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The Romance Writers of America will permanently retire its annual RITA Awards, which it has presented annually since 1982, and introduce a new award, the Vivian, named after RWA founder Vivian Stephens. The move to retire the RITAs follows a controversy related to issues of diversity at the organization this winter that saw the resignation of its newly-instated president and its entire board of directors, as well as the cancellation of this year's planned RITA Awards ceremony. In January, the RWA announced that it planned to hold the RITAs again "to celebrate 2019 and 2020 romances" in 2021. from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics https://ift.tt/2AUOxOr

In The Washington Post, eight black women share their thoughts on the life and work of Toni Morrison, including Michelle Obama: "..For me and for so many others, Toni Morrison was that first crack in the levee — the one who freed the truth about black lives, sending it rushing out into the world. She showed us the beauty in being our full selves, the necessity of embracing our complications and contradictions. And she didn't just give us permission to share our own stories; she underlined our responsibility to do so. She showed how incomplete the world's narrative was without ours in it..." from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics https://ift.tt/2TiAoQ6

Herman Wouk, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Navy drama The Caine Mutiny , whose sweeping novels about World War II, the Holocaust and the creation of Israel made him one of the most popular writers of his generation and helped revitalize the genre of historical fiction, died May 17 at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 10 days shy of his 104th birthday. from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics http://bit.ly/2VJfKgL

Faber emerged victorious at the British Book Awards 2019 on Monday evening (13th May), with Sally Rooney's Normal People scooping the coveted Book of the Year award. The book had earlier won the Fiction Book of the Year prize, while Faber stablemate Leila Slimani's Lullaby won the Debut Fiction category. The 90-year-old company also took the Independent Publisher of the Year gong in the trade section of the awards. from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics http://bit.ly/2W6eNhA

Novelist Ben Dolnick waxes lyrical on the benefits or ditching Netflix for a novel. And not just because a novelist is telling you to: One night a couple of summers ago, the power went out and, unable to watch Netflix or engage in my customary internet fugue, I lit a candle and picked up a thriller by Ruth Rendell. For the first time in as long as I could remember, my sole source of entertainment for an evening was going to be a book... from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics http://bit.ly/2Lnsd4Q

Cengage and McGraw-Hill, two of the largest academic publishers remaining, have agreed to a merger on equal terms that is expected to close by early 2020, the companies announced yesterday. from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics http://bit.ly/2V9WHfg

Baker & Taylor has made it official: it is leaving the wholesale retail book market. The move was hinted at when it became public late last year that the company was in talks to sell its retail operations to Ingram and then in the departure over the last few months of key retail staff members. B&T will focus on its traditional core business of servicing libraries, as well as publisher services... Paul Swydan, owner of the Silver Unicorn Bookstore, West Acton, Mass., wrote on Twitter, "It means I will make less money when I fill special orders for customers, because Baker & Taylor's sole competition offers a much lower discount." He added, "In the larger sense, it's another example of how Amazon is crippling this country in their mostly unchecked quest to monopolize any business they choose to focus on." from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics http://bit.ly/2GRQzyd

The New York Times takes on the tricky topic of YA authors being censored by readers within their own communities--focusing in particular on 26 year-old Amélie Wen Zhao who asked her publisher, Delacorte, to withdraw her debut novel, Blood Heir , six months before publication because of complaints that it was culturally insensitive. Now, after some rewrites, she plans to publish. See also an earlier article in The New Yorker from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics http://bit.ly/2DKBC03

"I have a strategy of reading children's books to gain knowledge. I've found that in an adult reference book, if it's not a subject I'm interested in, I just can't get into it. I was thinking, what is the place in the library I can go to to get books tailored to make things interesting for uninterested readers? Boom. The children's section." - James Holzhauer, Jeopardy mega-winner from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics http://bit.ly/2URdAX0

The political corruption scandal roiling Baltimore, leading to an FBI raid of Mayor Catherine Pugh's house Thursday morning, all began with a children's book. Pugh, who has been serving as the city's mayor since 2016, is at the center of a controversy that started with the revelation in March that she'd sold her children's books, the Healthy Holly series, to entities that have business deals with the city, including a $500,000 deal with the University of Maryland Medical System and a similar deal with health company Kaiser Permanente... from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics http://bit.ly/2vnNzUX

Thirty years after her death, Daphne du Maurier has not run out of surprises. Undiscovered poems written some 90 years ago when the author of Rebecca was still a literary unknown have been discovered hidden inside a photograph frame. from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics http://bit.ly/2Gf66I0

Gene Wolfe, a towering figure in science fiction whose magnum opus The Book of the New Sun was hailed as a masterpiece by Ursula K Le Guin, has died at the age of 87. from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics http://bit.ly/2GlzhcB

Netflix has been on a book acquisition spree over the past year, developing screen adaptations of dozens of novels, series, short story collections, and graphic novels. About 50 of these literary properties are being turned into series projects, while the screening service has announced plans to adapt only a handful into features—a list that includes Button Man by John Wagner, I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid, Pashmina by Nidhi Chanani, and The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics http://bit.ly/2KFgnTq

The 2019 Pulitzers have been announced. The winners in the "Letters" category are: Fiction: The Overstory by Richard Powers Nonfiction: Amity and Prosperity by Eliza Griswold History: Frederick Douglass by David W. Blight Biography: The New Negro by Jeffrey C. Stewart Poetry: Be With by Forrest Gander from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics http://bit.ly/2P9H6pJ

The Library of Congress rejected pressure from student activists to change its subject heading "illegal aliens" to "undocumented immigrants," arguing that many do have documentation of some type and that the term is not widely used in law, but has decided to replace the former heading with two new ones: "non-citizens" and "unauthorized immigration." The subject headings are an integral part of the world's most widely used library indexing tool, the basis for thousands of daily searches around the globe. from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics http://bit.ly/2Uuj9yt

Mental Floss has a fun article on words that started as spelling mistakes. For example, nicknames were originally called eke names, with the verb eke used here in the sense of "to make longer" or "to provide an addition." Sometime in the 13th century, however, "an eke-name" was mistakenly interpreted as "a neke-name," and the N permanently jumped across from the indefinite article an to the verb eke. from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics http://bit.ly/2KhRBsm

According to a Pew Research public opinion poll 3 in 4 Americans believe that local news outlets are in good financial shape and fewer than 1 in 6 pays for local news. "I found the survey results to be really sad and disturbing," said David Chavern, president of the News Media Alliance, which advocates for news organizations. "Local journalism is very much at risk, and the public just doesn't seem to realize it." In the 1990s, 30 percent profit margins were common at regional newspapers and the chains that owned them but revenue from print advertising has declined precipitously and a new generation of news consumers never developed the daily-newspaper habit that their parents and grandparents had. Newspapers (and to a lesser extent local TV stations) were forced to cut costs and reduce employees (by 45 percent between 2008 and 2017. But even in their shrunken state, many regional newspapers are producing important public-interest journalism. While this may...

After fiercely challenging Ted Hughes's description of deaf children as "alert and simple" in a poem in his first collection, the deaf spoken-word poet Raymond Antrobus has won the Ted Hughes award for poetry. The 33-year-old British Jamaican, who has performed at Glastonbury and also works as a teacher, has received the £5,000 prize for his debut The Perseverance . Described as "compelling" in the Guardian, the collection touches on family life, particularly the death of Antrobus's father, his diagnosis with deafness as a small child, and his biracial heritage. It has also been longlisted for this year's Folio prize. from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics https://ift.tt/2U319M4

More than 1,300 writers including Kerry Hudson, David Nicholls, Sally Rooney, Michael Rosen and Val McDermid have backed a campaign for Waterstones booksellers to be paid the living wage. The support follows a petition from staff at Waterstones, signed by more than 6,000 people, which calls on the book chain's managing director, James Daunt, to pay booksellers a starting living wage of £9 an hour, or £10.55 for the Greater London area... ...In an open reply to Hudson, Daunt said the writers were "preach[ing] to the converted", but that the book chain could not yet afford a pay increase, two years after returning to profit. .... "If you raise the bottom level really significantly, then everybody all the way up the company has to go up, and then we go bust, which isn't very helpful ... If we were to move to a significantly higher starting rate, then we would have to take that money from our more experienced booksellers, or cut costs in another dramatic way. We...

The European parliament has approved a controversial directive introducing sweeping changes to copyright enforcement across Europe. The European copyright directive is best known for two provisions it contains: articles 11 and 13, referred to as the "link tax" and "upload filter", respectively, by opponents. The latter requires websites that host user-generated content to take active measures to prevent copyrighted material from being uploaded without permission, under the penalty of being held liable for their users' copyright infringement. Article 11, the "link tax", includes new requirements aimed at making companies like Google pay licensing fees to publications such as newspapers whose work gets aggregated in services like Google News. from https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics https://ift.tt/2HEocGo