The link below is to an article that takes a look at a French traveling bookstore.
For more visit:
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/tiny-traveling-french-bookstore
Monthly Archives: September 2019
New Can-Lit ‘indie’ book imprint is anything but
Amine Rock Hoovr /Unsplash
Jody Mason, Carleton University
As a book buyer or reader, you may have recently encountered the new literary imprint Strange Light — a project spun off from the hugely successful digital literary magazine Hazlitt.
Although the fact of its ownership is muted, Hazlitt magazine and the new “indie” Strange Light are both owned by Penguin Random House. Penguin and Random merged in 2013 to become Canada’s largest book publisher and the world’s largest trade book publisher. Seventy-five per cent of the shares of Penguin Random House are owned by Bertelsmann, a German multinational media corporation.
Instead of its corporate identity, the magazine’s mission emphasizes its open, experimental, creator- and reader-driven environment.
“Hazlitt is a home for writers and artists to tell the best stories about the things that matter most to them … Hazlitt is … humane, diverse and committed to stories and writers not heard anywhere else.”
Random House Canada launched Hazlitt as part of its digital strategy in 2012. According to Brad Martin, then president of the company, the goal was to use websites for more than just the traditional purposes of sales and marketing.
In 2012, digital self-publishing ventures such as Amazon Kindle Direct loomed large. As Canadian journalist John Barber noted in an article on Hazlitt in 2012, Random House Canada’s forays into digital publishing constituted an effort to stay relevant — and profitable — at the edge of a “frontier pioneered by innovative outsiders.”
The publishing sector has only grown in size since then, as the previously unthinkable success of startups such as Canada’s Wattpad attests.
Strange Light
This year, Penguin Random House Canada launched the Hazlitt imprint Strange Light, a project dedicated to the work of “unpredictable, innovative authors telling personal and provocative and experimental stories, even — and especially –– those that defy easy categorization.”
Strange Light’s debut title, Sara Peters’s I Become a Delight to My Enemies, mixes poetry and prose. In a literary field utterly dominated by prose fiction — the novel — this is indeed “innovative” and “experimental.”
The embrace of generic diversification at Penguin Random House can only be a good thing. Regarding this embrace, however, we might hold our collective breath.
Strange Light plans to release two memoirs, a work of literary non-fiction, and a novel in 2020. Where is the poetry? The prose poem? The graphic novel?
Book buyers in Canada choose novels over poetry. According to Book Net Canada’s statistics, fiction represented just under 30 per cent of all unit sales of books in Canada in 2016. By contrast, poetry represented less than one percent.
Yet even if it could make Canadians read more poetry and mixed genre work, would Strange Light work to serve the diversification of Canada’s literary field, as its mission statement suggests?
Experimental stories
When thinking about how to introduce experimental stories and diverse points of view to readers in Canada, the primary issue is not one of genre or form. It is also not exclusively a question of publishing writers from a diversity of cultural backgrounds. Both of these factors matter, but they relate to a larger one.
The main issue is a question of ownership. According to the Book Net Canada statistics for 2016, 95 per cent of fiction, non-fiction (including poetry), young adult and juvenile books sold in Canada were published by foreign-owned publishers.
Penguin Random House Canada is the biggest of these, followed by HarperCollins Canada. Together, these two companies dominate literary publishing in Canada. According to investigative journalist Elaine Dewar, Penguin Random House Canada had cornered 32 per cent of the Canadian trade book market in 2016.
We do not have a diverse literary ecosystem in Canada; its diversity has shrunk rapidly in the past two decades. Two recent accounts amply demonstrate a narrowing of Canada’s publishing activity: Rowland Lorimer’s Ultra Libris analyzes the role of cultural policy in this process, while Elaine Dewar’s The Handover, reveals how “The Canadian Publisher” McClelland & Stewart was sold to Random House despite foreign investment rules that should have prevented it.
Resilience of small houses
Since at least the early 1970s and the introduction of the Canada Council’s block grants to Canadian-owned publishers who are actively producing and marketing Canadian books, a modest small-press ecology has managed to survive in this country.
Publishers such as Kentville, Nova Scotia’s Gaspereau Press; Windsor, Ontario’s Biblioasis; and Penticton, British Columbia’s Theytus Books bring Canadians books that would not otherwise see the light of day.
Book Hug Press
Although now fairly well known as Michael Onddatje’s first publisher, Toronto’s Coach House Books might also be remembered for its early forms of experimentation. The house made its mark in 1967 with b.p.nichol’s Journeying & the Returns, a slim volume in a blue and purple cardboard case that also contained assorted objects to be experienced alongside the poems, including a thumb-flip poem the size of a stack of sticky notes.
More recently, Québec’s Mémoire d’encrier offers us the unique poetry of Joséphine Bacon: French and Innu-aimun sit on each twinned page, giving the reader access to a language few in Canada have any opportunity to encounter.
Perhaps there is room for many different kinds of initiatives committed to boundary-pushing books in Canada’s literary field.
I hope that is the case. But do not be fooled: despite its rhetoric of innovation and experimentation, the indie-style imprint Strange Light is brought to us by a company that is already dominating the country’s literary space and that is clearly not indie.
This is one more sign of the desertification of our media ecology, not its diversification.
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Jody Mason, Associate Professor, Department of English, Carleton University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
I wrote a book about email – and found myself pining for the days of letter-writing
MCAD Library/flickr, CC BY
Randy Malamud, Georgia State University
Email has become so prevalent in our lives that I felt compelled to write about it for a Bloomsbury series called “Object Lessons” that examines “the hidden lives of ordinary things.”
Perhaps I chose this topic because I wanted to be surprised by what I would learn. Email had always evoked the image of my energy, attention and intelligence being sucked away, byte by byte, in a deadening tsunami of ill-composed blather, bland formalities and corporate groupthink. But I hoped my literary training could help me unearth some diamonds in the rough, some redeeming rhetorical force.
It turns out my chief discovery was how much richer old-fashioned letters are. An email is like a letter shorn of almost everything people liked about letters: the feel and smell of stationery, the confident authority of letterhead, the art of penmanship, the closing signature in the writer’s hand.
On paper, lives were lived, trysts arranged, manifestos mailed and wars waged; the shift from “communication” to “.com” has stripped away all of this historical and social value.
The satisfaction of a letter ‘done and signed’
Literacy rates jumped globally in tandem with the invention and expansion of mail service. People composed their letters with effort and pride, perhaps understanding that well-written correspondence wouldn’t be thrown in the trash.
The song “Letters,” from Dave Malloy’s 2012 musical “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812,” extols the joy and satisfaction of letter-writing: “We put down in writing what is happening in our minds.” Once it’s on the paper “we feel better – it’s like some kind of clarity when the letter’s done and signed.”
Email is certainly convenient. But will there ever be an electronic equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the literary correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell or the epistolary passion between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok?
Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme
Émile Zola’s “J’Accuse!” was a letter – an open letter – to the French president, castigating the army for unlawfully jailing a Jewish officer. The letter traveled the world, inspiring others who sought to challenge those in power.
Is there such a genre as an “open email”? The only thing that comes to mind is accidentally hitting reply-all.
Letters changed storytelling: In Samuel Richardson’s 1740 epistolary adventure, “Pamela; or, Virture Rewarded,” a 16-year-old servant named Pamela Andrews details her boss’s sexual harassment in letters to her parents. Today it’s considered the first novel.
Letters spread the Gospel, with St. Paul’s Epistles disseminating early Christian teachings to the Corinthians, Romans and Thessalonians; in letters to Penthouse, they channeled erotic desire.
The value letters possess is perhaps reflected in their price.
“This boat is giant in size and fitted up like a palatial hotel,” a man named Alexander Holverson wrote from the Titanic the day before it sank. “If all goes well we will arrive in New York Wednesday AM.” His letter sold for six figures in 2017.
And after President Abraham Lincoln received a petition from children asking him to free the slaves, he responded with a letter: “Please tell these little people I am very glad their young hearts are so full of just and generous sympathy.” It brought in US$3.4 million at a 2008 auction.
Empty, ephemeral email
“There is no standard nowadays of elegant letter writing, as there used to be in our time,” grumbled a woman at the turn of the 20th century. “It is a sort of go-as-you-please development, and the result is atrocious.”
This complaint was prompted not by email but by the growing fad of sending postcards, which were popularized at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition.
Short, informal and comprised of dubiously grammatical prose, postcards, some feared, imperiled epistolary eloquence.
Sound familiar?
Still, email seems particularly reductive. Nearly 300 billion are sent each day, but I wonder if there will ever be a truly valuable email, a famous email or a celebrated email.
Even when a presidential election turned on a collection of home-brew email – tens of thousands from Hillary Clinton’s ignominious private server and another leaked batch from her campaign chair John Podesta – what information did they contain?
In one, senior Clinton Foundation official Peter Huffman writes:
“Question: why do I use a ¼ or ½ cup of stock at a time? Why can’t you just add 1 or 2 cups of stock at a time b/c the arborio rice will eventually absorb it anyway, right?”
Podesta responds (with no time to edit, possibly because he is so busy losing an election):
“Yes it with absorb the liquid, but no that’s not what you want to do. The slower add process and stirring causes the rice to give up it’s starch which gives the risotto it’s creamy consistency.”
Email is ultimately a paltry and often disappointing piece of text – grammatically challenged, disheveled and ephemeral. Often ignored or deleted, it ricochets through cyberspace in search of validation. Dealing with a cluttered inbox is a chore; emails that require a response loom.
It’s surprising how banal email is, given how intricately interwoven it is with our existence. Or maybe it’s not surprising at all. Maybe it’s just the mirror held up to life, and we are precisely as trite as our email suggests.
Randy Malamud, Regents’ Professor of English, Georgia State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
BOOK REVIEW: Brian Toohey’s Secret warns against Australia being ‘joined at the hip’ with US
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Tony Walker, La Trobe University
When journalist Brian Toohey began researching his book Secret: The Makings of Australia’s Security State, he could not have foreseen publication would coincide with real-time overreach by government agencies of their security responsibilities.
Contemporary examples of such overreach include: a raid on a Canberra journalist’s apartment in search of evidence of who might have leaked top-secret information about the government’s surveillance plans; pursuit of a former intelligence officer and his lawyer over revelations Australian agents had bugged presidential offices of Australia’s weakest neighbour; and intrusions into ABC offices to gather evidence of sources of information about alleged Special Air Service war crimes in Afghanistan.
Laws that are antagonistic to journalist inquiry in pursuit of wrongdoing have been hustled through the Australian parliament in the past several years. Toohey writes:
No major party seems bothered by the use of new surveillance technology that allows governments to detect contact between journalists and their sources, effectively denying whistle-blowers the opportunity to reveal abuses of power and criminal behaviour.
If this was simply a matter of constraining journalists’ attempts to expose government secrets, it would be one thing. But it has become an assault more broadly on the public’s right to know about the seamier aspects of government behaviour.
Read more:
Why the raids on Australian media present a clear threat to democracy
Governments have taken advantage of the war on terror to strengthen their ability to suppress unwelcome disclosure. In the process, they have raised the stakes for whistle-blowers whose conscience dictates that activities that skirt – or break – the law should be exposed.
The Labor opposition has baulked at its responsibilities to push back against some of the more expansive powers accorded under the security legislation.
Labor’s weakness is not least a consequence of its worries about being wedged on national security issues. In this regard, governments of the day have taken advantage of legitimate concerns about multiple security threats.
All this is well described in Toohey’s sprawling account of the history of the Australian security state. It stretches from the early fumbling days of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), whose activities would not have been out of place in the Keystone Cops.
Read more:
To protect press freedom, we need more public outrage – and an overhaul of our laws
Based on a lifetime of reporting for various publications, including The Australian Financial Review and the National Times, Toohey provides behind-the-scenes snapshots of the Central Intelligence Agency’s anxieties about threats posed by the Whitlam government to American spy stations on Australian soil. He also examines the role of senior public servants in manipulating governments of the day and intelligence blunders that led to the Iraq war.
The list is long, and reflects poorly on the individuals and agencies involved.
Media organisations have realised too late the threats the new security legislation poses to journalistic inquiry. Proprietors and the industry itself, for that matter, have underestimated the determination of government to pursue journalists and whistleblowers under both existing statutes and the new legislation.
In the absence of explicit freedom of speech protections in the Constitution, Australian journalists find themselves at the mercy of a vastly expanded security state.
No government, Labor or conservative, is likely to reverse course.
The June 2018 Espionage Act is one case of Orwellian overreach. It makes it an offence to receive
information of any kind, whether true or false and whether in a material form or not, and includes (a) an opinion; and (b) a report of a conversation.
How this provision made its way through a democratically-elected legislature is confounding.
Apart from a description about threats posed to reasonable disclosure of information about government activities in the public interest, the rub of Toohey’s book lies in its telling of the sort of relationship that has evolved between Australia and its security guarantor.
This will be regarded by readers and critics as the most controversial element of Secret. Not everyone will agree with the author’s observations about risks to Australian sovereignty posed by its security relationship with the United States allied with a potentially damaging antagonism towards China in the national security establishment.
But his arguments are well made and deserve attention. This is especially so in view of our involvement in Iraq 2003, where the principal justification post facto has been that Australia needed to continue making regular down-payments on its security arrangements with the United States.
This is what Toohey describes as Australia being “chained to the chariot wheels of the Pentagon”. He writes:
The British monarchy has no say in Australian government decisions. It’s a different story with the head of the American Republic. A US president presides over a military-industrial complex with a huge say in whether the Australian government goes to war, buy particular weapons, host US-run military intelligence bases and ban trade with certain countries. The upshot is that Australia has now surrendered much of its sovereignty to the US.
In this context, Toohey quotes an off-key contribution to the debate about the power of a military-industrial complex. In 2016, former Australian ambassador in Washington, Kim Beazley, in his capacity as a board member in Australia of Lockheed Martin, gave a speech in which he described himself as a member of a “benign deep state” where the real power is “a military/intelligence phalanx”.
Read more:
The shaky case for prosecuting Witness K and his lawyer in the Timor-Leste spying scandal
It is not clear whether he was joking, but the fact is he has long associated himself with an uncompromising pro-American viewpoint.
Beazley, now governor of Western Australia, remains influential in Labor security policy-making.
Toohey’s concluding chapters offer some fairly pungent criticism of Australia’s national security establishment. It refuses, he says, to welcome China’s rise. Instead, it agitates for an increased US military presence in the region, it advocates a confrontational approach to Beijing and a strategy aimed at damaging the Chinese economy, never mind that this will have negative consequences for Australia itself.
At the same time, it lobbies for an ever-closer security relationship with the US summed up by Malcolm Turnbull in 2017 in which he said Australia is militarily “joined at the hip to the US”.
Toohey argues that rather than being “joined the hip”, Australia has more scope for individual initiative, and, in extreme circumstances, the capacity to deter and defend itself.
This book is the work of a contrarian. It should be read.
Tony Walker, Adjunct Professor, School of Communications, La Trobe University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Review: The Testaments – Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale
Sophie Giraud/Channel 4
Susan Watkins, Leeds Beckett University
SPOILER ALERT: This review contains plotlines and details from Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Testaments
When Margaret Atwood was writing The Handmaid’s Tale in 1984, she felt that the main premise seemed “fairly outrageous”. She wondered: “Would I be able to persuade readers that the United States had suffered a coup that had transformed an erstwhile liberal democracy into a literal-minded theocratic dictatorship?”
How times have changed. The connection the novel makes between totalitarianism, reproduction and control of women is now legible to most of us. The image of the red-and-white-clad handmaid has become a symbol in the wider culture of resistance to the restriction of women’s reproductive rights and to their sexual exploitation.
Read more:
Why women are dressing up as Margaret Atwood’s Handmaids
Partly this is a consequence of the immensely successful TV series, the third series of which has just concluded. Series one was directly based on Atwood’s novel and subsequent episodes over two years have continued the story of Offred beyond the ambivalent ending Atwood imagined for her, in which her fate is uncertain. Now, in her eagerly awaited sequel, The Testaments, Atwood makes a series of dizzying creative decisions which move away from, but also develop out of, both novel and TV series.
Next generation
The action of The Testaments takes place 15 years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale. The claustrophobic first-person narration of Offred is widened out to incorporate the stories of three narrators. These narrators are Aunt Lydia – the most senior of the Aunts in the first novel, who trains and manages the handmaids on behalf of the Gilead regime – and two young women.
It is in the identity of these young women that Atwood incorporates elements of the TV series. We discover that both are Offred’s daughters. One, Agnes, is the daughter she was forced to give up when she became a handmaid. The other, Nicole, is the baby she is pregnant with at the end of the novel and gives birth to in the second series of the TV programme.
Agnes has been brought up as a privileged daughter of the Gilead regime; Nicole – and the name choice here, as well as aspects of the story, draw on the TV series – has been smuggled out of Gilead by the May Day organisation and raised in Canada.
The inventiveness of this choice of narrators, plus the time shift, allows Atwood to do all sorts of exciting things. She explores what it actually means to be a mother. The Gilead regime has to keep records of bloodlines to avoid the genetic conditions attendant on incestuous couplings. Genealogical information is kept by the Aunts in folders organised by the male head of the family, but paternity will always be more uncertain than maternity. We never find out for sure who Nicole’s father is, although there are hints.
More broadly, though, can the same uncertainty be attached to the mother figure too? As one of the Marthas (the domestic servant class in Gilead) says to Agnes when she finds out that the person she believed to be her mother was not her birth mother: “It depends what you mean by a mother … Is your mother the one who gives birth to you or the one who loves you the most?” How do we define a mother when conventional family structures have been upended?
Making a difference
The interplay between the three women’s stories also allows us to compare how individuals make decisions about what constitutes ethical behaviour in a totalitarian regime. In the world of The Testaments, unlike in The Handmaid’s Tale, later period Gilead is on its uppers. It struggles to control its leaky borders and there is internecine in-fighting and betrayal within the upper echelons of the Commanders.
Sophie Giraud/Channel 4
Unbabies – defective births – continue to be born and the resistance is growing. Lydia begins to plot Gilead’s downfall, but in retrospect we also get her account of her earlier collaboration as the regime was established. Do her attempts to destroy Gilead cancel out her previous decision to collaborate? If she had not survived, she would not have been alive to work to bring down the regime, but can the master’s tools ever dismantle the master’s house?
Casualties of the resistance efforts abound. Becka – a friend of Agnes and a survivor of child sexual abuse – sacrifices herself for the greater good of what she believes to be the purification and renewal (rather than the destruction) of Gilead. Nicole (who engages in an undercover operation in Gilead vital to the resistance) remarks that she “somehow agreed to go to Gilead without ever definitely agreeing”. The novel asks readers to think about the extent to which exploitation of idealism and naivety are appropriate as means that justify the end of Gilead’s potential destruction.
Judgement of history
The Testaments ends with the Thirteenth Symposium of Gilead Studies – an academic conference taking place many years after the regime’s destruction. This is the same framing that concludes The Handmaid’s Tale, although the emphasis here is different. In her book, In Other Worlds, Atwood claims that the afterword to the first novel was intended to provide “a little utopia concealed in the dystopic Handmaid’s Tale”.
But, for most readers of the original novel, the effect of encountering the afterword is the opposite of optimistic. Reading it diminishes and undermines our emotional investment in Offred’s narrative, as historians debate whether or not her story is “authentic” and a professor warns us that “we must be cautious about passing moral judgement on the Gileadeans”.
Jasper Savage/Channel 4
The same historians make similar comments in the Thirteenth Symposium that ends The Testaments, but here they are fundamentally convinced of the witness transcripts’ authenticity. The postmodern uncertainty about the status of Offred’s narrative in The Handmaid’s Tale could be seen as characteristic of the mid-1980s (with its suspicion of narrative authenticity and reliability), as characterised by Jean-Francois Lyotard’s “incredulity towards metanarratives”.
Now, in 2019, Atwood replaces that incredulity with a much clearer sense of the validity of women’s stories. I believe we can relate this change of emphasis to the different times we find ourselves in – where the notion of the equal status of all versions of the past and indeed the present has been abused explicitly by Trump and others who make accusations of “fake news”.
Read more:
How The Handmaid’s Tale is being transformed from fantasy into fact
In Gilead, women are not allowed to read or write – unless they are Aunts. Agnes therefore struggles to become literate as a young woman. The description of her slow and painful acquisition of literacy reminds us of the vital connection between words and power and how important it is to validate women’s words in particular. A testament is a witness after all.
Susan Watkins, Professor in the School of Cultural Studies and Humanities and Director of the Centre for Culture and the Arts., Leeds Beckett University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
One skill that doesn’t deteriorate with age
AJP/Shutterstock.com
Roger J. Kreuz, University of Memphis
When Toni Morrison died on Aug. 5, the world lost one of its most influential literary voices.
But Morrison wasn’t a literary wunderkind. “The Bluest Eye,” Morrison’s first novel, wasn’t published until she was 39. And her last, “God Help the Child,” appeared when she was 84. Morrison published four novels, four children’s books, many essays and other works of nonfiction after the age of 70.
Morrison isn’t unique in this regard. Numerous writers produce significant work well into their 70s, 80s and even their 90s. Herman Wouk, for example, was 97 when he published his final novel, “The Lawgiver.”
Such literary feats underscore an important point: Age doesn’t seem to diminish our capacity to speak, write and learn new vocabulary. Our eyesight may dim and our recall may falter, but, by comparison, our ability to produce and to comprehend language is well preserved into older adulthood.
In our forthcoming book, “Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging,” my co-author, Richard M. Roberts, and I highlight some of the latest research that has emerged on language and aging. For those who might fear the loss of their language abilities as they grow older, there’s plenty of good news to report.
Language mastery is a lifelong journey
Some aspects of our language abilities, such as our knowledge of word meanings, actually improve during middle and late adulthood.
One study, for example, found that older adults living in a retirement community near Chicago had an average vocabulary size of over 21,000 words. The researchers also studied a sample of college students and found that their average vocabularies included only about 16,000 words.
In another study, older adult speakers of Hebrew – with an average age of 75 – performed better than younger and middle-aged participants on discerning the meaning of words.
On the other hand, our language abilities sometimes function as a canary in the cognitive coal mine: They can be a sign of future mental impairment decades before such issues manifest themselves.
In 1996, epidemiologist David Snowdon and a team of researchers studied the writing samples of women who had become nuns. They found that the grammatical complexity of essays written by the nuns when they joined their religious order could predict which sisters would develop dementia several decades later. (Hundreds of nuns have donated their brains to science, and this allows for a conclusive diagnosis of dementia.)
While Toni Morrison’s writing remained searingly clear and focused as she aged, other authors have not been as fortunate. The prose in Iris Murdoch’s final novel, “Jackson’s Dilemma,” suggests some degree of cognitive impairment. Indeed, she died from dementia-related causes four years after its publication.
AP Photo/Michel Euler
Don’t put down that book
Our ability to read and write can be preserved well into older adulthood. Making use of these abilities is important, because reading and writing seem to prevent cognitive decline.
Keeping a journal, for example, has been shown to substantially reduce the risk of developing various forms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.
Reading fiction, meanwhile, has been associated with a longer lifespan. A large-scale study conducted by the Yale University School of Public Health found that people who read books for at least 30 minutes a day lived, on average, nearly two years longer than nonreaders. This effect persisted even after controlling for factors like gender, education and health. The researchers suggest that the imaginative work of constructing a fictional universe in our heads helps grease our cognitive wheels.
Language is a constant companion during our life journey, so perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s interwoven into our health and our longevity. And researchers continue to make discoveries about the connections between language and aging. For example, a study published in July 2019 found that studying a foreign language in older adulthood improves overall cognitive functioning.
A thread seems to run through most of the findings: In order to age well, it helps to keep writing, reading and talking.
While few of us possess the gifts of a Toni Morrison, all of us stand to gain by continuing to flex our literary muscles.
Richard M. Roberts, a U.S. diplomat currently serving as the Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Consulate General in Okinawa, Japan, is a contributing author of this article.
Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging 
Roger J. Kreuz, Associate Dean, College of Arts & Sciences, University of Memphis
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Not My Review: The Blood of Stars (Book 1) – Spin the Dawn by Elizabeth Lim
Taking a Break
Hi all – just a quick note for those who are alert and have noticed a lack of posts recently. I am taking a short break to try and ensure continued good health and head off a possible decline (there have been a few recent signs) in it. So currently I need to get a lot of good sleep and rest, so a short break is in order. I do feel I am improving, so the break shouldn’t be too long. See you soon (which isn’t really correctly – Hopefully I’ll be posting again soon).
Writing in Books
The link below is to an article that takes a look at when it is OK to write in books.
For more visit:
https://bookriot.com/2019/08/18/writing-on-books-is-okay/
2019 CBCA Book of the Year Winners
The link below is to an article reporting on the winners of the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year for 2019.
For more visit:
https://www.booktopia.com.au/blog/2019/08/16/the-2019-cbca-book-of-the-year-winners-are-here/
At the BookShelf 
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