Barnes & Noble suspends reissues of classics with new images

NEW YORK – Barnes & Noble is withdrawing a planned line of famous literature reissued with multicultural cover images that has been met with widespread criticism on social media.

“We acknowledge the voices who have expressed concerns about the Diverse Editions project at our Barnes & Noble Fifth Avenue store and have decided to suspend the initiative,” Barnes & Noble announced in a statement Wednesday.

The author Adriana Herrera had called the books, scheduled to be launched this week, “the classics in blackface.”

“Diverse Editions,” a joint project between Barnes & Noble and Penguin Random House, featured 12 texts, including Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and L. Frank Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz.”

The words are the same, but on the cover, major characters are depicted with dark-skinned illustrations by artists of “different ethnicities and backgrounds,” according to Barnes & Noble.

“Diverse Editions” was announced at a time when the publishing industry is already facing scrutiny over the novel “American Dirt” and its depiction of Mexican life and culture. “Absolute TONE-DEAF decision-making,” Mexican-American writer David Bowles, a leading critic of “American Dirt,” tweeted about “Diverse Editions.”

The decision also comes in February, which is Black History Month, an annual celebration of past and present achievement.

To much disbelief online, the organizers of “Diverse Editions” had said they used artificial intelligence in reviewing more than 100 older books and determining whether the race or ethnicity of a character is specifically stated.

Few would argue that Alice from “Alice in Wonderland” or the title characters of “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” are fitting for a tribute to black history.

“They could have Googled, chosen a dozen books by actual Black authors that are classics & sent those out with fresh covers & a big event,” author MIkki Kendall tweeted.

“Add in bringing in contemporary Black authors to discuss these works & the whole thing is a win. They didn’t do the easy or logical thing.”



In its statement Wednesday, Barnes & Noble acknowledged that the new covers were “not a substitute for black voices or writers of color, whose work and voices deserve to be heard.

“The booksellers who championed this initiative did so convinced it would help drive engagement with these classic titles,” according to the bookstore chain.

“It was a project inspired by our work with schools and was created in part to raise awareness and discussion during Black History Month, in which Barnes & Noble stores nationally will continue to highlight a wide selection of books to celebrate black history and great literature from writers of color.”

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Scarier than fiction: Climate worry driving ‘cli-fi’ boom

Imagine a world where storms inundate coastal megacities, entire species become extinct in the blink of an eye and conflicts are fought over dwindling natural resources.

Not so difficult in 2019, perhaps.

After a year of devastating extreme weather and worldwide unrest over the emergency posed by climate change, topics that used to belong to the realm of science fiction are finding their way into mainstream storytelling.

Back in 2004, Roland Emmerich’s disaster flick “The Day After Tomorrow” depicted a global weather catastrophe, with coastal areas devoured by the sea amid general meteorological mayhem.

Just 15 years on, scenes from the movie resemble images taken from real-life weather events today.

And as climate change makes superstorms, flooding, wildfires and droughts more likely, a new genre is gaining fatalistic fans the world over: “cli-fi.”

“It’s catching on like wildfire,” said United States writer and cli-fi aficionado Dan Bloom.

He credited U.S. President Donald Trump, who has said he will withdraw from the Paris climate deal, with helping promote the genre.

“There’s a lot of people who say that climate change is not real,” said Bloom. “These people are making the rest of us very angry and as a result cli-fi is getting more and more power.”

Andrew Milner, a professor of comparative literature at Melbourne’s Monash University, said that cli-fi was yet to break out from sci-fi’s yoke — most people get into the new genre because they like the old one.

“Both its texts and practitioners — writers, readers, publishers, film directors, fans — relate primarily to the science-fiction tradition,” he said.


“(But) it is very clear that the sub-genre has grown very rapidly in recent years.”

Global appeal

Global protest movements such as the Youth Strike for Climate and Extinction Rebellion have heightened public awareness of the issue.

For J.R. Burgmann, co-author of “Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach”, cli-fi films and novels are a logical expression of an increasingly knowledgeable and concerned society.

“This rise is a response to real-world concerns,” he said. “And though I would argue that literature has been rather slow to respond to manmade climate change, it certainly appears to be making up for lost time.”

And, because climate change is a truly global problem, cli-fi has become a worldwide, multi-lingual phenomenon.

In France, two major television series focussing on dystopian but conceivable futures have received popular and critical acclaim.

“The Last Wave” tells the story of 10 surfers who go missing in bad weather. When they return they can’t remember what happened but some have strange new powers.

And “The Collapse”, set in a post-apocalyptic world where fuel is scarce, nuclear sites are threatened and medicines are rationed, debuted this week.

Recent cli-fi works from around the world include “Blackout Island” by Icelandic author Sigridur Hagalin Bjornsdottir, a Canadian adaptation of Jean Hegland’s “Into the Forest” and “Water Knife”, by U.S. author Paolo Bacigalupi.


In “The History of Bees”, Norwegian author Maja Lunde’s 2017 bestseller, humanity is forced to pollinate their crops by hand after pesticides have wiped insects off the face of the Earth.

“People are more and more worried about climate change and authors write about what scares them,” Lunde told Agence France-Presse last year.

‘Hard to ignore’

Novels and films about climate change are nothing new, of course.

J.G. Ballard’s “The Burning World” (1964) and John Brunner’s “The Sheep Look Up” (1972) depicted a world ravaged by environmental damage decades before scientists fully understood manmade climate change.

Even John Steinbeck’s generational “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939) is essentially a tale of the harrowing ordeal undergone by climate migrants from the Oklahoma dust bowl.

But, as leading cli-fi author Jean-Marc Ligny explained, greater public awareness and a seemingly unending string of drought, wildfires and heatwaves have made climate a topic that’s “hard to ignore.”

“Climate change needs stories, and readers need them to be told,” he said. “There are figures, statistics, but these don’t really say anything. Cli-fi makes people more aware of the situation.” CL/JB

source: entertainment.inquirer.net

Kobe Bryant sets ambitious plan for books in 2019-2020

NEW YORK — Kobe Bryant, Oscar winner and former NBA great, has big plans for books in the next few years.

Bryant’s Granity Studios plans to release five middle grade and young adult novels in 2019 and 2020. According to a press release issued Thursday, each novel was “conceptualized” by Bryant and written with a “notable” fiction author.


Projects for next year include “The Wizenard Series: Training Camp” featuring a “diverse cast” of young males and “Legacy and the Queen,” about a young black woman and her tennis match against a superstar known as “The Queen.”

Earlier this year, the Granity film “Dear Basketball,” Bryant’s ode to the sport that made him famous, won the Academy Award for best animated short.

source: sports.inquirer.net

Dylan book sales soar after Nobel announcement

NEW YORK — He won his Nobel for writing songs, but Bob Dylan’s unexpected honor also is providing a boost for his books.

Dylan’s memoir “Chronicles: Volume One” and a bound compilation, “The Lyrics: 1961-2012,” were among two of Amazon.com’s fastest sellers Thursday. His book of lyrics jumped from No. 73,543 on Amazon’s best-seller list the night before Thursday’s announcement to No. 209. Over the same 24-hour period, “Chronicles” soared from No. 15,690 to No. 278 and was out of stock by the end of the day.

Not surprisingly, sales were up on Amazon for many of his albums. Two of them, “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits” and “Blonde on Blonde,” were in the top 25 for CDs and vinyl by Thursday night.

source: entertainment.inquirer.net