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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.
Nobel Prize-Winning Author Mario Vargas Llosa Has Died
Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, has died at the age of 89. Known for writing about power, corruption, violence, and authoritarian politics, Vargas Llosa rose to international prominence in the 1960s, and many scholars consider his work to have had the widest impact of any author in the Latin American Boom. Politically active throughout his career, Vargas Llosa mounted an unsuccessful run for the Peruvian presidency in 1990, representing a right-wing party. As NPR notes, “In recent years, he attracted criticism for comments about topics including feminism’s role in literature, and the soaring death toll of Mexican journalists, but his books continued to be reprinted and sold in dozens of different languages worldwide.”
People Do Things.
In the early days of Covid, Andrew Clark started listening to a portion of the audiobook edition of The Great Gatsby narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal every night before bed. Setting a sleep timer for 45 minutes, he’d finish the book every week or so and start all over again. In 2024, he stopped using the timer and simply allowed the book to play in his ears all night. Now, he has listened to The Great Gatsby more than 200 times. Clark knows it’s a weird choice:
Who chooses as a ritual bedtime story a bittersweet novel that ends with a murder-suicide (preceded by a fatal car crash) in which no one finds love and the only character who ends up close to happy is a violent racist and a serial cheat?
But he doesn’t plan to quit anytime soon. Gatsby has become part of him, and his reflection on how his understanding of the novel has shifted with age, time, and repetition is quite lovely.
OwlCrate Launches Indie Publisher
OwlCrate, a book subscription service based in Canada, has launched an independent publishing arm intended to help “fix a broken industry.” OwlCrate Press will release SFF, romance, romantasy, and horror titles through an “ethical publishing model” aimed at reducing barriers for writers. Per its head of publishing, Jordan Fleming, the new press will consider manuscripts in any format and will not require that writers be represented by agents. It will also pay above-market rates per word and release authors from the expectation that they market their own work. OwlCrate Press will have a “symbiotic relationship” with the subscription service, which could mean all kinds of things (will OwlCrate Press books get priority placement in the subscription service??) and ultimately hopes to disrupt the industry. We’ll be following this one, for sure.
Americans Want to Read More Books…Or Do They?
On today’s episode of the Book Riot Podcast, Jeff and I break down a recent NPR/Ipsos poll about Americans’ reading habits, take a deep dive into the publishing industry’s worker demographics, and discuss a small but important change at Publishers Weekly. Listen wherever you get your pods.
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