What does Twitter have to do with Banned Books Week? Who wrote The Bondwoman’s Narrative? Why is Paris desperate for writers? Read on for those headlines and more:
Banned Books Week will take place from September 22 through 28, and for the first time, Twitter has partnered with the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression to promote the week with the hashtag #bannedbooksweek. [Publisher’s Weekly]
Getting a head start on Banned Books Week — but with the wrong message — is a North Carolina county, which has banned Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a novel dealing with black identity in America,from school libraries. [The Asheboro Courier-Tribune]
Meanwhile, Winthrop University English professor Gregg Hecimovich says he may have discovered the identity of the author behind The Bondwoman’s Narrative, believed to be the first novel written by an African-American woman. [The New York Times]
Also uncovered was a never-before-published poem by William Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy, now printed in its entirety for the first time. [Oxford University Press Blog]
By the way, if you’re craving a book festival, it’s a good time for a road trip. Here’s a list of fall’s biggest book festivals around the country. [USA Today]
But if you’re more into heading overseas, Paris has launched a new festival, the Écrivains du Monde (Writers of the World), to attract foreign writers and literary enthusiasts back to France. [The New York Times]
Who knows? Maybe at one of those festivals you’ll find a new author to appreciate — and probably become addicted to, according to Imogen Russell Williams in an essay about author addiction. “Addiction is an insatiable appetite for the unique style, attitude and assurance I know I’ll find in anything they’ve penned,” she writes. “It involves putting up with bum notes and off days, scrabbling around for obscure, laundry-list juvenilia once the canonicals have been polished off, and returning again and again to favorite titles as to a parent’s embrace.” [The Guardian]
Finally, here’s a question you know you’ve always wanted answered: Was George Eliot ugly? After Lena Dunham tweeted that the Victorian novelist’s Wikipedia page was “the soapiest most scandalous thing you’ll read this month,” Rebecca Mead investigated whether Eliot was truly ugly. [The New Yorker]
