Category: News and Editorials
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Graphic Novel Satirizes Chicago Gentrification, and more…
The Novel That Accidentally Predicted the College-Admissions Scandal (Vanity Fair) The Gifted School is a novel set in Donald Trump’s America but not about Trump’s America—or at least not directly. It’s a novel about privilege, economic inequality, racial disparity, but also about ambition, friendship, and family, about the twinned challenges of parenting and growing up in a pressure-cooker environment…
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Queer Literature, Black British Writers, and more…
What happened to Britain’s black avant-garde fiction writers? (Independent) Why did it take me so long to learn of Margaret Busby, who, 40 years after these figures, became the first black woman and youngest publisher in Britain, and whose recent New Daughters of Africa shows black women writers in Britain well before the arrival of the Windrush generation.…
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Privacy in Sci-Fi, Historical Fiction Surging, and more…
Science Fiction’s Preoccupation With Privacy (The Atlantic) Two recent literary science-fiction novels, Pola Oloixarac’s Dark Constellations and Namwali Serpell’s, add the increasingly radical concept of privacy to Le Guin’s list. Oloixarac is Argentine and Serpell is Zambian, and both set their novel in their country of origin, creating post-colonial futures in which surveillance poses disturbing…
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Rewriting History, Robot Writers, and more…
A Horrorshow Find: ‘Clockwork Orange’ Follow-Up Surfaces After Decades Unseen (NPR) So, according to Burgess scholar Andrew Biswell, the novelist got to work on a brief piece, which soon became a big piece, which eventually ballooned to 200 pages. Written under the name The Clockwork Condition, the work was to be a philosophical meditation on…
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Fan-Fiction at the Hugo Awards and more…
In China, science fiction enjoys an efflorescence (The Hindu) Ironically, it is science fiction — a genre that is often dismissed as the plaything of nerds, geeks, and social misfits — that has actively imagined the consequences of technological changes. For the adherents of realism, or ‘serious literature’, science fiction is the literary equivalent of…
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Racism in Romance Fiction and more…
In Defence of Young Adult Fiction (The Boar) The problem with being forced to read classics was that it took away all the enjoyment I found in reading. I could no longer read for pleasure and instead found that everything I was reading was either for my personal statement or related to one of my…
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Black Women Comic Book Writers, Robot Writers, and more…
Comic book sheroes: A look at Chicago’s new wealth of black female comic book talent (Chicago Tribune) As more diverse creators enter the comics pool, more black women are coming into shops and inquiring especially about books written and drawn by other black women. Joshua Kelly, manager of Graham Crackers Comics in the Loop, has…
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YA Fiction with LGBTQ Characters, Women Dominating the Man Booker Prize, and more…
Netflix Adapting Novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ Into New Series (Rolling Stone) In a statement about the project, Garcia noted that their father was “reluctant” to sell the book’s film rights “for decades” “because he believed that it could not be made under the time constraints of a feature film, or that producing it…
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Remembering Andrea Levy, and more…
How 5 Authors Of Color Found Literary Agents Who Understood Their Stories (Bustle) People of color aren’t a monolith, and for industry professionals and authors of color to work well together, they don’t have to come from the same cultural or ethnic backgrounds. It can be tricky for aspiring authors of color to find an…
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Why we need science fiction, and more news…
We Need Diverse Books, But Wattpad’s Machines Aren’t The Way (Forbes) In its announcement of Wattpad Books, Wattpad alluded to its perceived transformative role in the world of publishing when it said that its new division “will introduce diverse, new, and undiscovered voices to book lovers everywhere…. stories that speak to the diversity of Wattpad’s global…
Waking Writer 