What’s the Point of Epigraphs Anyway?
Writers and readers alike love to argue about the quotations in the opening pages of their favourite books
Read MoreTajja Isen
Self-Diagnosis Is Making Memoir Too Predictable
The joy of reading memoir is to watch another mind puzzle through its inner mechanics. If the outcome is already decided, why bother?
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The Hidden Racism of Book Cover Design
The publishing industry’s troubling reliance on visual stereotypes
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Alice Munro Was Bigger than Canada
Here artists are celebrated by virtue of their nationality. Munro showed me I could escape those tropes
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How Do You Even Sell a Book Anymore?
As sales slump, the labour of trying to bottle hype is largely left to writers
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The Case for Never Reading the Book Jacket
I don’t want to be told what’s going to happen and I definitely don’t want to be told what the book is “about”
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Do We Really Need a Taylor Swift Reporter?
Outlets like USA Today are hiring beat reporters to write exclusively about Swift and Beyoncé. But investing in this kind of journalism distracts from stories people actually need
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The Next Target in the War on Affirmative Action? Law Firms
The move to weed out equitable hiring is part of a much longer history of exclusion in both the US and Canada
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Goodreads Is Terrible for Books. Why Can’t We All Quit It?
It’s not entirely clear who it’s for and what its function should be in a rapidly changing literary ecosystem
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TikTok Is Becoming a Publisher. Will It Ruin the Book Industry?
BookTok is beloved as a guerrilla democratizing force, but the platform’s pivot risks killing the thing that makes it great
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