The Story Hour has migrated from Facebook, which is owned by Meta, to YouTube. The live-story-reading site is hosted by writers Laura Blackwell and Daniel Marcus. You can read their statement about what led to this decision here.
Here is a review category I don’t see every day: Bulgarian fiction. I want to read the first one!
More in the saga of scraping and data-mining; Society of Authors published an article about the findings of their survey about proposed changes in copyright that privilege tech companies over the authors and creators. (Thanks to File 770.)
Studio Ghibli works garnered $1.49 million at an auction held by Heritage Auctions in Texas. This was the first time the auction house focused on anime.
Book Riot reports that BookLooks, a review site associated with Mom for Liberty, has shut down. Interesting information. Book Riot is a personal site and the author of this post has no trouble expressing their opinions of the subject site or the parent organization.
Nice review of Idolfire by Grace Curtis here at Nerds of a Feather.
Recent cuts of at least $1billion from the USDA will affect food banks across the nation.
I can count on Reactor’s “Five Books that…” lists for something, and I really like this one—books about language and translation. That silly photo up top is homage to this article–I take no blame or credit for the quality of the poem.
Elias Ells of Bar Cart Bookshelf reviews A Drop of Corruption, the upcoming mystery fantasy from Robert Jackson Bennett, and demonstrates a bright and bitter cocktail inspired by the book.
For those who’ve been following the Laundry Files series by Charles Stross, what is reported to be the final book in the series is coming out next January. The Regicide Report will bring back Bob and Mo along with the recently deceased (in our timeline) Queen Elizabeth against the Elder God that has taken over the UK (in the Laundry Files timeline). I’m not sure how this can have a happy ending, given that the whole nature of Elder Gods reawakening is that human civilization and possibly all life is snuffed out, so it will be interesting to see how Stross handles this. Caitlin Kiernan, by contrast, just presents alternate ways that we could all be destroyed in her Tinfoil Dossier set of novellas on a similar theme.
Caitlin Kiernan is an amazing stylist, but her work leaves me feeling bleak and hopeless.
On her blog, “Aunt Beast” says she is in the early stages of working on another Tinfoil Dossier novella, so there may be more bleak and hopeless coming your way. The one (I think) continuing character got killed off in the last installment, but I guess that doesn’t cause a problem in Kiernan’s worlds, where the stories might be seen as different apocalyptic timelines.