Sakina Murdock writes about why she’s invested in independent publishing. “The problem is that proper ‘big’ publishing is broken. Not in a way that readers might consciously notice, but its systems are running on empty. Empty promises. Empty marketing budgets. Empty of innovation. Not completely empty, but running […]
At Polygon, Ta-Nehisi Coates talks with Evan Narcisse about writing Black Panther, working with Marvel and more. “[T]here are people who make their living off of comic books. And I wish that Marvel found better ways to compensate the creators who helped make Black Panther Black Panther. I […]
At The Paris Review, Anne Diebel considers Dashiell Hammett’s “strange career.” “In a 1929 interview with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dashiell Hammett described his first attempts at ‘breadwinning.’ After dropping out of Baltimore Polytechnic Institute at 14, he worked as a messenger boy for the Baltimore and Ohio […]
Dashiell Hammett’s “The Gutting of Couffignal” is available for your reading pleasure at the Library of America’s blog. The story originally appeared in the Dec., 1925 issue of the influential pulp fiction magazine, Black Mask. Along with the story there’s a discussion of the publication pressures of writing […]
At Smithsonian Magazine, Natalie Escobar looks at “how Madeleine L’Engle liberated young adult literature.”
Marcia Lynx Qualey writes about Agatha Christie’s popularity and influence in the Arab world! “So many Agatha Christie novels were published in Arabic in the mid-20th century that Hercule Poirots and Miss Marples overflowed handcarts and bookshelves from Algiers to Cairo to Amman to Muscat. These original editions, […]