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
- Elliot’s acquisition of troubled retailer Barnes & Noble was finalized on Aug. 7, 2019. Elliot is the same hedge fund that owns the bookstore chain Waterstones in the UK. B&N will operate separately from Waterstones, but the two will share a CEO: James Daunt, currently the CEO of Waterstones. (Yahoo Finance)
Literary Losses
Toni Morrison, beloved author—and author of Beloved—died Monday, Aug. 5, at the age of 88. Morrison wrote powerfully and movingly about the African American experience, and her books were lauded by critics and readers alike. She was one of the few women and the only African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In 2012, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama.
Obituaries & tributes: The Guardian; Los Angeles Times; NPR; Vulture
Bibliography & Biography: Goodreads; Wikipedia
David Bevington, one of the preeminent Shakespeare scholars of the 20th century, died Aug. 2, 2019, at the age of 88. If you studied Shakespeare in college or graduate school anywhere in the U.S. in the last 40 or 50 years, your textbook may have been The Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by Bevington, currently in its 7th edition. (I still have my copy of the 3rd edition, used for two college courses in the early 1980s.) Bevington attended Harvard for both his undergraduate and graduate work, then taught at the University of Virginia for six years before accepting a position at the University of Chicago in 1967, where he remained until he retired. In addition to editing Shakespeare’s works, Prof. Bevington wrote prolifically on Shakespeare’s plays, English Tudor and Renaissance drama, medieval drama, and dramatists of those periods.
Obituaries & tributes: UChicago News
Bibliography & Biography: Goodreads; Wikipedia
That’s it for this week!
Rita @ View From the Books
Though I download e-books for my Kindles as I gave up on my Nook years ago, I love the experience of wandering through a bricks and mortar book store. I just wish B & N had less gifts in the stores, and more titles, but I guess that’s how they make good money, on impulse purchases.
RO
So sad of the loss of 2 such talented writers. May they both RIP.