly; also House Committee on Oversight and Reform)
Banned in the USA: Rising School Book Bans Threaten Free Expression and Students’ First Amendment Rights. PEN America has issued a comprehensive report on the rise in book bans, whether schools and libraries are following their own policies in removing books, and the potential impacts on children and young people. “The findings in this report demonstrate a profound increase in both the number of books banned and the intense focus on books that relate to communities of color and LGBTQ+ subjects over the past nine months.”
Barnes & Noble Introduces New Digital Audiobook Experience (press release). B&N Audiobooks appears to be Barnes & Noble’s response to Amazon’s Audible: an audiobook arm that offers both a monthly subscription as well as the option to buy books one at a time, without subscribing. Readers can listen to their books on the NOOK App or on BN.com.
Independent Bookstore Day is April 30, 2022. Shelf Awareness details some indie bookstores’ plans to mark the day. (Darn it, I can’t go. I’ll be at a virtual indexing conference all day.)

Literary Losses

Patricia MacLachlan, Newbery Award-winning author of Sarah Plain and Tall and more than 60 other titles for children, died March 31, 2022, at her home in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. She was 84. MacLachlan began writing after her children started school. Her first book was published in 1979; her last, A Secret Shared, was released in September 2021. Her books are notable for their economy of words and lean storytelling; she frequently edited and rewrote sentences, removing words “to make them as elegant and spare as the prairies of her youth.” (Boston Globe)

Her best-known novel, Sarah Plain and Tall, is based on a woman who married one of MacLachlan’s mother’s relatives. In addition to the Newbery, the book also won the Scott O’Dell Award, and led to four sequels and three TV adaptations starring Glenn Close and Christopher Walken.

Obituaries: Book Riot; Boston Globe; Daily Hampshire Gazette; Shelf Awareness; Washington Post

Biography and Bibliography: Goodreads; Wikipedia

Worth Reading/Viewing

Banning Books Makes for Bad Parenting (P. N. Hinton, Book Riot)
No Actions Offered To Librarians to Help With Book Bans. Kelly Jensen criticizes the ALA for failing librarians by not suggesting concrete actions librarians can take to counter book-banning campaigns (as they did in the 1990s.)
‘Out of touch’: children’s authors describe increasing censorship of books on diversity [in the UK] The culture wars are apparently not limited to the US. (The Guardian)
Shelf-promotion: the art of furnishing rooms with books you haven’t read (The Guardian)

Free Fiction

“The Dragon Project” by Naomi Kritzler (Clarkesworld Magazine) Cute short story about bioengineered, 3D-printed dragons.

Books, Movies, and TV

Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson raises record-setting $41 million on Kickstarter for secret books. (USA Today) Sanderson announced in early March (see video above) that he had written five “secret” books during the pandemic — in addition to the books he was contracted to write. He plans to publish four of them himself, as ebooks, print books, and audiobooks, along with special “swag.” He set up a Kickstarter, hoping to earn $1 million; 44,430 enthusiastic backers pledged $41,754,153. (Full disclosure: one of my family members was one of them.) Each book is a stand-alone novel; three are set within his Cosmere universe. Sanderson aims to publish them in 2023. The Kickstarter is now closed, but if you missed out, Sanderson has said it is “possible” they will eventually be released to the wider public. (Other sources: SciFy, Daily Dot, Winter Is Coming)