News & Notes is a weekly Saturday post featuring book- and publishing-related news, links to interesting articles and opinion pieces, and other cool stuff
Book News
- William Shakespeare’s London home ‘identified by historian’ (BBC News)
- Hunchback of Notre-Dame goes to top of France’s bestseller list after fire (The Guardian)
- The 2019 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced for Journalism, Letters, Drama, and Music. The fiction prize was awarded to Richard Powers’s The Overstory. The poetry prize went to Forest Gander’s Be With; you can read one of his poems, “The Sounding”, at Literary Hub.
- Unknown Daphne du Maurier poems discovered behind photo frame (The Guardian)
- Publishers prepare to release Mueller report as soon as possible once the redacted report is made public. And they are expecting to sell a lot of copies. (Publishers Weekly)
- Woman Finds Ring Filled With Charlotte Brontë’s Hair and brings it to Antiques Roadshow. (Jezebel)
Literary Losses
Gene Wolfe at the 2005 Nebula Awards ceremony in Chicago. (Photo by Cory Doctorow; CC-SA)
Gene Wolfe, award-winning science fiction and fantasy author and SFWA Grand Master, has died at the age of 87. Wolfe was best known for the four-volume series The Book of the New Sun, a “dying Earth” SFF series published in the early 1980s. The series is often considered as one work, and came in third in a 1998 Locus poll of the best fantasy novels written before 1990, behind The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Wolfe wrote 30 novels, beginning with The Fifth Head of Cerberus in 1972 and ending with 2015’s A Borrowed Man, as well as a number of novellas. Over his lifetime, Wolfe won almost every SFF award at least once, except the Hugo Award (although nine of his works were nominated.) The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named him a Grand Master in 2012.
Obituaries & tributes: The Guardian; NPR; Tor.com
Bibliography & Biography: Goodreads; Wikipedia
Worth Reading/Viewing
- Notre Dame on Fire: Toward the Symbol at the Center of a City (Lauren Elkin, Literary Hub)
- Fantasy is Female: The Importance of Feminism in YA Fantasy (Book Riot) S. W. Sondheimer interviews authors Alexandra Christo and Tricia Levenseller on feminism and female characters in fantasy.
- Pushing Diversity Forward in Publishing (Publishers Weekly) Two organizations, People of Color in Publishing and We Need Diverse Books, held a joint town hall for publishing professionals.
Book & Movie Announcements
- Modern Library Launches Series of Classics Penned by Women. The line, to be called Modern Library Torchbearers, will be published in trade paperback editions, and will feature books by “women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.” (Publishers Weekly)
Awesome Lists
- 9 Free Books To Celebrate World Book Day (list by Book Riot; free books offered by Amazon, on Kindle)
- An Earth Day Reading List for Grownups (Book Riot)
- African American Classics I Wish I’d Read in School (Mya Nunally; Book Riot)
Really Cool / Just for Fun
A mirrored ceiling amplifies the Escher-like effect. Zhongshuge bookstore, Chongqing, China. (source)
Design team creates most astonishing bookstore in Chongqing (Stuff) There are additional photos and a video in the article, so I recommend clicking through. And you can read this article, which also includes photos from some of Zhongshuge’s other amazing bookstores.
Bookish Quote
That’s it for this week!
