Mexico City, 1971. Maite’s neighbour goes missing, having entered the orbit of some radical students at the advent of Mexico’s Dirty War. Sick of feeding her cat, Maite goes to track her down, but she’s not the only one. (★★½)
Shori is a young vampire who awakens in a cave, badly injured and with amnesia. She finds out that her entire family has been murdered. With the help of some bonded humans called symbionts, she pursues justice in a vampire society she must learn about from scratch. (★★★★)
Informative article about how dire the pay & conditions are for workers in Australia’s publishing industry, not to mention the paltry remuneration for authors (58% of which earnt less than $2,000 for the entire year of 2021).
Dracula is an 1897 novel by Bram Stoker. Told in an epistolary format (through letters, diary entries and newspaper articles), it starts by following solicitor Jonathan Harker as he goes on a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian noble, Count Dracula. Harker escapes the castle after discovering that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town …
The proliferation of the so-called ‘internet novel’ genre indicates this anxiety. What does it mean to exist as a person online right now, and how is it different to life conducted offline? The problem is that this question is the wrong question, and consequently the answers you get are almost always fucking awful.
Where the Crawdads Sing never really appealed to me before, and I’m definitely not going to read it now 🤯 The Owens seem super racist, to the point of course that they are wanted for questioning over the murders of Zambian men that they alleged to be poachers…
(via this post on /r/books )
Seems like even Douglas Adams’ letters are fun to read! This one is from 1992, when he wrote to an American comic book publisher with some objections to one of their adaptions of his work.
Found myself metaphorically nodding along at almost every word of this piece. The internet was supposed to “democratise” media consumption, but for the most part it’s resulted in bestsellers selling ever better and the midlist declining. It does mention indie, self-pubbed authors but only in brief, and at any rate they suffer from the same discovery problem as the midlist (just even more intensely).
An article on those generic samey covers that are everywhereeee on those kinds of books that make the bestsellers’ list.
Teixcalaan is threatened by an uncommunicative armada. Mahit Dzmare is brought in to help. (★★★★)
Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.