At The Reading List, we’re trainspotters when it comes to interesting book links, and here are a number that caught our eye.

• This just in from Florida, The War on Books Enters ‘Goblin Butts Are Sexual’ Territory.
• Researchers reveal lost library of Charles Darwin for the first time.
• There have for a while now been two Milan Kunderas, characters so different as to suggest Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
• The Shunned Literary Genius of Samuel Selvon – When a giant of Caribbean literature moved to Calgary, Canadian critics ignored him. He probably didn’t care.
• ‘The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion‘ – emails and files released by a member of the Hugo administration team shows that Chinese laws related to content and censorship were the reason behind the Chengdu Worldcon Hugo fiasco.
• A US district judge in California has largely sided with OpenAI, dismissing the majority of claims raised by authors alleging that large language models powering ChatGPT were illegally trained on pirated copies of their books without their permission.
• He Polarized Readers by Writing About His Late Wife’s Affairs. Now He’s Ready to Move On.
• A new book wants you to know NYC’s underground community was more than ‘mole people’.
• ‘Reading is so sexy’: gen Z turns to physical books and libraries.
• Am I the Literary Asshole? In Which Everyone Talks Shit About Everyone Else.
• Hungarian bookseller evades huge fine due to missing comma.
• Iranian writer Sepideh Rashno to serve nearly four-year prison sentence for refusing to wear a hijab.
• Sheila Heti takes her autofiction to its logical conclusion by publishing her journals – with editing help from Excel.

 

• Find our previous Footnotes here.

Header image: Agustin Gunawan on Unsplash

Categories Fiction

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