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White Literary Taste
Did the 2020 efforts towards diversity and inclusion in the wake of George Floyd impact the systemic racial bias in publishing and reviewing?
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Matilda by Roald Dahl Novel Study
Matilda is a classic, best-selling children’s book first published in 1988. This story draws from a history of children’s literature such as classic fairytales and Anne of Green Gables. Matilda was written by Roald Dahl, but significantly improved by a talented editor and publisher, Steven Roxburgh. For half of his writing career, Dahl wrote for adults. […]
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The Girl Title Trend In Children’s Books
The girl title trend in publishing is interesting because it is popular despite some pushback against using the word ‘girl’ to refer to grown-ass women. Author Emily St John Mandel wrote this week about why so much of the bestselling fiction this year has ‘girl’ in the title. Those are my takeaway points but the entire article […]
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Why You Can’t Get Your Hands On That Old Book You Remember From Childhood
In the early 1980s, to encourage aggressive sales, the U.S. government raised the taxes charge on goods left in warehouses at the end of each year. As applied to books, this meant that publishers could no longer afford to keep large numbers of titles on their backlists (the still-available books published in previous years). Books […]
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Gendered Book Covers
A sobering panel discussion on the gendered nature of book covers from earlier in 2015 can be found here at The Wheeler Center’s website. As was noted by someone on the panel, “It starts with children’s books.” Cover girls: How lipstick, bathing suits, and naked backs discredit women’s fiction from Boston Globe Sexy Backs and […]
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Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown Analysis
Goodnight Moon is an American picturebook classic, and is of particular interest because who would’ve thunk it? Margaret Wise Brown had a talent for creating odd-duck prose which went down a treat (and still does) with the preschool set. But is this book only of value for toddlers? Never. PARATEXT In a great green room, tucked away […]
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Should America Import More Children’s Books?
Should America import more children’s literature from other countries? Everything we do to, with, and for our children is influenced by capitalist market conditions and the hegemonic interests of ruling corporate elites. In simple terms, we calculate what is best for our children by regarding them as investments and turning them into commodities. Jack Zipes, […]
