Says a statement from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “In Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio’s father Samuel, now divorced, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train leads to a relationship that changes Sami’s life definitively. Elio soon moves to Paris where he too has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a professor in northern New England with sons who are nearly grown, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return visit to Europe.” – Vulture
Category: words
Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Can Be, In A Way, Utopian
“The apocalypse can facilitate a different kind of social world,” says scholar Caroline Edwards. “That might seem horrifying to the protagonists, but the writer is posing a serious question: might this new world be better?” Sumit Paul-Choudhury digs into this idea. – BBC
NY’s Antiquarian Book Fair: A Marketplace Of Fascinating Stories
For people with modest bank accounts, a tour of the fair amounts to a trip to an exhibit or museum, with dealers happily telling the often fascinating stories behind their wares, even if a potential sale is nowhere in sight. The 59th edition of the fair took place March 7 to 10 at the Park Avenue Armory. – The New York Times
The Hard-Working Little Publisher Keeping Local History Books Alive
“Arcadia’s business turns the traditional publishing model on its head. Big New York publishers are looking for the next blockbuster to sell 2 million copies across the English-speaking world in a month. Arcadia wants to find a book that will sell 1,000 copies this year in, say, McMullen Valley, Ariz.” Says the company’s CEO, “The books are completely evergreen. Once you publish them, they sell forever. So even though the initial numbers are modest, you’re creating a kind of annuity.” – The Washington Post
Novelist Writes New Narnia Book With Out C.S. Lewis Estate’s Permission
Francis Spufford, who won a Costa Book Award and an Ondaatje Prize for his 2016 book Golden Hill, has spent 3½ years working on a Narnia prequel he’s titled The Stone Table. “After finishing the novel, Spufford made a ‘tentative’ approach to ask the Lewis estate if they might agree to publication, but did not receive a reply. Eventually he printed up 75 copies and started giving them to friends” — who are praising it to the skies. – The Guardian
How The Internet Is Changing How We Preserve Endangered Languages
Across the world, language revitalization movements are attempting to reverse language loss. While levels of institutional support and overall strategies differ, the goal is the same. Language is more than a way to communicate basic information, it expresses culture and identity: it’s used to explain the surrounding world, to sing songs, to worship, and to pass on stories. Languages are a link that bond people in a community to each another and to their shared past. – The Outline
Against The Bad Sex In Fiction Awards
Catherine Brown: “At the risk of taking too-seriously an award of which the keynote is not seriousness, there are several problems involved in this that are worth considering. One is the implicit hypocrisy that the award has brought great publicity to its parent magazine because of the very fact – which the award ostensibly disparages – that sex sells.” – IAI News
Was Shakespeare Really Queer? The Sonnets Are Pretty Clear
Sandra Newman looks at the 126 Shakespeare sonnets (out of a total of 154) addressed to the Fair Youth, at other sonnets and love poetry of the time and place, and at what Shakespeare’s contemporaries said and wrote about male-male sex and love (especially in the theatre). Then she applies Occam’s Razor. – Aeon
When Culture Is At The End Of An Algorithm, We Lose The Juice Of Engaging With It
Christian Lorentzen: “The new books coverage is more like litter. Endless lists of recommendations blight the landscape with superlatives that are hard to believe, especially, as is inevitable, when they aren’t drawn from the work of critics but compiled by poorly paid writers who haven’t read the books they’re recommending, a standard practice in preview lists. Proliferating recommendations become what Elizabeth Hardwick called ‘a hidden dissuader, gently, blandly, respectfully denying whatever vivacious interest there might be in books or in literary matters generally.’ Readers are better served by the algorithm, which never pretends to have an actual opinion.” – Harper’s
This Presidential Candidate Liked An Author, So He Learned Norwegian In Order To Read The Untranslated Books
Go read the entire (short) story that the booksternet (Liternet?) is flipping out about. – Twitter