Round-Up: Book Marks, PEN International, and BookCon 2016

From LitHub’s new service to updates on the upcoming BookCon, here’s the latest in literary news:

• Literary Hub has just announced the release of a new service, Book Marks, which is described as a “Rotten Tomatoes for books.” For each book, the site will take aggregate reviews from over seventy sources and then assign the book an overall letter grade. The site hopes to provide readers with a resource to discover books and the literary discourse surrounding new titles. Literary Hub Publisher Andy Hunter hopes that Book Marks “will help readers discover books, while spotlighting books that deserve more attention.” 

• This week, prominent writers again teamed up with PEN International to intervene in the financial crisis facing the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The authors penned an open letter addressing the issue and demanding that funding be delivered to the IACHR by June 15. If the organization does not receive funding, it has started that it will be forced to fire about forty percent of its employees. The IACHR has been tasked with promoting and protecting human rights, especially the freedom of speech. The letter outlines the ways that the organization has “[kept] the world informed about freedom of expression and press freedom abuses and advances.” The signatories include Margaret Atwood, Ariel Doorman, and Francisco Goldman.

• Literary fan event BookCon will now be held in conjunction with New York ComicCon. Though the two will be held in separate event spaces, access to BookCon will be included with access to ComicCon, and if a fan wishes to attend BookCon, they must now do so with the purchase of an in-demand New York ComicCon ticket. BookCon organizer Lance Fensterman sees the combination of New York ComicCon and BookCon as being “for the betterment of our fans and publishing customers.” BookCon will take place from October 6 to October 9.