The plague ravaged William Shakespeare’s world and inspired his work, from Romeo and Juliet to Macbeth, according to Ben Cohen from Slate.com…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

One summer day in 1564, a weaver’s apprentice died in a small village in the English countryside, a local tragedy that was immortalized in the margins of the town’s records. Next to the name of the weaver’s apprentice were three ominous words: “Hic incipit pestis.”

Here begins the plague.

The plague wiped out a sizable portion of this particular town. Who lived and who died was seemingly a matter of chance. The plague could decimate one family and spare the family next door. In one house on a road called Henley Street, for example, was a young couple who had already lost two children to previous waves of the plague, and their newborn son was 3 months old when they locked their doors and sealed their windows to keep the plague from invading their home again. They knew from their unfortunate experience that infants were especially vulnerable to this morbid disease. They understood better than perhaps anyone on Henley Street that it would be a miracle if he survived. It was as if every family was flipping a coin unfairly weighted toward heads and betting a child’s life on tails. But when the plague was done with this small village in the English countryside, a little town called Stratford-upon-Avon, the couple breathed a sigh of relief that their young boy was still alive. His name was William Shakespeare.

There’s a possibility that Shakespeare developed immunity to the plague because of his exposure when he was an infant, but that speculation began only centuries later and only because the plague was a constant nuisance to Shakespeare. “Plague was the single most powerful force shaping his life and those of his contemporaries,” wrote Jonathan Bate, one of his many biographers. The plague was naturally a taboo subject for much of Shakespeare’s writing career. Even when it was the only thing on anybody’s mind, nobody could bring himself to speak about it. Londoners went to the city’s playhouses so they could temporarily escape their dread of the plague. A play about the plague had the appeal of watching a movie about a plane crash while 35,000 feet in the air.

Read full post on Slate.com

Barbara Neely, author of first black female series sleuth Blanche White, dies at 78, according to Mark Kennedy from the Associated Press…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Award-winning mystery writer Barbara Neely, who created the first black female series sleuth in mainstream American publishing, died last week after a brief illness, according to her publisher, Brash Books. She was 78.

Neely is perhaps best known for her four-book Blanche White series, which had at its center a nomadic amateur detective and domestic worker who uses the invisibility inherent to her job as an advantage in pursuit of the truth.

“I realized the mystery genre was perfect to talk about serious subjects,” Neely told Ms. Magazine in 2000, “and it could carry the political fiction I wanted to write.”

Neely was named the 2020 Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. In announcing the honor last year, the association described Neely as “a groundbreaking author” who “tackles tough social issues with an unflinching eye and a wry sense of humor.”

The Blanche White series includes 1992’s “Blanche on the Lam,” 1994’s “Blanche Among the Talented Tenth,” 1998’s “Blanche Cleans Up” and 2000’s “Blanche Passes Go.” They push past mystery into political and social commentary, like tackling violence against women, racism, class boundaries and sexism. “If Toni Morrison wrote murder mysteries, they would probably read a bit like Barbara Neely’s,” the women’s general-interest website Bustle said in 2015.

“Blanche on the Lam” won the Agatha Award, Anthony Award, and the Macavity Award for best first novel, as well as the Go on Girl! Award from Black Women’s Reading Club. Her series has been translated into several languages including French, Czech, German and Japanese. She was included in 2012’s “100 American Crime Writers” by Steven Powell.

“She was an inspiration, a trailblazer and a remarkable talent and voice whose loss is deeply felt,” Mystery Writers of America said in a statement following her death. “Her talent and memory will live on forever in her wonderful books.”

Read full post on USA Today

With help from a lot of children, 90-year-old Sri Lankan author Sybil Wettasinghe’s Wonder Crystal set a new Guinness World Record for the most alternate endings for a book: 1,250, according to Ben Hooper from UPI… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

A Sri Lankan author was awarded a Guinness World Record after enlisting the help of the country’s children to write a book with 1,250 alternative endings.

Sybil Wettasinghe, 90, author and illustrator of popular children’s books including The Umbrella Thief, enlisted the help of students from all across the country to contribute writings, drawings and poetry to complete the story in her book, Wonder Crystal.

Guinness World Records said the resulting tome, which has 1,250 different completed endings, is being recognized as a record holder for the most alternative endings for a book.

Wettasinghe said she received a total of about 20,000 submissions from children as part of the effort.

Read full post on UPI

Yesterday saw staffers across Hachette Book Group’s various imprints stage a walkout to protest the acquisition of Woody Allen’s memoir, according to John Maher from Publishers Weekly… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Three days after Grand Central Publishing announced that it would publish director Woody Allen’s forthcoming memoir Apropos of Nothing, employees at the imprint and at Little, Brown, a sister imprint at Hachette Book Group, staged a walkout in protest of the acquisition. The walkouts, which have affected both the New York and Boston offices, have been joined by select HBG employees at other imprints as well, including Basic, Hachette Books, Forever, and Orbit. Allen has been accused by his adoptive daughter, Dylan Farrow, of molesting her in 1992, when she was seven years old.

“This afternoon, Grand Central Publishing employees are walking out of the Hachette New York office in protest of the publication of Woody Allen’s memoir,” an email auto-reply from Grand Central employees’ email addresses stated on Thursday afternoon. “We stand in solidarity with Ronan Farrow, Dylan Farrow, and survivors of sexual assault.”

Little, Brown is the publisher of Ronan Farrow, the author of the bestselling Harvey Weinstein exposé Catch and Kill and Allen’s estranged son, who has staunchly defended his sister and stood by her allegations in spite of Allen’s consistent denials. In a post on Twitter on March 3, Farrow severed his ties with the publisher.

“I was disappointed to learn that Hachette, my publisher, acquired Woody Allen’s memoir after other major publishers refused to do so and concealed the decision from me and its own employees while we were working on Catch and Kill—a book about how powerful men, including Woody Allen, avoid accountability for sexual abuse,” Farrow wrote in his March 3 post.

Read full post on Publishers Weekly

From the hollers of Appalachia to the halls of Yale and Harvard Law, the course of Cassie Chambers’ life is a classic American story in the Horatio Alger mode, according to Chloe Hadavas from Slate…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Cassie Chambers‘ new memoir Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains rejects the American myth that pluck and gumption can pull you out of poverty. Instead, Hill Women is a gritty, warm love letter to Appalachian communities and the resourceful women who lead them: aunts who cut off their skin cancer with a pocketknife, mothers in pain who refuse to go on disability in defiance of stereotypes of “lazy hillbillies.” Hill Women feels especially urgent now, in our post-2016, post-Hillbilly Elegy America. In a sense, Chambers is responding to the “bootstraps” narrative of J.D. Vance’s controversial memoir, which has been criticized for blaming Appalachians for their own circumstances. Hill Women shows an Appalachia that Hillbilly Elegy obscured.

Read full post on Slate

According to Sarah Knapton from The Telgraph, neuroscientists have discovered that the same cognitive and emotional parts of the brain are stimulated whether a person hears words, or reads them on a page…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Dr Fatma Deniz, a researcher in neuroscience says: “At a time when more people are absorbing information via audiobooks, podcasts and even audio texts, our study shows that, whether they’re listening to or reading the same materials, they are processing semantic information similarly.

“We knew that a few brain regions were activated similarly when you hear a word and read the same word, but I was not expecting such strong similarities in the meaning representation across a large network of brain regions in both these sensory modalities.”

Language is a complex process that involves many regions of the brain, and it was previously thought the brain dealt with spoken and written information differently.

For the study, nine volunteers listened to stories from ‘The Moth Radio Hour,’ a popular podcast broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in which people read out true stories. The study participants were then asked to read the same stories.

Read full post on The Telegraph

If you loved the critically acclaimed and astonishing film Parasite—directed by Bong Joon-ho—and you’re looking for more great Korean artistry to scratch that itch, look no further than the incredible books in translation coming out of South Korea right now… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The Vegetarian: A Novel

by Han Kang

Kindle price: $12.99

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.

* * *

Please Look After Mom

by Kyung-Sook Shin

Kindle price: $12.99

When sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mom?

Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, Please Look After Mom is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love.

* * *

The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly: A Novel

by Sun-mi Hwang

Kindle price: $4.99

This is the story of a hen named Sprout. No longer content to lay eggs on command, only to have them carted off to the market, she glimpses her future every morning through the barn doors, where the other animals roam free, and comes up with a plan to escape into the wild—and to hatch an egg of her own.

An anthem for freedom, individuality and motherhood featuring a plucky, spirited heroine who rebels against the tradition-bound world of the barnyard, The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is a novel of universal resonance that also opens a window on Korea, where it has captivated millions of readers. And with its array of animal characters—the hen, the duck, the rooster, the dog, the weasel—it calls to mind such classics in English as Animal Farm and Charlotte’s Web.

* * *

Rent or buy PARASITE on Amazon Prime