For decades publishing insiders have wrung their hands over the ways in which television, video games and the internet have eaten into their profits, while ignoring the ways in which their own business practices have limited the audience for their products. Survey after survey shows that the two groups of Americans most likely to read books are those who have a bachelor’s degree and those who earn more than $75,000 a year. For publishers, this should be Champagne-popping news. After all, the percentage of Americans over 25 who have earned bachelor’s degrees has more than doubled since 1970. But demographically these graduates look different than they did in the 1970s — they are more likely to be women and to be Black, Asian or Latino — and by neglecting to build an audience among them, publishers may have lost millions of customers. Publishers, Lucas pointed out, have nurtured audiences for items as strange as adult coloring books and young-adult vampire mysteries. “We built these audiences,” she said. “We invested. We worked. We took things that did work and we built something out of them.”
Some editors, like Lucas, are trying to figure out how to do the same for the vast swaths of America that big publishers have mostly ignored. It’s an effort that is complicated by a long history of neglect, which itself is bound up with publishers’ failure to take diversity in their own professional ranks seriously until recently. In interviews with more than 50 current and former book professionals and authors, I heard about the previous unsuccessful attempts to cultivate Black audiences and about an industry culture that still struggles to overcome the clubby, white elitism it was born in. As Lucas sees it, the future of book publishing will be determined not only by its recent hires but also by how it answers this question: Instead of fighting over slices of a shrinking pie, can publishers work to make the readership bigger for everyone?
There’s a huge appeal to putting infrastructure underground, says Bradley Garrett, a cultural geographer at University College Dublin and author of Subterranean London. "Human beings tend to like those things to be operating in the background." It gives the illusion of seamlessness, he says. "There's almost something magical about it."
Along with trains, powerlines, pipes, cables and sewers, there’s another piece of infrastructure some have long wished to bury – roads.
Lidia Yuknavitch’s extraordinary new novel is the weirdest, most mind-blowing book about America I’ve ever inhaled. Part history, part prophecy, all fever dream, “Thrust” offers a radical critique of the foundational ideals that conceal our persistent national crimes. As we march from Juneteenth to July 4, this is a story to scrub the patinated surface of our civic pride.
Publishing a book about beaches in the season of the “beach read” is a bold and meta move, like when Kramer made a coffee-table book about coffee tables on “Seinfeld.”
The conventional wisdom is that readers want something light and unchallenging for their summer vacations, something they don’t mind smudging with Coppertone and leaving behind at the rental house. Sarah Stodola’s “The Last Resort,” its title echoing Cleveland Amory’s classic about high-society playgrounds, is definitely not that kind of book. Indeed it aims, in well-intentioned, widely researched and somewhat scattershot fashion, to make you profoundly uneasy about the very act of visiting the beach.
Learned today that flamingos can live up to seventy years.
I gasped at the fact, thinking about a bird, pink and slender