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Roald Dahl’s estate, the National Literacy Trust, and McDonald’s have teamed up in a smart, new installment of the fast food franchise’s recent UK literacy initiative, Happy Readers. Fourteen-million Roald Dahl books have been created specifically for the project, featuring excerpts from some of the author’s classics, and will be distributed with Happy Meals in…
Elizabeth Koch recently conceived of a promising new literary venture, Catapult, that launched yesterday. Jennifer Kovitz, the publisher’s publicity and marketing director, said that “Catapult is dedicated to spotlighting extraordinary narratives (as fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and graphic/illustrated projects) and we intend for Catapult to be an inclusive community for writers at all stages of their careers.” Kovitz…
Chemist Teri Dankovich recently created a life-saving tool in the form of a book with perforated pages that filter water. The book, simply called The Drinkable Book, “acts to both educate the user and purify their drinking water.” It is a low-cost, portable, and reliable alternative to other water purification systems and methods, and though it…
Adam Johnson, the author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Orphan Master’s Son, has a new story collection, Fortunes Smiles, out today. The collection, which includes six stories, was recently reviewed, with high praise, by Lauren Groff for The New York Times. Each of the stories in the collection have appeared in esteemed journals such as Tin House, except one. In…
Last Tuesday, highly regarded University of Akron Press announced on social media it was closing its doors, its employees having received “pink slips.” This was an effort on the part of the university–specifically UA President Scarborough and the board of trustees–to eliminate a significant portion of its debt, which currently stands at an alleged sixty million dollars. A few…
Discussion surrounding the recent release of Harper Lee’s purported To Kill a Mockingbird prequel–or draft, or sequel–Go Set a Watchman has dominated the literary community for the past several weeks. Just about every article on Watchman touches on the question of either whether Lee consented to having the long stowed-away manuscript released. At The New York Times, Randall Kennedy…
In what Alexandra Alter at The New York Times calls an “unusual experiment,” Stephen King has released a short story, “Drunken Fireworks,” which is forthcoming in his collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. The collection is slated for a November 2015 release, making this a months-advance sneak peek at the eagerly anticipated work. In the…
At The New York Times, Associate Press writer Michael Biesecker discusses North Carolina third-grade teacher Omar Currie’s decision to read a gay fable called King & King to his class at Efland-Cheeks Elementary in Efland, North Carolina. Currie was compelled to read the story, written by Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland, aloud after one…
BookExpo America 2015 (BEA), one of the leading book conferences internationally and held this year in New York, was recently host to a five-hundred-person delegation from the Chinese government, representing one-hundred publishing houses–attendance that BookExpo has described as “unprecedented” and which covered over twenty-thousand square feet of convention space. On the steps of the New York Public…
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