October 2024

What is the first American graphic novel?

What is the first American graphic novel?

Graphic novel is a terrible term. It is never used with any kind of precision. The three graphic novels most non-nerds are likely to have encountered are Maus, Persepolis, and Fun Home, none of which are novels (being memoirs). Somehow Harvey Pekar’s Our Cancer Year and Joe Sacco’s Palestine and John Lewis’s March and Derf’s Kent State are all graphic novels despite their non-fiction credentials. Adrian Tomine’s 32 Stories and Gilbert Hernandez’s Fear of Comics are graphic novels despite being quite explicitly collections of short stories.

October 28, 2024 by Books

Secret library of explicit books prompts investigations in PA School District

Secret library of explicit books prompts investigations in Lebanon County school district

“When I went through and saw the vulgarity and profanity within this book, I was shocked. One book handed to me contained very graphic sexual content, derogatory terms, and detailed explanations of explicit acts, including depictions of BDSM and other inappropriate behaviors,” she said.

October 25, 2024 by School Libraries

An investigation exposes data brokers using ads to help track almost any phone

Locate X uses a phone%u2019s mobile advertising ID to create a vast network of device locations

An investigation conducted by a data privacy group has revealed a vast tracking network that can follow the movements of a person’s phone, according to reports from 404 Media and Krebs on Security. The people-tracking service, called Locate X, reportedly lets users follow a device using its mobile advertising identifier, a unique number assigned to phones.

October 25, 2024 by Privacy

Texas condemned for placing book on colonization in library’s fiction section

Outcry in Montgomery county as Linda Coombs’ book on European colonization of Native American land reclassified

Anti-censorship advocates have joined the book publisher Penguin Random House in condemning a Texas county that reclassified an account of European settlers’ colonization of Indigenous Americans as fiction.

The furor in Montgomery county – near Houston – follows the decision by a citizens review panel, at the behest of rightwing activists, to place Colonization and the Wampanoag Story by Linda Coombs in the fiction section of children’s libraries

October 21, 2024 by Books Censorship

Dracula author Bram Stoker’s lost story unearthed after 134 years in National Library of Ireland

National Library of Ireland

An amateur historian has discovered a long-lost short story by Bram Stoker, published just seven years before his legendary gothic novel Dracula.

Brian Cleary stumbled upon the 134-year-old ghostly tale while browsing the archives of the National Library of Ireland.

Gibbet Hill was originally published in a Dublin newspaper in 1890 – when the Irishman started working on Dracula – but has been undocumented ever since.

Stoker biographer Paul Murray says the story sheds light on his development as an author and was a significant “station on his route to publishing Dracula”.

The ghostly story tells the tale of a sailor murdered by three criminals whose bodies were strung up on a hanging gallows as a warning to passing travellers.

October 21, 2024 by Authors Books

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