Today, twelve writers, historians, educators and activists received their 2021 National Humanities Medals from President Biden at the White House, in conjunction with the twelve 2021 National Medals of Arts recipients. The awards were delayed to the pandemic.
Writers awarded include
Ann Napolitano toiled in obscurity for years. Novels went unpublished; agents turned her down. She found recognition with "Dear Edward." Then came the call: "Hello Beautiful" was the 100th pick for what is arguably the most influential book club in the world.
Maybe it was fate, maybe it was the meddling of a higher power with a wicked sense of humor. Either way, Ann Napolitano was taking out the garbage when Oprah Winfrey called to tell her that her novel, Hello Beautiful, is the 100th selection for what is arguably the most influential book club in the world.
Napolitano was so afraid of losing the connection that she stood stock-still in the tiny vestibule of her Park Slope apartment building, clutching her bag of trash, for the duration of the 27-minute call.
To be clear, we're talking about Oprah's Book Club — the O.G. reading group, trusty launching pad to the best-seller list and sourdough starter for dozens of iterations, celebrity sponsored and otherwise. Yes, Booktok is nipping at Winfrey's heels, especially where young readers are concerned, but her endorsement is still a golden ticket.
Nobel literature laureate Kenzaburo Oe, whose darkly poetic novels were built from his childhood memories during Japan's postwar occupation and from being the parent of a disabled son, has died. He was 88.
Oe, who was also an outspoken anti-nuclear and peace activist, died on March 3, his publisher, Kodansha Ltd., said in a statement Monday. The publisher did not give further details about his death and said his funeral was held by his family.
Oe in 1994 became the second Japanese author awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
The Swedish Academy cited the author for his works of fiction, in which "poetic force creates an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today."
People who handle rare books for a living are used to doing battle with a range of dastardly scourges, including red rot, beetles and thieves. But there is one foe that drives many of them particularly crazy: the general public's unshakable — and often vehemently expressed — belief that old books should be handled with Mickey Mouse-style white cotton gloves.
Gloves reduce your sense of touch, increasing the likelihood that you might accidentally tear a page, smear pigments, dislodge loose fragments — or worse, drop the book.
And whatever their associations with cleanliness, cotton gloves attract dirt. They also tend to make hands sweat, generating moisture that can damage a page. Rubber gloves, while moisture-proof and generally better fitted to the hand, are too grabby.
While there are some exceptions, librarians overwhelmingly agree the best way to handle a rare book is with clean hands and caution.
There are exceptions to the bare-hands rule. Books including some kinds of photographic materials are best handled with gloves (the Library of Congress recommends "clean nitrile gloves"). The same goes for books made from ivory or encased in metal bindings, or certain kinds of cloth.
And then there are poison books. In the 16th and 17th century, budget-minded bookbinders sometimes recycled cheap manuscript waste paper as a binding, coating it with arsenic-laced green paint to mimic leather. And in the Victorian period, some publishers used binding cloth dyed with colors like Scheele's green, an industrially produced hue also containing arsenic. But, according to experts, so long as you don't lick the book you will be fine.
People learn to talk simply through listening — to our parents talking to us and to each other, to the TV talking to the ether, to strangers on the street. But that's not how people learn to read. People need to be taught to read. And the trouble is, educators, parents and politicians can't seem to agree on the best way to do that.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) submitted a bill to his state's legislature this year that would command all Tennessee school districts to rely on phonics for reading in kindergarten through third grade. More than 30 states and D.C. have taken this approach, instituting various degrees of phonics instruction on their turf. Yet teachers unions in many places have been resistant, and some politicians are on their side.
The so-called reading wars have been raging for decades now, sometimes pitting teachers against publishers or publishers against academicians — and also sometimes, as too many things do these days, pitting progressives against conservatives or Democrats against Republicans. That's unfortunate, because — as perhaps too few things do these days — the debate over how best to teach children to read lends itself to a conclusive answer. That's phonics...
The US Postal Service is honoring the late author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison with her own Forever stamp.
"It's a privilege to represent the 650,000 men and women of the Postal Service, as we honor Toni Morrison with one more tribute — our new stamp that will be seen by millions and forever remind us of the power of her words and the ideas she brought to the world," Pritha Mehra, USPS chief information officer and executive vice president, said in a statement.
Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has joined a rising chorus of condemnation against a proposed Florida bill that seeks to muzzle intellectual freedom in colleges and universities.
House Bill 999 is a sly hodgepodge of contradictory dictums designed to bleach the study of American history and deny the persistence of racism. "General education core courses may not suppress or distort significant historical events," the bill states, pleasantly enough. But then it also mandates that these courses may not "include a curriculum that teaches identity politics, such as Critical Race Theory, or defines American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence."
... "America's greatness stems not from its suppression of our complicated history but our willingness to engage and understand it," Burns wrote. "Each generation has helped further bring to life the values articulated in the Declaration and made more perfect in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Our contribution should not be to silence those trying to understand the past more fully."
Christopher Fowler has died at the age of 69, having been diagnosed with cancer three years ago.
Fowler was best known for his Bryant & May thrillers, featuring the veteran detectives solving unusual crimes in London from the second world war to the present day. The series began with Full Dark House in 2003, and 17 more novels followed, most recently London Bridge Is Falling Down, published in 2021. A further book exploring the London of the characters, Bryant & May's Peculiar London, came out last year.
Fowler's death was announced late on Thursday by his husband, Pete, who posted on the writer's Twitter account:
"Christopher Robert Fowler, 3 score & 10, 1953-2023. His sparkle, joy and humour are gone, but remain in my heart and his work. What a remarkable person we all shared. Goodbye to a beautiful man, a beautiful mind, my partner in crime and soulmate."
"What was once an occasional distraction and disruption has increasingly become a daily occurrence," said Ray Daniels, the American Booksellers Association (ABA) chief communications officer, at the outset of the Winter Institute session "Book Banning: Stores, Authors and Communities: What Can We Do?" He went on describe how book bans affect bookstores, authors and communities, with challenges in stores turning into the quiet censorship of books turned spine-out, harassment of staff, social troubles and more. He then asked the panelists how they've addressed this issue in their own communities.
Writing in The Millions, Timothy Walsh explores the diversity of Ukrainian literature from Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad and Nicolai Gogol to Isaac Babel, Sholem Aleichem, Mikhail Bulgakov and Vasily Grossman; and then to the modern day:
When Russia invaded Ukraine one year ago, the region of Sumy, just northeast of Kyiv, came under intense bombardment, endangering the house where Anton Chekhov spent two halcyon summers working on his play The Wood Demon, as well as several short stories. The house had been turned into a museum in 1960 and contained many irreplaceable artifacts, including Chekhov's medical instruments and a portrait of Chekhov painted by his brother Nikolay...