According to Alison Flood from The Guardian, Stephen King is now clarifying controversial comments about diversity, acknowledging that while in a perfect world ‘judgments of creative excellence should be blind’, we’re not there yet… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Stephen King has rowed back on his controversial comments about diversity in the Oscars, acknowledging in a lengthy essay that the awards are still “rigged in favor of the white folks”.

King provoked anger among authors and fans after tweeting earlier this month that he “would never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong.” King is able to nominate films in three Oscars categories – best picture, adapted screenplay and original screenplay – and had been commenting on the lack of recognition for women and artists of colour in this year’s Oscars nominations.

“Damn, Stephen. Damn. I thought you were better than this,” said the award-winning American science fiction writer NK Jemisin. “It should be obvious that diversity and quality aren’t separate qualities, or in opposition to each other – except in the minds of bigots”. Writer Roxane Gay agreed. “As a fan, this is painful to read from you,” she told King. “It implies that diversity and quality cannot be synonymous. They are not separate things. Quality is everywhere but most industries only believe in quality from one demographic. And now, here you are.”

King later clarified his comments on Twitter, adding: “The most important thing we can do as artists and creative people is make sure everyone has the same fair shot, regardless of sex, color, or orientation. Right now such people are badly underrepresented, and not only in the arts. You can’t win awards if you’re shut out of the game.”

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Season 8 was originally meant to be a box office blockbuster, according to Daniel Van Boom of CNET…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

One of the strange aspects of Game of Thrones‘ final season was it being just six episodes long, shorter than the 10-episode runs of the first six seasons. What was originally planned for the polarizing season, George R.R. Martin told German publication Welt, is even stranger.

“David Benioff and Dan Weiss,” the HBO hit’s showrunners, “wanted to finish the saga with three movies after season 7,” Martin said to the publication in an interview, translated by Reddit user mellycafe. “Game of Thrones was supposed to end in cinema. It was seriously discussed four to five years ago.”

Martin explained that HBO put the kibosh on that idea, reasoning that it’s in the TV business — not the movie business. Even HBO-produced films like Deadwood: The Movie, Martin noted, are made to be shown on TV, not in theaters.

Benioff actually talked about this possibility in 2012, telling Entertainment Weekly during the filming of season 3 that “we have a very generous budget from HBO, but we know what’s coming down the line and, ultimately, it’s not generous enough.”

In other words, the idea behind concluding the show in the theaters was to secure a Hollywood blockbuster budget that would allow Benioff and Weiss to end Thrones in a sufficiently spectacular fashion. It turns out the show didn’t need to hit cinemas: Plenty of criticism has been aimed at the season 8, but it certainly wasn’t short on big-budget spectacle.

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Racking up likes and followers today resembles the nonstop friending of 19th-century England. But Jane Austen’s characters figured out how to disengage, according to Alexandra Samuel from The Digital Voyage… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

It’s exhausting to live in a world of constantly swirling social interaction, in which you never know who you’re going to hear from, or how you’ll live up to the pressure to respond. It’s uncomfortable to know that you can be assessed and measured by very public metrics, which amount to a transparent calculation of your worth. It’s stressful to hew to the standards of public discretion, knowing that any violation of propriety will be held against you forever.

These are the pains of living in the social-networking era—but they are also the pains of living in the world described by the nineteenth-century novels of Jane Austen. That’s why her well-loved books are worth revisiting at our particular moment, in search of wisdom on how to cope with the pressures of the digital age.

The parallels between our world and Austen’s jumped out at me when I recently returned to her works after many years. When I first read Austen’s Pride and Prejudice at the age of fifteen, the World Wide Web had yet to be invented. When I picked up her next novels in my mid-twenties, it was still many years before the advent of blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

But I recently yielded to a sudden and acute Austen craving, which plunged me into six weeks of gorging on her work, this time in audiobook form. Austen’s words poured over me as I puttered through my daily tasks: Emma gossiping as I glanced at my morning email, Eliza Bennet whispering in my ear as I plugged my devices in to charge each night.

I soon got past the incongruity of finding Jane Austen on my phone, in my audiobook app, and in the ebook I downloaded so that I’d have access to explanatory annotations on the text. (Yes, I’m afraid I really have fallen down the Austen rabbit hole this time.) Indeed, as I plunged into Austen’s England from the very device that normally connects me to Facebook and Twitter, her world and ours looked more and more alike.

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Brain Pickings and Maria Popova from brainpickings.org take a glimpse inside the beautiful, heartbreaking, unclassifiable relationship that fomented some of the greatest, most original and paradigm-shifting poetry… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Four months before her twentieth birthday, Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) met the person who became her first love and remained her greatest — an orphaned mathematician-in-training by the name of Susan Gilbert, nine days her junior. Throughout the poet’s life, Susan would be her muse, her mentor, her primary reader and editor, her fiercest lifelong attachment, her “Only Woman in the World.”

Susan Gilbert had settled in Amherst, to be near her sister, after graduating from the Utica Female Academy — one of a handful of academically rigorous educational institutions available to women at the time. She entered Dickinson’s life in the summer of 1850, which the poet would later remember as the season “when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens.”

Poised and serious at twenty, dressed in black for the sister who had just died in childbirth and who had been her maternal figure since their parents’ death, Susan cast a double enchantment on Emily and Austin Dickinson. Sister and brother alike were taken with her poised erudition and her Uranian handsomeness — her flat, full lips and dark eyes were not exactly masculine, her unchiseled oval face and low forehead not exactly feminine.

“Best Witchcraft is Geometry,” Emily Dickinson would later write. Now both she and her brother found themselves in a strange bewitchment of figures, placing Susan at one point of a triangle. But Emily’s was no temporary infatuation. Nearly two decades after Susan entered her heart, she would write with unblunted desire:

To own a Susan of my own
Is of itself a Bliss —
Whatever Realm I forfeit, Lord,
Continue me in this!

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Oprah Winfrey’s latest Oprah’s Book Club pick, “American Dirt,” has social media and news outlets arguing over whether the book is an “extraordinary piece of work” or “cringeworthy” and “real problematic”, according to Jenna Amatulli from the HuffPost… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

On Tuesday, Winfrey touted the Jeanine Cummins novel as a story that “changed the way I see what it means to be a migrant in a whole new way.” In a video of her endorsement, the media mogul said, “I was shook up, it woke me up, and I feel that everybody who reads this book is actually going to be immersed in the experience of what it means to be a migrant on the run for freedom. So I want you to read.”

Considered one of the most anticipated books of 2020, “American Dirt” follows Lydia Quixano Perez, a woman who runs a bookstore in Acapulco, Mexico. When the boss of the city’s newest drug cartel becomes the subject of a tell-all profile by Lydia’s journalist husband, the couple and their son Luca find themselves on the run and become migrants.

The book has been praised by authors like Stephen King and John Grisham, while Lauren Groff hailed it in The New York Times as “propulsive” and “written with good intentions.” But many writers and book critics have said the book tells the story of a Mexican family through a reductionist, white lens.

According to many reviews, the book’s central problem is “brownface.” Some critics have drawn attention to Cummins’ identity (the author, who is of Irish-Puerto Rican heritage, describes herself on Twitter as “Irlandaisa/Boricua/Persona” but she has also identified herself as white) and are questioning the accuracy of her portrayal of Mexican immigrants.

“Latina or no, Cummins certainly isn’t Mexican or Chicana. That’s a problem,” writer David Bowles explains in a Medium post where he also calls the novel “harmful, appropriating, inaccurate, trauma-porn melodrama.”

Bowles’ take echoes much of what Latinx writer Myriam Gurba wrote in a piece titled, “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature” about Cummins’ novel. Gurba claims Cummins’ “clumsy and distorted spectacle” is another example of a white writer “appropriating genius works by people of color” and “repackaging them for mass racially ‘colorblind’ consumption.”

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Christopher Tolkien has died at 95. The youngest son of Lord of the Rings author was responsible for editing and publishing much of his father’s work, according Nicola Slawson from The Guardian… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Christopher Tolkien, the son of Lord Of The Rings author JRR Tolkien, has died aged 95, the Tolkien Society has announced. The society, which promotes the life and works of the celebrated writer, released a short statement on Twitter to confirm the news.

The statement said: “Christopher Tolkien has died at the age of 95. The Tolkien Society sends its deepest condolences to Baillie, Simon, Adam, Rachel and the whole Tolkien family.”

Tolkien, who was born in Leeds in 1924, was the third and youngest son of the revered fantasy author and his wife Edith. He grew up listening to his father’s tales of Bilbo Baggins, which later became the children’s fantasy novel, The Hobbit.

He drew many of the original maps detailing the world of Middle-earth for his father’s The Lord of the Rings when the series was first published between 1954 and 55. He also edited much of his father’s posthumously published work following his death in 1973. Since 1975 he had lived in France with Baillie.

Tolkien Society chairman Shaun Gunner praised Christopher’s commitment to his father’s work and said: “Millions of people around the world will be forever grateful to him … We have lost a titan and he will be sorely missed.”

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Teen book club founder created a ‘brotherhood’ with African-American boys through reading, according to Kelly McCarthy from ABC News… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Sidney Keys III told “Good Morning America” that his idea to create Books N Bros was born from his own setbacks and struggles.

“I used to have a really bad stutter in elementary school and I would get teased for it,” he said. “Reading was kind of my escape from my stutter because in my head I was able to visualize things — and play out all the events clearly.”

He said he wanted to start up Books N Bros “so that I could talk to other people, and especially boys, about books that I love to read because it’s like a brotherhood.”

The reading club that he started at just 10 years old, with the help of his mom Winnie Caldwell, now has over 250 “bros” ages 7 to 13 from all over the U.S. and Canada.

“I’m extremely proud. He’s grown into such a leader over the last few years,” Caldwell said. “I remember the first time we had a meetup of seven boys and we grew from seven boys to 30 boys and he was so scared to talk in front of 30 people and since then he’s spoken to a group of over 3,000 people, so he continues to amaze me.”

The book club chooses works that celebrate black culture and African-American literature as well as entrepreneurship, financial literacy and more.

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