In censorship news (a phrase I hated writing, just for the record), The Poet X, the award-winning YA novel by Elizabeth Acevedo, is the subject of a lawsuit. Parents of a North Carolina charter school student have complained that that book, a coming-of-age story about a Latina teenager who finds comfort in poetry as she navigates her rapidly changing world, is “anti-Christian.” The parents have “asked the federal courts to remove the book from their child’s classroom.” In talking about fiction can change and shape our worldviews, Acevedo told the Atlantic in 2019, ” I can tell who reads fiction. […] I can tell which of them have read things that don’t look like them or sound like them or depict who they come from. You know.”
Congratulations to Joanne Hichens! Her book, Death and the After Parties (Karavan Press) is out (well almost). Her memoir of grief, recovery, and “the mainstays of life – friendship, family, and the memories of those we love and lose” releases on November 2! We’re proud to be the US publisher for Joanne’s thriller Divine Justice, which releases in January 2021.
Love comics? Love small presses? Good day for you, then. Here’s a great story at Atlas Obscura about Lion-Muthu Comics, an Indian press made up of “a four-person team translates Italian, French, and English comics into [Tamil], a language spoken by 70 million people.”
The conversation about diversity (or lack of) in publishing continues, but there are some folks committed to doing more than talking. This New York Times article spotlights a few new imprints that are bringing more diverse voices to the page and the reading public. Krishan Trotman, who is leading the new Hachette imprint Legacy Lit, which is focused on books by writers of color, told the Times, “We should not have to wait for a moment in the country like George Floyd to wake everybody up to the fact that there are tons of brown faces missing in the room.”
We’ve all watched as Nigeria activists have protested against police violence. At Zora, Antoinette Isama writes about why we shouldn’t look away and why “the diaspora needs to continue to run parallel and take on the supporting role of amplification, taking to task those living among us who represent the state […] The world must not forget, so we must continue to share resources and accurate accounts of what occurred in this moment. The world still has to learn, so we must revisit Nigeria’s past and reckon how it will inform its future.”
In (much) lighter news, over at McSweeney’s, Frog and Toad rediscover the outside world in Frog and Toad Tentatively Go Outside After Months In Self-Quarantine” by Jennie Egerdie:
“Toad,” said Frog, “I do not understand time anymore.”
“Time means nothing now,” said Toad. “It is just the thing that happens between snacks.”
An interesting read over at JSTOR Daily by Kathleen Rooney on author Frank London Brown, and his novel Trumbull Park, “Brown’s only novel published before his death, dramatizes the courage, dignity, and struggle of middle-class Black families integrating an all-white public housing project on Chicago’s far South Side. Drawing on his family’s own experience of abuse from both white residents and the police supposedly there to protect them, Brown presents a powerful story of white supremacist hatred characterized by riots, death threats, brickbats, and nightly window-breakings and bombings.” Brown is set to be inducted in the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.
And finally, it’s Halloween this weekend, and while I have no idea how trick-or-treating goes down in these modern times, there are always scary movies to watch. At CrimeReads, there’s a list of the “50 Best, Worst, and Strangest Draculas of All-Time, Ranked.” While I’m glad to see that my favorite Dracula (the Count from Sesame Street) has made a more than respectable showing at number eight, I was surprised to see a distinct lack of Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins from everyone’s favorite (only?) supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows.
