Racial and wealth disparities in the United States have been thrown into sharp relief by the COVID-19 pandemic and racial unrest throughout 2020. We see more clearly than ever just how often Black business owners and creatives have been thought of as less than their Caucasian counterparts – and Black...
The summer of 2020 was a dud when it came to barbecues, vacations, family reunions, pedicures and swiping a lick from someone else’s ice cream cone. But there was one mainstay Covid couldn’t wreck: reading. For me, those empty, quiet nights were a reminder of the boredom that pushed me...
read more about Did the Pandemic Change Summer Reading for Good? I Hope So.
Tomorrow, we celebrate the 174th birthday of Joseph Pulitzer, now most well-known for establishing the Pulitzer Prizes with his endowment to Columbia University. But in his time, he was an elected Democratic congressman from New York fighting corruption, and the publisher of the New York World newspaper—a job so stressful he invented...
read more about Look inside the only surviving copy of Joseph Pulitzer’s secret code book.
How did I miss this?! NASA’s Perseverance rover has touched down on Mars—and NASA has named its landing site after Octavia Butler. “Octavia E. Butler Landing” is located in Jezero Crater, just north of Mars’s equator. Once flooded with water, Jezero was home to an ancient river delta, which makes it...
Sister Souljah, the author of The Coldest Winter Ever, a formative work of “street lit,” returns with a sequel after 22 years.
From the first pages of Sister Souljah’s 1999 debut novel, The Coldest Winter Ever, the teenage protagonist declares that she’s been a style icon since birth. “The same night I....
The period leading up to Ernest Hemingway’s 1954 Nobel Prize win was a pretty nightmarish one for Papa. Debilitating health problems (migraines, high blood pressure, liver disease, diabetes), near-fatal accidents (two plane crashes in as many days while vacationing in Africa in ’54 were severe enough that Hemingway spent the...
read more about Back in 1986, the Castros helped retrieve Hemingway’s stolen Nobel Prize.
Virginia Woolf laid out her views pretty clearly in A Room of One’s Own, the book-length essay based on the lectures on Women and Fiction that she gave at two colleges in 1928: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” She could...
read more about Rooms of Their Own: Where Some of the Best Women Writers Created Art
Waterstones has told staff that furloughed workers will not receive any increase to their wages until shops can reopen, after a petition was launched calling on the book chain to help workers who are being paid below minimum wage on the scheme.
Here’s some surprising end-of-2020 good news: books are doing . . . well? According to NPD BookScan, unit sales of print books in the United States rose 8.2% in 2020. Units hit 750.9 million this year—57.2 million up from last year. This is fairly surprising, given the pandemic was expected to...
Bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey, a leader in contemporary black literature, has died at age 59.
"It is with great sadness that we confirm that beloved New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey passed away on Sunday, 3 January, in Los Angeles after battling a long illness,” a rep for Dutton, an imprint...
read more about Eric Jerome Dickey, bestselling author, dies aged 59
Michael Ray FitzGerald, a chronicler of North Florida's music legacy, has been getting some good reactions to his new book, "Jacksonville and the Roots of Southern Rock," which he says is looking as if it's heading toward a second printing from the University Press of Florida.
...read more about 'Book explores Jacksonville's influence on Southern rock'
I’ve long held to the completely unsupported notion that a protagonist is simpler to write than a truly memorable supporting character. Sometimes just a silhouette — created with a few slashes of the pen, a few charismatic adjectives — seems the more unlikely accomplishment, born out of some surplus wit...
read more about Nearly a Century Later, We’re Still Reading — and Changing Our Minds About — Gatsby
Almost 300 letters, mostly unpublished, from the influential feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir to the French novelist Violette Leduc, including The Second Sex author’s rejection of her friend’s romantic advances, have sold for €56,700 (£51,500).
read more about Simone de Beauvoir's 'remarkable' letters to Violette Leduc sold at auction
"So many books have been published on Trump, Trumpism, and the flurry of issues surrounding his time in office, you could never possibly make a dent in them. Unless you’re Carlos Lozada, Washington Post book critic, who read and wrote about 150 of them for his own book, What Were We Thinking: A Brief...
read more about The Best Books About the Trump Era, According to the Critic Who Read 150
" “NICE ONE … but where is the magical realism?” commented a friend, after reading one of my stories. A joke, yes, but there was also an element of blunt sincerity to his words — it isn’t rare for me to bump face-first into the expectation that I deploy the magical...
read more about What We Talk About When We Talk About Magical Realism
Some 200 “culturally significant” books including works by Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton and Goya that were stolen in a west London heist have been found buried underground in Romania.
The books were swiped in January 2017 during a burglary in Feltham, which saw thieves cut holes in the roof of...
A wave of deaths and retirements prompted publishers to name new leaders. Now the industry is in a rare moment of transformation that promises to influence the books put out into the world.
read more about In Publishing, ‘Everything Is Up for Change’
Already this year’s recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Orwell Prize for political fiction, Whitehead is now being honored by the Library of Congress. On Monday, it announced that he had won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
...
read more about Library of Congress to Honor Author Colson Whitehead
Dana Canedy has been named senior vice-president and publisher of Simon & Schuster’s namesake imprint, one of the biggest jobs in the industry, according to the New York Times. She is the third woman and first Black person to hold the role.
read more about Dana Canedy to Be First Black Publisher of Simon & Schuster
There are a lot of anti-racism reading lists floating around the internet, and there are a lot of people interested in buying the books on those lists. This caused a good problem: Black-owned bookstores have been so inundated with anti-racism book orders that they can hardly keep up with the demand. (A few not-so-understanding...
read more about 10 Books Recommended by Black-Owned Bookstores
An author, literary agent, marketer, publicist, editors and booksellers talk about how race affects their careers — and the books you read.
read more about ‘A Conflicted Cultural Force’: What It’s Like to Be Black in Publishing
The top rated Bookstores in Jacksonville are:
Chamblin's Bookmine is back in action, albeit with a few changes to ensure public health and safety.
Click here for the full Jacksonville Business Journal article!
read more about Turning the page: How Chamblin's Bookmine is getting back to business.
Total U.S. sales in March were down 8.4 percent to $667 million, a sign of how the early days of the pandemic hurt booksellers and publishers.
Clive Cussler, the US author of the popular Dirk Pitt novels, has died at the age of 88.
He wrote 25 books in the adventure series, including Sahara and Raise the Titanic, and sold more than 100 million copies of his novels in total.
read more about Clive Cussler: Dirk Pitt novels author dies aged 88
Ronan Farrow, Emily Bazelon, Attica Locke, Michael Connelly and Colson Whitehead are among the finalists for the 40th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizesannounced Wednesday, with crime novelist Walter Mosley named as the winner of the 2019 Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement.
...
The publicity-shy Mr. Portis earned a modest but devoted readership and accolades as America’s “least-known great writer.”
read more about Charles Portis, Elusive Author of ‘True Grit,’ Dies at 86
Kobe Bryant and Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho were working together on a children’s book, but the author of “The Alchemist” said he deleted the draft after Bryant’s death in a helicopter crash.
The 72-year-old novelist told The Associated Press on Monday that the two men started discussing the project in...
We treat books like sacred objects. They’re not. They’re value-neutral delivery systems.
read more about It is absolutely fine to rip your books in half
The Jaxson's list of 36 of the best nonfiction books ever written about Jacksonville and the people who made it what it is today.
The ZORA Canon, our first-of-its-kind list of the 100 most important books written by Black American women, celebrates established literary giants. To shine a light on the next generation of greats, we asked a few of our contributors and columnists — Feminista Jones, L’Oreal Thompson Payton, Erika Stallings, and Danielle Jackson — to...
read more about 10 Black Women Writers You Should Read Right Now
A decade is in part defined by its books. And recent days have seen many roundups of the best books of the 2010s -- the titles that critics consider the pinnacle of literary excellence.
read more about Here are 10 of the decade's most influential books
According to Slate’s book critic.
Black Friday might bring throngs of shoppers to major retailers nationwide and Cyber Monday has consumers clicking away for the best online deals, but in between the two is a day just for the locals: Small Business Saturday.
read more about Small business, big impact: Keeping Jax’s holiday shopping local
Decades ago, Le Carré worked for British intelligence services MI5 and MI6. He has channeled that experience into more than 50 years of espionage thrillers.
read more about John Le Carré Fears For The Future In 'Agent Running In The Field'
"As an editor he championed writers, like Judy Blume, who changed the landscape of literature for young people. He later became a writer himself."
read more about Richard Jackson, Who Had an Ear for Children’s Books, Dies at 84
"For the first time in the Nobel Prize for Literature’s 118-year history, two authors were announced Thursday as recipients of the award: Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke and Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. (Handke received the Prize for 2019. Tokarczuk received the Prize for 2018.)
Last year’s Nobel Prize for Literature...
read more about Two Authors Just Won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here's What to Know About Them
"Just 25 books can still be called contenders for the 2019 National Book Awards.
The National Book Foundation on Tuesday unveiled the finalists, listing five books each in five categories. And while there are some readily recognizable names among the remaining authors — some with past shortlist appearances and other...
read more about Here Are The Finalists For The 2019 National Book Awards
"Governments are spending a remarkable amount of resources attacking books — because their supposed limitations are beginning to look like ageless strengths."
"Spending time in Fairfax? Get to know this Jacksonville neighborhood by browsing its most popular local businesses, from a a bookstore to a garden and home decor shop.
Hoodline crunched the numbers to find the top places to visit in Fairfax, using both Yelp data and our own secret sauce...
read more about Check out the 3 top spots in Jacksonville's Fairfax neighborhood