For an increasing number of people, reading means listening to streamed audio files through a smartphone. The audiobook has a long history, of course, but what is new is its commercial impact: For the first time, audiobooks can no longer be seen as a niche market. Now, the audio medium competes with print books and ebooks for the attention of book readers in a large and diverse range of national book markets. Most people in the book trade believe that the audiobook share will continue to grow in the coming years. According to the Association of American Publishers (AAP), 8.1 percent of the revenues of the total US book trade in 2021 came from audiobooks. This figure can be compared to ebooks (11.6 percent), but also to change over time: in fact, it is audiobooks—in contrast to all other book formats—that have shown a rapid and steady increase over the past ten years.
No plant-based milk has been hotter than oat milk. Driven in large part by the success of Oatly, a Swedish company that invented oat milk in the early 1990s, the fervor for oat milk has been so intense that the brand has faced shortages throughout 2021, as more and more milk drinkers converted to the product. But now, following Oatly’s first major recall and a turning of the tide of popular opinion, the oat milk backlash has arrived.
Once he turned to songwriting, Cohen set fiction aside. Perhaps it was a purely strategic decision, or maybe he ultimately understood that it was not his form. If the pieces gathered in “A Ballet of Lepers” testify to this, they nonetheless offer nascent glimmers of his inimitable artistic vision: intimate yet aloof, trembling with weakness even as it aches toward wisdom.
Near the beginning of “Deliverance”, a horror film of 1972 about four men from Atlanta who go canoeing in the backwoods of north Georgia, one of the city types takes a guitar from his car and trades melodies with a dead-eyed boy on a porch, who strums a banjo. The locals and visitors smile and dance, but things soon turn sour. What follows helped convince a generation of urbanites to holiday at the beach. It also solidified the banjo’s image as a totem of white rural culture.
Kristina Gaddy’s beguiling new book aims to subvert that reputation by excavating the banjo’s history. Her thesis is simple and well-supported. The banjo was created in America by enslaved Africans, and for much of its history was integral to African-American culture, celebration, spirituality and resistance.
Nothing of that old house was square.
Shut doors were framed with triangles of air.