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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Major Publishers, Authors Guild Sue Over New Florida Book Banning Law
The line-up of plaintiffs in this challenge to Florida’s bad, stupid, and probably unconstitutional H.B. 1069 is formidable: six big publishers, the Authors Guild, and some individual marquee authors (Angie Thomas, John Green, and more). The suit has a sort of pincer attack, claiming that the publishers’ and authors’ First Amendment rights are being violated and that the students’ First Amendment rights are being violated. Compelling. But possibly the most common sense argument for how unbelievably idiotic the bill is comes in the shape of just listing the books removed from schools because of it: “Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man; Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls; Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye; Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; Richard Wright’s Native Son; Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House Five; and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.”
Prince Harry’s Spare Finally Coming Out in Paperback
If for some reason you were waiting for the paperback version of Spare, your 18-month and counting vigil is coming to and end. The paperback version of the Guinness World Record Holder for the title of The Fastest Selling Book of All-Time is coming out in the U.S. on Oct 22 (Oct 24 in the UK). This article in People notes that there is no new chapter, forward, or other new material included, which might be a sign of a desire to, if not reconcile, at least not further strain Harry’s relationship with the Royal family. This would not have occurred to me a) because it would have required spending more than five seconds thinking about the Royal family, which I will not do and b) I didn’t really clock that keeping a little powder dry for the paperback to boost sales was something that happens in celebrity memoirs, which come to think of it didn’t occur to me because this category is a superset of my laws governing a).
How The New York Public Library Memed Its Way Into $58 Million Dollars
Fascinating account, via the unfortunate medium of an X thread, from Rachel Karten about how the NYPL’s social media team employed memes on social media to great effect and helped it avoid $58 million in proposed budget cuts. When I first saw the posts, I thought they were pretty funny and could see right away that they were resonating. Good for them.