I can’t attend, for the road between my poem and Damascus is cut off for postmodern reasons.
–“I Can’t Attend,” by Ghayath Almadhoun

No ISBN sequence can keep track the world’s recent homeless, but the books won’t stop coming. As the refugee crisis grows unremittingly, with people out of Syria, El Salvador, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Bosnia… as the numbers mount, so do the novels and short stories. Fiction that grapples with the dislocation, the desperation, has surged over the past decade or so, and the output includes some celebrated recent titles. This year, our purgatorial 2020, has seen a fresh flurry, and several prove highly distinctive, both fine and strange.

Myself, attracted to such imaginations (and perhaps prodded by the ghost of my father, an economic refugee out of Southern Italy), I’ve been struck especially by that last element: the strangeness of these creations. Dream passages, nutty exaggeration, linguistic somersaults, disorienting shifts of frame and focus—these devices and others distinguish a surprising number of the imaginative works that struggle with these broken lives. That goes as well for authors working in their second or third language, a situation that you’d think would make them rely on the simple and standard. Instead, they embrace the subversive, and this refusal to conform gives me my essay. I’d argue that a norm-busting impulse distinguishes the most authentic fiction about migrants and refugees.

Writing a Book? Here’s How Authors Make Money.

photo credit: CHRISTOPHER MICHEL

Hugh Howey

For many in the self-publishing community, bestselling author Hugh Howey needs no introduction. He has written numerous sci-fi novels across multiple series, including the Bern Saga, the Sand series, and the postapocalyptic Silo Saga, which began with Wool, published in 2011 through Amazon’s Kindle Direct program. The series is set in a future when humanity has escaped an uninhabitable surface world by moving into underground silos.

This year, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published all three Silo books—Wool, Shift, and Dust—individually and as a box set. The books have new covers, and the set features original tie-in essays and a chapbook of short stories.

Found on LitHub

By Corinne Segal

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November 30, 2020, 3:48pm

There’s a new union on the block: Verso Books announced today that its staff has organized to join the Washington-Baltimore News Guild (WBNG), a unit of the NewsGuild and the Communications Workers of America. Management voluntarily recognized the union last week, according to a statement from the publisher.

The move was meant to formalize the policies that staff have organized around in recent years, including salary banding, a democratic decision-making process, and others, according to the statement. Senior publicist Julia Judge and editor Ben Mabie, the current shop steward, answered some further questions about the process of unionizing and some details that others hoping to do the same should consider.

Why NewsGuild? I know some prior attempts at unionizing within publishing have been with UAW, so I’m wondering what you can share about that selection process. UAW is one of the best in the business and we have great respect for the work they’ve done across arts and culture organizations—Film at Lincoln Center (who just voted last week in favor of a union), McNally Jackson, the New Museum, and Asian American Writers’ Workshop, to name a few. We had an early and strong connection with the organizers at the NewsGuild and appreciate the work they’ve done with new media outlets in particular. Additionally, the NewsGuild has been growing by leaps and bounds in recent years and has an expressed interest in organizing publishing, a historically unorganized industry with no shortage of labor issues. They are currently building a program to help New York-based publishing workers to get organized. We look forward to seeing the fruits of these efforts pay off with other shops in the coming months and years and are proud to be one of the first publishers to come on board.