Riot New Media

Hayao Miyazaki Comes Out Of Retirement To Make One More Film

Hayao Miyazaki is famous for his beautiful animated films Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle (an adaptation of the novel by Diana Wynne Jones), Kiki’s Delivery Service, and more. The 80-year-old filmmaker retired from his Studio Ghibli position in 2013, but recently told The New York Times Magazine he’ll be coming out of retirement to make one more film, an adaptation of a beloved novel called How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino. No details on when the film will be released, but an English translation of the book was recently released in the U.S.

Authors Of Color Speak Out Against Efforts To Ban Books On Race

Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, is reporting that efforts to remove books from schools and libraries are the highest she’s seen in her twenty-year tenure. According to her, certain groups are making organized attacks by targeting books that celebrate gender and racial diversity, to the point where her office is receiving multiple reports of challenges each day, where they used to see a couple each week. Authors and artists Kwame Alexander, Sheetal Sheth, and more speak out against these challenges.

What Happened To Amazon’s Bookstore?

The New York Times took a deep dive into the ways that Amazon’s bookstore, once a foundation of its business, has evolved and gone off the rails. One such example of this is a suit that author and publisher John C. Boland brought against Amazon when he discovered that third party sellers were attempting to re-sell his titles $900+ over list price, and were claiming the release dates were in the 18th century when in reality, they were published in 2011. This is just one tactic that third party sellers use to try and garner sales, begging the question: Has Amazon lost control of their marketplace?

Penguin Random House US Campaign Identifies 2021 Book Trends

Penguin Random House US has created a new campaign called Find Your Light to reflect on the growth of the book market this year, which saw US book sales up by 12%. Find Your Light was created in collaboration with branding and marketing agency Posture Media and features illustrations from Lynn Baik. Some highlights? Apparently, we collectively listened to the audiobook version of A Promised Land by Barack Obama for the equivalent of 4,255 years in 2021. Also, over 20 million copies of manga books sold this year, more than double any other year on record.

Malcolm X’s Former Prison Cell to Be Library for Incarcerated People

Reginald Dwayne Betts, a MacArthur Award-winning poet who himself spent eight years in prison, is planning to convert the prison cell that’s believed to be Malcolm X’s former cell into a library for incarcerated people. While most prison libraries focus on legal texts, the Malcolm X Freedom Library will include a curated mix of fiction and nonfiction books, including prison literature like Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land and John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers. The library will also include many traditional classics, and about one-fifth of the books will be in Spanish.

Laverne Cox Joins the Cast of Netflix’s Uglies

Laverne Cox has joined the cast of the Netflix film Uglies, an adaptation of Scott Westerfeld’s bestselling novel of the same name. Cox, who is known for her roles in Promising Young Woman and Orange Is the New Black, joins the previously announced Uglies cast members Joey King, Keith Powers, Brianne Tju and Chase Stokes. The role Cox will play in the film has yet to be disclosed.

There’ve Been More Than 155 Book Challenges Since June: This Week’s Censorship News

ALA has documented 155 book challenge cases since June, but the number isn’t high enough. Here’s that story and more of this week’s book censorship news.

Riz Ahmed and Lulu Wang to Produce Comedy Series The Son of Good Fortune

Riz Ahmed’s Left Handed Films and Lulu Wang’s Local Time are partnering to develop the comedy series The Son of Good Fortune, an adaptation of Lysley Tenorio’s novel of the same name, for Amazon. The novel follows the story of an undocumented Filipino teenager in the Bay area who is working through his troubled relationship with his mother, a former B-movie action star, while also falling in love for the first time and trying to figure out how to pay back a massive amount of debt. Filipino and Korean writer, director, actor and stand-up comic Andrew Lopez will adapt the book for the screen and executive produce, alongside Riz Ahmed and Allie Moore of Left Handed and Lulu Wang and Dani Melia for Local Time.

This Black-Owned Bookstore is Delivering Books on Horseback

Harriett’s Bookshop, an independent bookstore in Philadelphia, has taken to delivering books on horseback. Jeannine A. Cook, the owner of Harriett’s Bookshop, says the idea started with her partnership with the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, a North Philly organization known for promoting horseback riding for inner city youth. “December 2020 I took my first ride on [horseback] in partnership with the Fletcher Street Riding Club. From there we’ve periodically found ways to bring together the world of horses and books. It is believed that Harriett Tubman stole a horse to deliver her elderly parents to freedom. There is a rich riding tradition among our ancestors and many indigenous cultures. That tradition continues with us,” Cook told Because Of Them We Can. To learn more about the bookshop, check out their website here.

Read the New Poem by Saeed Jones

Columbus poet, essayist, and author Saeed Jones recently shared the title piece from his forthcoming book, Alive at the End of the World, which is hitting shelves in 2022. The poem was released yesterday via the author’s Werk-In-Progress newsletter, but you can read the poem in full online. Jones said the poem emerged from a time when he was reflecting on the apocalyptic state of the world in 2020. “I think what I’ve learned is the apocalypse is a state of being, and it’s not a linear, one-time event,” Jones said in an interview with Alive. “Every time there’s a mass shooting, every time a cop shoots a kid and gets away with it, every time we learn about a sexual assault and it’s just paved over and someone becomes a Supreme Court justice. Those are all apocalyptic, world-ending events, or at least they should be, because that’s how meaningful they are to the people implicated.” Here is Jones’ full poem.

Why Police Shouldn’t Be in Libraries (and How to Help Change That)

Libraries are an essential public institution. They should be a safe, accessible space for everyone. So why are there police in libraries, compromising this very safety?