Whit Press

04/04/2025

The American Booksellers Association "strongly opposes any potential acquisition of TikTok by Amazon," CEO Allison Hill wrote in a

03/25/2025

How Gaza Welcomed in the Age of Monsters

03/22/2025

National Book Critics Circle Awards were presented last night.
Honored to be part of the judging committee for their 'Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize'.
Proud to be a member of the NBCC.
When so many 'esteemed' literary organizations and universities have proven themselves to be too timid to support human rights and writers, NBCC stands out for its courage to meet this moment.
Pedro Lemebel's 'A Last Supper of Q***r Apostles' is a book read now. It will most certainly be a banned book. One to read for this time.
(my comments from our judges meeting posted in comments below. By the time we get to finalists, every book is beyond excellent. This is the first year I had one title stand out enough for me to advocate for it. Heart and Soul Medicine)

Each year, the National Book Critics Circle presents awards for the finest books published in English in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Biography, Autobiography, Poetry, and Criticism. In addition, we award

03/20/2025

03/17/2025

An honor to be part of this selection committee. Voting completed. We’ll know the winner on the 20th. Every one of these translations spectacular

Six judges of the 2024 NBCC Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize share their appreciations of the six shortlisted titles.

03/07/2025

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/97285-aba-goes-into-damage-control-after-contentious-wi2025-community-forum.html

The American Booksellers Association used a dedicated issue of its weekly Bookselling This Week newsletter to address a host of issues raised during a contentious community forum during Winter Institute last week.

03/02/2025

03/01/2025

Two children a week are killed in the West Bank. Two cameras recorded the circumstances of one such death

02/25/2025

“I may be wrong about this, but it seems as though so much fiction, particularly that by younger people, is very much about themselves. Love and death and stuff, but my love, my death, my this, my that. Everybody else is a light character in that play.

“When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, “Don’t pay any attention to that.” First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris? Things way outside their camp. Imagine it, create it. Don’t record and editorialize on some event that you’ve already lived through. I was always amazed at how effective that was. They were always out of the box when they were given license to imagine something wholly outside their existence. I thought it was a good training for them. Even if they ended up just writing an autobiography, at least they could relate to themselves as strangers.”—Toni Morrison

–from a 2014 interview with NEA Arts Magazine