The streaming service that transformed the music industry is expanding into audiobooks, and will offer more than 300,000 titles on a pay-per-book model. Read more
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Category: Miscellaneous
ICYMI Merriam-Webster Added 370 Words and Phrases to the Dictionary
ICYMI, “lewk,” “pumpkin spice” and “janky” are among the 370 new entries that have made it into the latest update of the Merriam-Webster dictionary … Notable additions include COVID-19-era words like “subvariant,” “booster dose,” “emergency use authorization,” “false negative” and “false positive.” The dictionary also prepared a full plate of food-centric words, such as omakase, birria, oat milk and bahn mi. Meanwhile, some of the slang-sourced words might need a little more explanation. Sus (“suspicious” or “suspect”), baller (“excellent, exciting or extraordinary, especially in a way that is suggestive of a lavish lifestyle”) and cringe (“so embarrassing, awkward, etc. as to cause one to cringe”) all made the cut, as well as abbreviations like FWIW (“for what it’s worth”), and ICYMI (“in case you missed it”). Read more
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11 Books to Read During Hispanic Heritage Month
Some names will be familiar, others new. Of course, no reading list is ever complete, no list ever able to capture the range of our collective experiences as a people. But I chose these, a mix of conventional and unorthodox narratives, to illustrate the scope of our literary capabilities. Read more
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The Radical Books Rewriting Sex
If you believe the headlines, there’s not all that much sex happening right now. We are living, apparently, through a “sex recession”, with young people especially having less. The blame has been pinned on everything from the housing crisis and the pandemic to a backlash to the hook-up culture of the past decade. But there is one place where sex is resolutely on the agenda – in literature. Particularly that written by women. In a new slew of fiction and non-fiction books by female writers exploring the messy intricacies of desire, sex isn’t just a subtext or a brief encounter; but front and centre. Read more
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A Festival That Conjures the Strange Magic of H.P. Lovecraft
At the NecronomiCon revelers danced to murder ballads and celebrated all things weird. They even found time to reckon with the writer’s racism. Read more
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Game of Thrones Effect Fires Up Reissues of ‘Lost’ Fantasy Fiction Classics
With big-budget TV series about to hit streaming services, publishers hope a string of cult novels will find a new audience. Read more
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Salted Owl and Roasted Puppy: Cambridge University to Digitise Medieval Cures
Curious Cures is a two-year project to conserve more than 180 manuscripts, revealing the ‘precarity of medieval life’ and strangeness of pre-scientific medicine. Read more
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The New “Tinder for Bookworms” Has the Least Sexy Name on the Planet
Hey, nerds. Do you have more books than you do friends? Do you ever find yourself explaining the plot of the novel you’re reading to your dog? Are you looking for that special someone to lie next to you in bed in the morning while you ignore each other and read your own books? Turns out there’s an app for that (or there will be—it’s still in early beta). Yep, it’s “Tinder for bookworms“—though to be fair, it isn’t actually a book dating app, but rather a “book meetup app.” It’s called Klerb. Read more
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Nine Authors Share How They Organize Their Bookshelves
I asked nine writers to share a photo of a favorite bookshelf (or what social media might refer to as a “shelfie”), explain the organizing principle (if there is one) and tell me a bit about what’s on that shelf. Here’s what they said. Read more
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Island Resort in Maldives Seeks Barefoot Bookseller
White sands, blue skies… and lots of books. Applications have opened for what might just be the best job in the world: running a bookshop on a luxury island in the Maldives. Read more
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