Jokes circulated online when, in 2013, Penguin and Random House merged: would the new mega-publisher, which became the world's biggest trade publishing group, be known as Random Penguin? Penguin House? Now, as the prosaically named Penguin Random House's parent company Bertelsmann's $2.17bn acquisition of Simon & Schuster comes under scrutiny in the UK, the jokes are fewer and further between.
Links of the week March 22 2021 (12)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
22 March 2021
Authors have made it abundantly clear that they fear the fallout if the deal goes ahead. When it was first announced last November, the Authors Guild in the US was quick to register its objections. The acquisition, which would bring heavyweight S&S authors including Hillary Clinton, John Irving, Stephen King and Bob Woodward under the PRH umbrella in the US, would "creat[e] a huge imbalance in the US publishing industry", it warned, calling on the US justice department to step in.
The Bologna Children's Book FairThe Bologna Children's Book Fair or La fiera del libro per ragazzi is the leading professional fair for children's books in the world. has confirmed its plans to hold an in-person book fair, June 14-17, and opened registration for exhibitors.
Fair organizers announced in late 2020 that they were moving the fair from its usual April date to June because of the global pandemic. In announcing the decision to move ahead with an in-person event, organizers acknowledged "the general uncertainty that still abounds throughout the world," but added, "We remain optimistic that the vaccination campaigns to be rolled out over the next few months will be decisive in allowing a return to normality."
On March 1, The Guardian reported that Amanda Gorman's Dutch translator, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, had quit. Amanda Gorman, the poet who catapulted onto the world stage after an astounding performance at U.S. President Joe Biden's January inauguration, had approved Rijneveld, an acclaimed Dutch writer, themselves, but the announcement that Rijneveld would translate Gorman's book The Hill We Climb provoked backlash.
Journalist and spoken-word artist Zaire Krieger tweeted, "How salty on a level from one to the Dead Sea am I going to sound when I say that tons of female spoken word artists of color (Babs Gons, Lisette Maneza etc.) could have done this better?" Her post led to a response from Meulenhoff, the book's Dutch publisher. The statement pointed out that both Gorman and Rijneveld were young, celebrated writers and announced that they would employ sensitivity readers for the translation. For many, this last detail implied that Rijneveld, who has never translated a book, was unqualified for the job. In an opinion piece for the Netherlands' national newspaper, de Volkskrant, activist Janice Deul called the choice "incomprehensible." She wondered why Meulenhoff, the publisher, hadn't chosen a translator who was more like Gorman: a "spoken-word artist, young, female and unapologetically Black." She characterized the choice of a white, nonbinary translator as a missed opportunity.
When Yaa Gyasi's book rocketed up the charts after last year's Black Lives Matter protests, she grieved. Treating authors of colour as tools for self-improvement is an impoverished response to centuries of harm
In 2018, two other novelists and I were being driven back from a reception in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, to our hotel in downtown Detroit, when we saw a black man getting arrested on the side of the road. The driver of our car, a white woman who had spent the earlier part of the drive ranting about how Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor, had ruined the city, looked at the lone black man surrounded by police officers with their guns drawn and said: "It's good they've got so many on him. You never know what they'll do."
Judy Blume turned 83 last month. She has sold 1 million books for every year she's been alive. These days she's a retired Jewish woman living in Florida, a breast cancer survivor who spends most of her time at her local bookstore. But her legacies are grand and many-more like an Olympian, or a past president.
Her dozens of novels for children and adults have stood in-in the absence of federal institutions-for a comprehensive national sex education curriculum. Her works have been tasked with holding up freedom of speech-humble paperbacks about training bras as bulwarks against censorship. They've been friends to the lonely.
Judy Blume taught me how to curl my hair, pray to God, and maintain a 24/7 watchdog program for my first period. (I ended up getting it on a toilet in my own house-an anti-climatic event after years spent running drills turning classroom items into menstrual pads.) Her words elevated even the most mundane moments of girlhood to the level of literature.
He was one of the most wildly imaginative writers of any generation but even for Douglas Adams writing could be a torturous process, requiring a "general note to myself" that he would finally get pleasure from it.
"Writing isn't so bad really when you get through the worry. Forget about the worry, just press on. Don't be embarrassed about the bad bits. Don't strain at them," The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author wrote to himself. "Writing can be good. You attack it, don't let it attack you. You can get pleasure out of it. You can certainly do very well for yourself with it!"
The fascinating note will be in a book based on the abundant trove of unseen letters, scripts, jokes, poems, ideas, ID cards and to-do notes in the archive left by Adams after his death in 2001, aged 49.
AdvertisementThe crowdfunded book shines light on his best-known work, including Hitchhiker's and Dirk Gently, as well as unrealised projects such as a dark theme park ride at Chessington World of Adventures.
A number of documents reveal how horrible the writing process could be for Adams, not least the "general note to myself" with which he reminded himself that he would get there in time.
In the fall of 2000-a few months before George W. Bush was elected president and nearly a year before 9/11 irrevocably altered the world I'd grown up knowing-my first novel was released from the great literary maw of the Random House conglomerate with much fanfare, its blue-toned cover splashed across the storefront windows of bookstores throughout the metropolis I called home and, if the rumors were to be believed, across the entirety of our great novel-reading republic.
It was one of the more memorable times in my life. I was in love with the woman I would eventually marry, I was young and in shape and my feeling of invincibility was compounded by a literary success that felt at once sudden and preordained, complete with an eye-popping advance and a veritable chorus of industry hype. It was the culmination of a rags-to-riches story I'd been cultivating for a decade. I was the courageous, iconoclast-child of working-class parents, a kid who'd escaped the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of Long Island housing developments to conquer college, grad school, and now literature itself. The universe didn't mind that I had exaggerated this story's most salient plot-points; it was confirming that I was special, and I moved through the rarified air of my ascendancy with a modesty so perfectly false that it convinced even me.
In February 2020, at a book party in a Brooklyn brownstone, a smiling stranger walked up to me. "We have something in common, you know," she said. "We conceived our children without having sex." My memory of the exchange then goes blank for a moment - I must have spluttered some confused pleasantry in response - but it quickly emerged that she had read my first novel, which explores its protagonist's struggles with infertility, and drawn the conclusion that I myself had undergone I.V.F., as she had.
It was an audacious introduction. But I could not begrudge the assumption she had made, even if I was disoriented by the way she had expressed it. I, too, assume that much of the contemporary fiction I read is autobiographical. Douglas Stuart's "Shuggie Bain," which won the Booker Prize, drew openly on the author's childhood.
A year ago, very few audiobooks listeners would have realised that duvets were a valuable asset for recording audiobooks as well as for listening to them. But the press coverage of the BBC making radio plays in lockdown, with the famous request "Can I have that line again with a bit more duvet, please?", has made rather more listeners aware of the challenges of making good audio recordings outside a studio.
A year ago, very few audiobooks listeners would have realised that duvets were a valuable asset for recording audiobooks as well as for listening to them. But the press coverage of the BBC making radio plays in lockdown, with the famous request "Can I have that line again with a bit more duvet, please?", has made rather more listeners aware of the challenges of making good audio recordings outside a studio.
On this week's episode of Working, June Thomas spoke with actor and award-winning audiobook narrator Abby Craden about her voice work. They discussed the technical aspects that go into recording an audiobook, her creative license in making narration decisions, and the differences between working on fiction and nonfiction projects. This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
June Thomas: Let's talk about the accents, the different tones of voices. I noticed that you do a lot with different pitches, different amounts of gravel, you might say. How do you describe how you do different voices?
Abby Craden: I feel that I am lucky that I have a wide range in my voice. I can go very deep and gravelly, and I can also go high and soft and young, which has offered me the opportunity to do lots of different genres. I've done kids' books, I've done young adult, I've done all sorts of different things.
In this pandemic year, parents have been watching - often anxiously - their children's increasing reliance on screens for every aspect of their education. It can feel as if there's no turning back to the time when learning involved hitting the actual books.
But the format children read in can make a difference in terms of how they absorb information.
Naomi Baron, who is professor emerita of linguistics at American University and author of a new book, "How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen and Audio," said, "there are two components, the physical medium and the mind-set we bring to reading on that medium - and everything else sort of follows from that."
Because we use screens for social purposes and for amusement, we all - adults and children - get used to absorbing online material, much of which was designed to be read quickly and casually, without much effort. And then we tend to use that same approach to on-screen reading with harder material that we need to learn from, to slow down with, to absorb more carefully. A result can be that we don't give that material the right kind of attention.
When Naomi Klein toured North America with her 2019 book about the Green New Deal, she and her assistant liaised with local campaigners from the Sunrise Movement. This youthful climate action group was organised to set up a table at each event, with petitions and actions, so audiences could become activists, right there. When they reached Palo Alto, they discovered that the Sunrise Movement contact they'd been "bossing about" was a 13-year-old, who was organising the whole thing between her classes.
This shock inspired Klein, who began her activism in her 20s with the anti-corporate bible No Logo, to write her first book specifically for young people. How to Change Everything joins a burgeoning library of new books seeking to mobilise a new generation: alongside the iconoclastic Jay Griffiths' Why Rebel, and youthful activist Hendrikus van Hensbergen's How You Can Save the Planet, an excellent down-to-earth handbook for teens and pre-teens.