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Tag: Books and literature

  • Unpublished works and manuscript by legendary Argentine writer Cortázar sell for $42,120 at auction

    Unpublished works and manuscript by legendary Argentine writer Cortázar sell for $42,120 at auction

    MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — A buyer from Argentina paid $42,120 for a manuscript of works, including seven unpublished stories, by legendary Argentine writer Julio Cortázar at an auction Thursday in the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo.

    The bundle of 60-year-old sheets bound together with metal fasteners bearing the inscription “Julio Cortázar. Historias de Cronopios y de Famas. Paris. 1952” was the basis for the writer’s iconic “Cronopios and Famas” book, published in 1962.

    The buyer paid $36,000, plus the auction house’s 17% commission, for the typewritten manuscript containing 46 short stories that make up the heart of what ended up becoming one of Cortázar’s most famous works.

    Of the total stories, 35 were published in “Cronopios and Famas.” Some were printed exactly as found in the manuscript that was once thought to be lost forever. It was discovered in Montevideo last year, while others underwent editorial changes. Three other stories were published in magazines before Cortázar’s death in 1984.

    The seven unpublished works are: “Inventory,” “Letter from one fame to another fame,” “Automatic Butterflies,” “Travels and Dreams,” “Tiny Unicorn,” “Mirror’s Anger” and “King of the Sea.”

    Cortázar is one of Latin America’s most celebrated writers, known for several groundbreaking works that included innovative narrative techniques that influenced future generations of writers.

    The 60 yellowed sheets had a starting bid of $12,000 and were being auctioned by Zorrilla, an auction house in Montevideo, in partnership with the Buenos Aires art antique dealer Hilario.

    In 1952, Cortázar sent a manuscript titled “Stories of Cronopios and Famas” from Paris to Luis María Baudizzone, the head of Argentine Argos publishing. Baudizzone, a personal friend of the writer, who at the time had only published his first novel, “Bestiario,” never responded, according to Cortázar scholars.

    “These little tales of cronopios and famas have been my great companions in Paris. I jotted them down on the street, in cafes, and only two or three exceed one page,” Cortázar wrote to his friend Eduardo Jonquiéres in October 1952. In the same letter, he informed Jonquiéres that he had sent a typescript to Baudizzone.

    More than half a century later, the typescript began to be studied by specialists when the son of a book collector, who had passed away in Montevideo, found it at the bottom of a box with other materials.

    “It was something that had been lost,” Roberto Vega, head of the Hilario auction house, told The Associated Press. “The book was in an unlisted box. It could have happened that the collector died, and things could have ended up who knows where. It could easily have been lost.”

    Vega speculates that Cortázar “lost track of the manuscript” after he sent it to Baudizzone.

    The collector’s family, who requested anonymity, does not know how Cortázar’s manuscript ended up in the estate of the deceased, who had silently cherished it. The heir contacted Lucio Aquilanti, a Buenos Aires antiquarian bookseller, and a prominent Cortázar bibliographer, who confirmed the piece’s authenticity.

    Institutions, collectors and researchers from both the Americas and Europe had been inquiring about the manuscript recently because of its rarity.

    “Very few originals by Cortázar have been sold,” Vega said.

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  • Author and activist Louise Meriwether, who wrote the novel ‘Daddy Was a Number Runner,’ dies at 100

    Author and activist Louise Meriwether, who wrote the novel ‘Daddy Was a Number Runner,’ dies at 100

    NEW YORK — Louise Meriwether, the author and activist whose coming-of-age novel “Daddy Was a Number Runner” is widely regarded as a groundbreaking and vital portrait of race, gender and class, has died. She was 100.

    Meriwether died Tuesday at the Amsterdam Nursing Home in Manhattan, according to Cheryl Hill, a filmmaker who said she is part of the author’s “extended family.” The cause was old age, Hill said.

    “Daddy Was a Number Runner,” published in 1970, tells of a poor Black community in Harlem during the 1930s as seen through the eyes of 12-year-old Francie Coffin. The narrative is a grim panorama of gangs, gambling, confrontations with the police and endless worrying about money. But it is also a testament to the human spirit, whether Francie’s growing consciousness of her sexuality or the tenuous bond she feels as she looks out on the street life of Harlem.

    “I wanted to hug them all,” Francie thinks to herself. “We belonged to each other somehow. I’m getting sick, I thought, as I shifted my elbows on the windowsill. I must have caught some rare disease. But that sweet feeling hung on and I loved all of Harlem gently and didn’t want to be Puerto Rican or anything else but my own rusty self.”

    Meriwether’s debut novel sold hundreds of thousands of copies and, along with such contemporaneous works as Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” helped mark a rise of Black women’s voices in literature. James Baldwin, who contributed a foreword, praised Meriwether for telling “everyone who can read or feel what it means to be a black man or woman in this country.” National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson was among many who would later credit the novel with helping inspire them to become authors.

    In 2016 the Feminist Press and TAYO Literary Magazine launched the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize for “debut women/nonbinary writers of color.” The same year she received a lifetime achievement from the Before Columbus Foundation for her contributions to multicultural literature.

    Meriwether was dedicated to enlightening young readers about the achievements of Black people and completed biographies of Rosa Parks, heart surgeon Dr. Daniel Hale Williams and Robert Smalls, an escaped slave who became a Civil War hero and member of Congress. Her other novels included the Civil War drama “Fragments of the Ark” and the modern love story “Shadow Dancing.”

    Meriwether also was a journalist who wrote for the Los Angeles Times, Essence and other publications and a self-described “peacenik” who would recall dodging eggs while marching in May Day parades, protesting the “disastrous” policies of the IMF and World Bank and being arrested during a sit-in against the extremist John Birch Society. As head of the anti-apartheid organization Black Concern, she protested Muhammad Ali’s plan in 1972 to fight before a racially segregated audience in South Africa. (The bout was eventually cancelled over financial issues).

    Meriwether taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Houston. She was married twice, to Angelo Meriwether and Earle Howe, with both marriages ending in divorce.

    “Daddy Was a Number Runner” was a personal story. She was born Louise Jenkins in Haverstraw, New York, and later moved to Brooklyn and then Harlem, one of five children of a housekeeper and a janitor who became a number runner when he couldn’t find work. A passionate reader, Meriwether vowed to rise above the “deep feeling of shame” she felt over being in an all-white grade school in Brooklyn, to write her way “out of the wilderness.”

    She majored in English at New York University and in her 40s received a master’s in journalism from UCLA. She developed “Daddy Was a Number Runner” through the Watts Writers Workshop, founded by screenwriter Budd Schulberg and others in 1965 not long after the devastating riots in South Central Los Angeles. Around the same time, she became one of the few Black women working in Hollywood, hired as a story analyst by Universal Studios. After returning to New York in the late 1960s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild and befriended Angelou and Sonia Sanchez, among others.

    In a 2010 commencement speech at Pine Manor College, Meriwether explained that writing meant the willingness to draw upon the “totality” of one’s self. She remembered criticizing a story submitted by a Black student at Sarah Lawrence, contending that the young woman had not revealed everything she knew.

    “She replied, ‘If I write the truth I’ll be crying every step of the way,’” Meriwether said of the student. “‘All right,’ I counseled, ‘Rewrite it and cry.’”

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  • Mateo Askaripour’s ‘This Great Hemisphere’ is a novel about power set 500 years from now

    Mateo Askaripour’s ‘This Great Hemisphere’ is a novel about power set 500 years from now

    Mateo Askaripour is set to publish a follow-up to his acclaimed debut novel “Black Buck.”

    ByThe Associated Press

    October 10, 2023, 1:39 PM

    This image released by Dutton shows author Mateo Askaripour, whose next book, “This Great Hemisphere” is scheduled for next summer. (Andrew Askaripour/Dutton via AP)

    The Associated Press

    NEW YORK — Mateo Askaripour’s follow-up to his acclaimed debut novel “Black Buck” is a look into the distant future.

    Dutton, a Penguin Random House imprint, announced Tuesday that Askaripour’s “This Great Hemisphere” is scheduled for release next summer. The novel is set 500 years from now and tells of a society in which some people are born invisible and consigned to second-class citizenship. One invisible person, Sweetmint, embarks on a quest to find her missing brother.

    ”’This Great Hemisphere’ is a novel about the nature of power, the lengths people will go to in order to gain and maintain it, as well as the almost biological compulsion we all possess to protect those we love,” Askaripour said in a statement. “It is a call to arms for the unseen, a rallying cry for those who are tired of being ignored and forgotten. And, of course, it’s a hell of an adventure.”

    Askaripour’s “Black Buck,” released in 2021, was a widely praised satire of the tech industry and a Jenna Bush book club pick by the “Today” show.

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  • Honoree Fleming, a retired university dean, shot to death on Vermont trail

    Honoree Fleming, a retired university dean, shot to death on Vermont trail

    Vermont State Police are asking the public, businesses and hunters near a state university campus to review their surveillance systems after Honoree Fleming, a retired dean and professor who was married to best-selling author Ron Powers, was found shot to death on a rail trail this week.

    Police said Friday night an autopsy showed that Fleming, 77, of Castleton, died from a gunshot wound to the head on Thursday afternoon. She was found on the Delaware & Hudson Rail Trail about a mile (1.61 kilometers) south of the Castleton campus of Vermont State University, which was closed.

    “The campus will reopen Monday morning, providing a supportive environment for those who wish to come together,” Vermont State University spokesperson Sylvia Plumb said in an email Saturday. Monday events such as an admissions open house were canceled. Regular class schedules were expected to resume Tuesday.

    A witness reported a possible suspect was northbound on the trail walking towards the campus after gunshots were heard, police said. The witness described a 5-foot-10-inch (1.78-meter) white male with short, dark-colored hair, last seen wearing a dark gray T-shirt and carrying a black backpack. State police said he is considered to be armed and dangerous and asked anyone who might have seen him to call them.

    Maj. Dan Trudeau, head of the state police criminal division, said in a news conference Friday afternoon that some security camera footage from the area was reviewed, “which hasn’t been much of a help at this rate,” he said. “We’re still canvassing the area” and trying to reach people at their homes.

    “It is early hunting season,” Trudeau said. “There’s hunters who may have game cameras in the woods.” He asked if they could check them.

    Fleming was a beloved retired dean of education and researcher “with countless papers published,” the university said in a statement Friday.

    She also was the wife of Powers, who co-wrote the book “Flags of Our Fathers,” about the men involved in the famous flag-raising during the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima. A Pulitzer Prize winner in 1973 for criticism as a television-radio columnist, he also wrote a biography of Mark Twain and collaborated with the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy on the politician’s memoir, “True Compass.” More recently, Powers wrote “No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America,” about his sons’ battles with schizophrenia.

    Fleming died days before what would have been the couple’s 45th wedding anniversary.

    Her husband said she was walking on her favorite trail.

    “There is an area-wide dragnet out for her killer,” Powers posted online Friday. “Police believe that it was random, but all possibilities remain open.”

    He added, “Those of you who knew her know that she was beautifully named. I have never known a more sterling heart and soul than hers. She has taken far more than half my own heart and soul with her.”

    ____

    McCormack reported from Concord, New Hampshire.

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  • Retired university dean who was married to author Ron Powers shot to death on Vermont trail

    Retired university dean who was married to author Ron Powers shot to death on Vermont trail

    Vermont State Police are asking the public, businesses and hunters near a state university campus to review their surveillance systems after a retired dean and professor who was married to best-selling author Ron Powers was found shot to death on a rail trail this week.

    Police said Friday night an autopsy showed that Honoree Fleming, 77, of Castleton, died from a gunshot wound to the head on Thursday afternoon. She was found on the Delaware & Hudson Rail Trail about a mile (1.61 kilometers) south of the Castleton campus of Vermont State University, which was closed.

    “The campus will reopen Monday morning, providing a supportive environment for those who wish to come together,” Vermont State University spokesperson Sylvia Plumb said in an email Saturday. Monday events such as an admissions open house were canceled. Regular class schedules were expected to resume Tuesday.

    A witness reported a possible suspect was northbound on the trail walking towards the campus after gunshots were heard, police said. The witness described a 5-foot-10-inch (1.78-meter) white male with short, dark-colored hair, last seen wearing a dark gray T-shirt and carrying a black backpack. State police said he is considered to be armed and dangerous and asked anyone who might have seen him to call them.

    Maj. Dan Trudeau, head of the state police criminal division, said in a news conference Friday afternoon that some security camera footage from the area was reviewed, “which hasn’t been much of a help at this rate,” he said. “We’re still canvassing the area” and trying to reach people at their homes.

    “It is early hunting season,” Trudeau said. “There’s hunters who may have game cameras in the woods.” He asked if they could check them.

    Fleming was a beloved retired dean of education and researcher “with countless papers published,” the university said in a statement Friday.

    She also was the wife of Powers, who co-wrote the book “Flags of Our Fathers,” about the men involved in the famous flag-raising during the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima. A Pulitzer Prize winner in 1973 for criticism as a television-radio columnist, he also wrote a biography of Mark Twain and collaborated with the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy on the politician’s memoir, “True Compass.” More recently, Powers wrote “No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America,” about his sons’ battles with schizophrenia.

    Fleming died days before what would have been the couple’s 45th wedding anniversary.

    Her husband said she was walking on her favorite trail.

    “There is an area-wide dragnet out for her killer,” Powers posted online Friday. “Police believe that it was random, but all possibilities remain open.”

    He added, “Those of you who knew her know that she was beautifully named. I have never known a more sterling heart and soul than hers. She has taken far more than half my own heart and soul with her.”

    ____

    McCormack reported from Concord, New Hampshire.

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  • Nobel Prize in literature to be announced in Stockholm

    Nobel Prize in literature to be announced in Stockholm

    The Nobel Prize in literature will be announced Thursday, with the new laureate, or laureates, joining an illustrious list of past winners that ranges from Toni Morrison to Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre — who turned down the prize in 1964

    ByDAVID KEYTON Associated Press and MIKE CORDER Associated Press

    FILE – A Nobel Prize medal is displayed during a ceremony in New York on Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020. The Nobel Prize winners of 2023 will be announced throughout the weeks of Oct. 2 and 9. (Angela Weiss/Pool Photo via AP, File)

    The Associated Press

    STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Prize in literature will be announced Thursday, with the new laureate, or laureates, joining an illustrious list of past winners that ranges from Toni Morrison to Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre — who turned down the prize in 1964.

    This year’s winner or winners will be known at 1 p.m. (1100 GMT), assuming there is no slip-up similar to Wednesday, when a press release divulging the names of the three chemistry laureates was sent to Swedish media hours before the official press event to unveil the winners.

    Last year, French author Annie Ernaux won the prize for what the prize-giving Swedish Academy called “the courage and clinical acuity” of books rooted in her small-town background in the Normandy region of northwest France.

    Ernaux was just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel literature laureates. The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers, as well as too male-dominated.

    On Wednesday, the chemistry prize was awarded to Moungi Bawendi of MIT, Louis Brus of Columbia University, and Alexei Ekimov of Nanocrystals Technology Inc. They were honored for their work with tiny particles called quantum dots — tiny particles that can release very bright colored light and whose applications in everyday life include electronics and medical imaging.

    Earlier this week, Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

    On Tuesday, the physics prize went to French-Swedish physicist Anne L’Huillier, French scientist Pierre Agostini and Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz for producing the first split-second glimpse into the super-fast world of spinning electrons.

    The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences ends the awards season on Monday.

    The Nobel Prizes carry a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Winners also receive an 18-carat gold medal and diploma when they collect their Nobel Prizes at the award ceremonies in December.

    ___

    Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.

    ___

    Follow all AP stories about the Nobel Prizes at https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

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  • New book alleges Trump’s ex-chief of staff’s suits smelled ‘like a bonfire’ from burning papers

    New book alleges Trump’s ex-chief of staff’s suits smelled ‘like a bonfire’ from burning papers

    NEW YORK — A former aide in Donald Trump’s White House says chief of staff Mark Meadows burned papers so often after the 2020 election that it left his office smoky and even prompted his wife to complain that his suits smelled “like a bonfire.”

    Cassidy Hutchinson, who was a prominent congressional witness against former President Trump before the House Jan. 6 committee, described the burning papers in a new book set to be released Tuesday. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the book, “Enough.”

    Hutchinson was a White House staffer in her 20s who worked for Meadows and testified for two hours on national television about the White House’s inner workings leading up to and including the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

    Trump and Meadows tried to challenge the former president’s election loss in several states. Both are under indictment in Georgia for what prosecutors have called an illegal conspiracy to overturn the results.

    In her book, Hutchinson writes that starting in mid-December, Meadows wanted a fire burning in his office every morning. She says that when she would enter his office to bring him lunch or a package, she “would sometimes find him leaning over the fire, feeding papers into it, watching to make sure they burned.”

    Hutchinson had previously testified to the House Jan. 6 committee that she had seen Meadows burning documents in his office about a dozen times.

    Hutchinson said she did not know what papers he was burning but said it raised alarms because federal law regarding presidential records requires staff to keep original documents and send them to the National Archives.

    She said one day when Republican Rep. Devin Nunes of California came to meet with Meadows, the congressman asked Hutchinson to open the windows in Meadows’ office because it was smoky. She said she warned Meadows he would set off a smoke alarm.

    Later, in the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, when Trump’s staffers began packing to move out of the White House, Hutchinson said Meadows’ wife arrived to help and asked the aide to stop lighting the fireplace for Meadows because “all of his suits smell like a bonfire” and she could not keep up with the dry cleaning.

    A message seeking comment from Meadows’ attorney was not returned Monday.

    Hutchinson in her book also described a moment on the morning of Jan. 6, when she said former New York City Mayor and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani groped her backstage as Trump addressed his supporters in Washington.

    She said Giuliani slid his hand under her blazer and her skirt and ran his hand on her thigh after showing her a stack of documents related to his efforts to overturn the election.

    Giuliani denied the allegation in an interview on Newsmax last week, calling it “absolutely false, totally absurd.”

    “First, I’m not going to grope somebody at all. And number two, in front of like 100 people?” he said.

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  • A rare Truman Capote story from the early 1950s is being published for the first time

    A rare Truman Capote story from the early 1950s is being published for the first time

    NEW YORK — Along with such classics as “In Cold Blood” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Truman Capote had a history of work left uncompleted and unpublished.

    Capote, who died in 1984 shortly before his 60th birthday, spent much of his latter years struggling to write his planned Proustian masterpiece “Answered Prayers,” of which only excerpts were released. As a young man, he wrote a novel about a love affair between a socialite and a parking lot attendant that was published posthumously under the title “Summer Crossing.”

    Shorter work, too, was sometimes abandoned, including a piece released this week for the first time.

    Capote was in his mid-20s and a rising star when he moved from New York City to Taormina, Sicily, in 1950 and settled in a scenic villa named Fontana Vecchia, once occupied by D.H. Lawrence. Acclaimed for his debut novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” and for his eerie short story “Miriam,” Capote would describe the move to Europe as a needed escape from the American literary scene, which he likened to living inside a light bulb, and an ideal setting to get work done: He wrote the novel “The Grass Harp” in Sicily and worked on numerous short stories.

    “I am so happy to be writing stories again — they are my great love,” he wrote to a friend.

    One story from Sicily, “Another Day In Paradise,” is an unfinished work that appears in the new issue of The Strand Magazine. Written at a time of relative contentment for Capote, “Another Day” is a narrative of disillusion and entrapment: The middle-aged American heiress Iris Greentree has used her inheritance — a small one because her mother didn’t trust her with money — to buy a villa in Sicily. She will end up betrayed by the local man who persuaded to invest her money, Signor Carlo Petruzzi, and too broke to sell the home and return to the U.S.

    “The past had trained her to envision an affair from a futureless angle; at the most, she hoped such episodes would end in friendship. It was so humiliating that Carlo should have turned out not to be a friend. She’d trusted him to the extent of her capital: let him sell her the land, allowed him to build the villa, supply, at pirate prices, the native paraphernalia that furnished it,” Capote wrote.

    “He was an emotional crook and, beyond that, a common gangster who’d pocketed at least half the money supposedly spent on Belle Vista. All this she could forgive him — could, but didn’t. The unforgivable aspect of the ghastly man’s behavior was that it had destroyed the meaning of these lines in her journal: `I belong. At last, somewhere.’”

    Much of Capote’s fiction was set in New York or in the American South, but “Another Day in Paradise” has the easy pace, decorative language and cutting — sometimes cruel — humor of his best known work, and the themes of loneliness, fear and regret. Thomas Fahy, author of “Understanding Truman Capote,” says that the author likely related to Iris Greentree’s sense of displacement and alienation.

    “He was constantly moving around as a child, from New Orleans to Alabama to New York to Connecticut,” Fahy says. “You could see how his life became very lonely and isolated.”

    The Strand has published rare works by Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and many others. Managing editor Andrew Gulli found the Capote story in the Library of Congress, inside an “old red- and gold-scrolled Florentine notebook,” he writes on the Strand editorial page. The handwritten manuscript, worked in pencil, was at times so hard to make out that Gulli needed a transcriber to help prepare it for publication.

    Fahy says that Capote’s time in Sicily, where he remained for just over a year, left him with the kind of feelings many authors have when away from their native countries — a heightened sense of distance from home that likely helped inspire “Another in Paradise,” and a heightened clarity. which he drew upon for “The Grass Harp” and its memories of his years in Monroeville, Alabama.

    Capote biographer Gerard Clarke says that the author moved to Sicily in part because his partner, Jack Dunphy, wanted to live overseas, and because the strong American dollar made Italy more affordable than New York. Neither Clarke nor Fahy could cite a specific real-life model for Iris Greentree, but Capote does refer to a possible inspiration — the aunt of a boy who delivers ice — in his essay “Fontana Vecchia,” written in the early 1950s.

    “Blond, witty, the ice boy is a scholarly-looking child of eleven. He has a beautiful young aunt, one of the most attractive girls I have ever known, and I often talk to him about her,” Capote writes. “Why, I wanted to know, does A., the aunt, have no beau? Why is she all alone, never at the dances or the Sunday promenades? The ice boy says it is because his aunt has no use for the local men, that she is very unhappy and longs only to go to America.”

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  • John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and more authors sue OpenAI for copyright infringement

    John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and more authors sue OpenAI for copyright infringement

    NEW YORK — John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George R.R. Martin are among 17 authors suing OpenAI for “systematic theft on a mass scale,” the latest in a wave of legal action by writers concerned that artificial intelligence programs are using their copyrighted works without permission.

    In papers filed Tuesday in federal court in New York, the authors alleged “flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights” and called the ChatGPT program a “massive commercial enterprise” that is reliant upon “systematic theft on a mass scale.”

    The suit was organized by the Authors Guild and also includes David Baldacci, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen and Elin Hilderbrand among others.

    “It is imperative that we stop this theft in its tracks or we will destroy our incredible literary culture, which feeds many other creative industries in the U.S.,” Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said in a statement. “Great books are generally written by those who spend their careers and, indeed, their lives, learning and perfecting their crafts. To preserve our literature, authors must have the ability to control if and how their works are used by generative AI.”

    The lawsuit cites specific ChatGPT searches for each author, such as one for Martin that alleges the program generated “an infringing, unauthorized, and detailed outline for a prequel” to “A Game of Thrones” that was titled “A Dawn of Direwolves” and used “the same characters from Martin’s existing books in the series “A Song of Ice and Fire.”

    In a statement Wednesday, an OpenAI spokesperson said that the company respects “the rights of writers and authors, and believe they should benefit from AI technology.

    “We’re having productive conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild, and have been working cooperatively to understand and discuss their concerns about AI. We’re optimistic we will continue to find mutually beneficial ways to work together to help people utilize new technology in a rich content ecosystem,” the statement reads.

    Earlier this month, a handful of authors that included Michael Chabon and David Henry Hwang sued OpenAI in San Francisco for “clear infringement of intellectual property.”

    In August, OpenAI asked a federal judge in California to dismiss two similar lawsuits, one involving comedian Sarah Silverman and another from author Paul Tremblay. In a court filing, OpenAI said the claims “misconceive the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”

    Author objections to AI have helped lead Amazon.com, the country’s largest book retailer, to change its policies on e-books. The online giant is now asking writers who want to publish through its Kindle Direct Program to notify Amazon in advance that they are including AI-generated material. Amazon is also limiting authors to three new self-published books on Kindle Direct per day, an effort to restrict the proliferation of AI texts.

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  • Rolling Stone co-founder ousted from Rock Hall leadership over controversial comments

    Rolling Stone co-founder ousted from Rock Hall leadership over controversial comments

    NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Jann Wenner, who co-founded Rolling Stone magazine and also was a co-founder of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, has been removed from the hall’s board of directors after making comments that were seen as disparaging toward Black and female musicians.

    “Jann Wenner has been removed from the Board of Directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation,” the hall said Saturday, a day after Wenner’s comments were published in a New York Times interview.

    A representative for Wenner, 77, did not immediately respond for a comment.

    Wenner created a firestorm doing publicity for his new book “The Masters,” which features interviews with musicians Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Townshend and U2’s Bono — all white and male.

    Asked why he didn’t interview women or Black musicians, Wenner responded: “It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni (Mitchell) was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test,” he told the Times.

    “Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level,” Wenner said.

    Wenner co-founded Rolling Stone in 1967 and served as its editor or editorial director until 2019. He also co-founded the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which was launched in 1987.

    In the interview, Wenner seemed to acknowledge he would face a backlash. “Just for public relations sake, maybe I should have gone and found one Black and one woman artist to include here that didn’t measure up to that same historical standard, just to avert this kind of criticism.”

    Last year, Rolling Stone magazine published its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and ranked Gaye’s “What’s Going On” No. 1, “Blue” by Mitchell at No. 3, Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life” at No. 4, “Purple Rain” by Prince and the Revolution at No. 8 and Ms. Lauryn Hill’s “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” at No. 10.

    Rolling Stone’s niche in magazines was an outgrowth of Wenner’s outsized interests, a mixture of authoritative music and cultural coverage with tough investigative reporting.

    ___

    This story has been updated to correct that Wenner was a co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine and not the founder.

    ___

    Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

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  • Pulitzer officials expand eligibility in arts categories, letting some non-US citizens compete

    Pulitzer officials expand eligibility in arts categories, letting some non-US citizens compete

    The Pulitzer Prize Board has revised its longtime rules on eligibility for many of its arts awards and will now allow those not born in the U.S. and other non-citizens to compete

    ByThe Associated Press

    September 12, 2023, 1:31 PM

    FILE – Signage for The Pulitzer Prizes appear at Columbia University on May 28, 2019, in New York. The Pulitzer Prize Board has revised its longtime rules on eligibility for many of its arts awards, and will now allow those not born in the U.S. and other non-citizens to compete. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)

    The Associated Press

    NEW YORK — The Pulitzer Prize Board has revised its longtime rules on eligibility for many of its arts and letters awards and will now allow those not born in the U.S. and other non-citizens to compete.

    The board announced Tuesday that permanent residents and those who have made the U.S. their longtime primary home will be eligible in the categories for books, drama and music. The changes go into effect for the 2025 awards cycle, which begins next spring.

    “The Board is enthusiastic about ensuring that the Prizes are inclusive and accessible to those producing distinguished work in Books, Drama and Music,” board co-chairs Tommie Shelby and Neil Brown said in a statement. “This expansion of eligibility is an appropriate update of our rules and compatible with the goals Joseph Pulitzer had in establishing these awards.”

    Last August, hundreds of writers endorsed an open letter calling for the Pulitzer board to permit non-U.S. citizens to compete. Signers included Sandra Cisneros, Brit Bennett, Dave Eggers and Pulitzer winners Andrew Sean Greer and Diane Seuss.

    Joseph Pulitzer founded the prizes in 1917 with a mission to honor “American” journalism and literature. Journalism prize judges already accept nominees of other nationalities, as long as the work was published in the U.S., a requirement which also applies to the arts categories.

    The new rules actually tighten eligibility for the history award, which previously could be written by authors of any nationality as long as they were about the U.S. “For the sake of consistency,” the board decided, history will now have the same guidelines as those for books, dramas and music.

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  • Amazon to require some authors to disclose the use of AI material

    Amazon to require some authors to disclose the use of AI material

    ByHILLEL ITALIE AP national writer

    September 8, 2023, 6:09 PM

    FILE – The Amazon app is seen on a smartphone, Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2023, in Marple Township, Pa. After months of complaints from the Authors Guild and other groups, Amazon.com started requiring writers who want to sell books through its e-book program to tell the company in advance that their work includes artificial intelligence material. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum, File)

    The Associated Press

    NEW YORK — After months of complaints from the Authors Guild and other groups, Amazon.com has started requiring writers who want to sell books through its e-book program to tell the company in advance that their work includes artificial intelligence material.

    The Authors Guild praised the new regulations, which were posted Wednesday, as a “welcome first step” toward deterring the proliferation of computer-generated books on the online retailer’s site. Many writers feared computer-generated books could crowd out traditional works and would be unfair to consumers who didn’t know they were buying AI content.

    In a statement posted on its website, the Guild expressed gratitude toward “the Amazon team for taking our concerns into account and enacting this important step toward ensuring transparency and accountability for AI-generated content.”

    A passage posted this week on Amazon’s content guideline page said, “We define AI-generated content as text, images, or translations created by an AI-based tool.” Amazon is differentiating between AI-assisted content, which authors do not need to disclose, and AI-generated work.

    But the decision’s initial impact may be limited because Amazon will not be publicly identifying books with AI, a policy that a company spokesperson said it may revise.

    Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said that her organization has been in discussions with Amazon about AI material since early this year.

    “Amazon never opposed requiring disclosure but just said they had to think it through, and we kept nudging them. We think and hope they will eventually require public disclosure when a work is AI-generated,” she told The Associated Press on Friday.

    The Guild, which represents thousands of published authors, helped organize an open letter in July urging AI companies not to use copyrighted material without permission. James Patterson, Margaret Atwood and Suzanne Collins are among the writers who endorsed the letter.

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  • Kimiko Hahn wins $100,000 award from Poetry Foundation for lifetime achievement

    Kimiko Hahn wins $100,000 award from Poetry Foundation for lifetime achievement

    Cornelius Eady, Toi Derricotte and Kimiko Hahn are among this year’s winners of awards from the Poetry Foundation, which announced some of poetry’s most lucrative prizes

    ByThe Associated Press

    September 7, 2023, 9:54 AM

    FILE – Toi Derricotte attends the 70th National Book Awards ceremony and benefit dinner at Cipriani Wall Street on Nov. 20, 2019, in New York. Derricotte and Cornelius Eady are among this year’s winners of awards from the Poetry Foundation. Derricotte and Eady won its inaugural Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry, a $25,000 honor. They were cited for their leadership of Cave Canem, an organization which supports Black poets through wide range of programs. (Photo by Greg Allen/Invision/AP, File)

    The Associated Press

    NEW YORK — Cornelius Eady, Toi Derricotte and Kimiko Hahn are among this year’s winners of awards from the Poetry Foundation, which announced some of the poetry world’s most lucrative prizes.

    Hahn, a faculty member of Queens College in New York City whose books include “The Unbearable Heart” and “Earshot,” won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. Lilly was an heir to pharmaceutical tycoon Eli Lilly who in 2002 bequeathed $100 million to Poetry magazine. The Poetry Foundation was established the following year.

    “Kimiko Hahn’s poetry projects the soul and challenges the human spirit by inviting readers to explore the mysteries of science and nature,“ Poetry Foundation President Michelle T. Boone said in a statement Thursday. “It’s our privilege to acknowledge her decades of advancing poetry through her writing and teaching.”

    The foundation also announced that Derricotte and Eady had won its inaugural Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry, a $25,000 honor. Derricotte and Eady were cited for their leadership of Cave Canem, an organization which supports Black poets through a wide range of programs.

    “The impact of Toi and Cornelius’s work as mentors, collaborators, and advocates cannot be overstated,” Poetry magazine editor Adrian Matejka said in a statement. “As a Cave Canem fellow myself, I have been the grateful recipient of their service to poetry and the path they’ve created for countless other Black poets.”

    Douglas Kearney’s “Optic Subwoof” won the $10,000 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.

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  • Jeff Daniels looks back with stories and music in new Audible audio memoir ‘Alive and Well Enough’

    Jeff Daniels looks back with stories and music in new Audible audio memoir ‘Alive and Well Enough’

    NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Jeff Daniels tackles his life and career in an absorbing, unconventional way this month with a music- and skit-filled audio memoir from Audible that he calls “a little bit like a one-man musical.”

    In the 12-episode season of “Alive and Well Enough,” the actor, musician and playwright explores his influences and opinions, offering thoughts on everything from fedoras to folk star Arlo Guthrie.

    “Over the course of these episodic excursions, I’m going to let you peek under my hood. Frankly, I want to know what’s under there, too,” he says in the first episode.

    We learn that writer Aaron Sorkin gave Daniels a chance at career rebirth with “The Newsroom,” we hear Daniels’ curtain speech on Broadway after his run ended in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and about the time he played golf with Clint Eastwood.

    The Eastwood story leads to a fantasy sequence in which Daniels dreams up an Oscars telecast punctuated by a stream of all the actors shot on film by Eastwood, and then he sings the song “Dirty Harry Blues,” with the lyrics: “Well, if I had to guess/Off the top of my head/When all’s said and done/One of us is gonna be dead.”

    Daniels, who has performed close to 600 small gigs with his guitar, was never interested in linear storytelling, preferring instead to use his songs to wrap stories around.

    “I said, ‘Don’t expect Chapter One to be the day I was born and then move through my teen years and all that.’ I’m going to jump all over the place, which is kind of like a set list,” the multiple Emmy-winner said in an interview. “It just became this kind of perfect platform to kind of do all the things I do.”

    Highlights include a song about a crazed Canadian pedestrian who Daniels almost hit with his car one day in Toronto — “Your eyes were wild/Your teeth were bared/Anatomical references filled the air” — and a story about his family renting an 28-foot RV and neglectfully leaving his wife behind at a truck stop.

    There’s an unpredictability to each episode and that’s intentional. Daniels said he wanted to mix it up to keep listeners’ attention.

    “I know where I’m going. I just don’t know how I’m going to get there. And on the way there, I give myself the freedom as a writer to kind of explore and go down a side street.”

    Episode Three opens surreally with Daniels being interviewed by Harry Dune, his clueless character in the movie “Dumb and Dumber.” Daniels, of course, also voices Dune, who wants to know what state Michigan is in, if an IQ of 8 is “good” and who stuffs a dangerous amount of Twinkies in his mouth at one time.

    Daniels in the third episode recalls revering Al Kaline, who played right field for the Detroit Tigers and made everything look easy. “Effortless takes a lot of work,” notes Daniels, who then talks about integrity and honor and then performs his song about Kaline. (Fun fact, Daniels’ handwritten lyrics are now in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.)

    “If you can write funny and make them laugh, then you slip in the one about Al Kaline or something like that, they feel the ones that are more serious a little bit more if you loosen them up a little bit,” he tells the AP. “It’s just set-list dynamics.”

    Daniels, a proud Midwesterner, cut his stage teeth in New York City’s now-defunct off-Broadway Circle Repertory Theater company. He created The Purple Rose Theatre Company in Michigan and has earned Tony Award nominations for each of the last three plays he’s performed: “God of Carnage,” “Blackbird” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

    The series has a funny story about how Ryan Reynolds inspired the song “How ’Bout We Take Our Pants Off and Relax?,” audio of Daniels performing three characters from his play “Escanaba in da Moonlight” and him thinking out loud whether Jesus was a stoner. He celebrates New York City as a place where innocence gets lost quickly.

    “If you want a crash course in how to accept others for who they are, New York City is as good a place as any for that kind of transformation,” the 68-year-old performer says in “Alive and Well Enough.”

    Daniels’ son, Ben, produced the audio memoir and said he got to learn a lot about his old man, like the stories of him in New York as a struggling actor.

    “I got to hear some things that I just never heard before and look up the places or look up the people he’s talking about,” said Ben Daniels. “It was a pretty cool editing process to take me on a little journey myself.”

    Each episode — which took about three days to write, rewrite and record, all by the father-and-son team — is between 20-30 minutes. A second series is already in the cards.

    Jeff Daniels hopes listeners take away the lesson that anyone can be more than one thing. When he went out on the road to play his songs, he was sometimes told by musicians to stay in his lane. He rejects that.

    “You can do more than one thing,” he said in the interview. “My argument is it all comes from the same place. It’s just the craft is different for writing a play versus writing a song versus acting a role in a show. It still comes from that same place of imagining,”

    ___

    Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

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  • Three found dead at remote Rocky Mountain campsite were trying to escape society, stepsister says

    Three found dead at remote Rocky Mountain campsite were trying to escape society, stepsister says

    DENVER — The stepsister of a Colorado woman who was found dead along with her sister and teenage son at a remote Rocky Mountain campsite says the women fled into the wilderness after struggling to cope with societal changes in recent years, but they were unequipped to survive off the grid.

    Exposed to several feet of snow, chills below zero and with no food found at their camp, Christine Vance, Rebecca Vance and Rebecca’s son likely died of malnutrition and hypothermia, according to the autopsies released this week. Authorities haven’t released the boy’s name.

    Those reports contained another chilling detail that brought stepsister Trevala Jara to tears: The 14-year-old boy’s body was found with Jara’s favorite, blessed rosary that she gave the group before they left.

    “God was with them,” said Jara, who still hasn’t mustered the strength to remove the rosary from the hazard bag. But Jara, who tried to convince them not to go, has questions.

    “Why would you want to do this knowing that you would leave me behind?” she said through tears. “Why didn’t you listen to me and my husband?”

    The camp and the teen’s body were first discovered by a hiker wandering off trail in July. The Gunnison County Sheriff’s Office found the two women’s bodies the following day, when they searched the campsite and unzipped the tent. All three had been dead for some time. Strewn across the ground were empty food containers and survival books. Nearby, a lean-to extended near a firepit.

    The sisters from Colorado Springs, about an hour south of Denver, had been planning to live off the grid since the fall of 2021, Jara said. They felt that the pandemic and politics brought out the worst in humanity.

    They weren’t conspiracy theorists, said Jara, but Rebecca Vance “thought that with everything changing and all, that this world is going to end. … (They) wanted to be away from people and the influences of what people can do to each other.”

    Jara remembers Rebecca Vance as a bit reserved, sharp as a whip, and someone who could read through a 1,000-page book in days. Vance’s son was homeschooled and a math whiz, Jara said.

    Christine Vance was more outgoing, charismatic and wasn’t at first convinced on the idea to escape society, Jara said, “but she just changed her mind because she didn’t want our sister and nephew to be by themselves.”

    Rebecca and Christine Vance told others they were travelling to another state for a family emergency. They told Jara of their plans, but not where they would set up camp. They watched YouTube videos to prepare for their life in the wilderness, but they were woefully underprepared, Jara said.

    Jara said she tried everything short of kidnapping to keep them from leaving, but nothing worked. Now, Jara wants to warn others about the risks of surviving in the wilderness.

    “I do not wish this on anybody at all,” Jara said. “I can’t wait to get to the point where I’m happy and all I can think of is the memories.”

    ___

    Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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  • Conservatives are on a mission to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision

    Conservatives are on a mission to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision

    WASHINGTON — With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump, recruiting thousands of Americans to come to Washington on a mission to dismantle the federal government and replace it with a vision closer to his own.

    Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trump administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president’s second term — or any candidate who aligns with their ideals and can defeat President Joe Biden in 2024.

    With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the “deep state” bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers.

    “We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish about the undertaking.

    “This is a clarion call to come to Washington,” he said. “People need to lay down their tools, and step aside from their professional life and say, ‘This is my lifetime moment to serve.’”

    The unprecedented effort is being orchestrated with dozens of right-flank organizations, many new to Washington, and represents a changed approach from conservatives, who traditionally have sought to limit the federal government by cutting federal taxes and slashing federal spending.

    Instead, Trump-era conservatives want to gut the “administrative state” from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.

    The goal is to avoid the pitfalls of Trump’s first years in office, when the Republican president’s team was ill-prepared, his Cabinet nominees had trouble winning Senate confirmation and policies were met with resistance — by lawmakers, government workers and even Trump’s own appointees who refused to bend or break protocol, or in some cases violate laws, to achieve his goals.

    While many of the Project 2025 proposals are inspired by Trump, they are being echoed by GOP rivals Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy and are gaining prominence among other Republicans.

    And if Trump wins a second term, the work from the Heritage coalition ensures the president will have the personnel to carry forward his unfinished White House business.

    “The president Day One will be a wrecking ball for the administrative state,” said Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official involved in the effort who is now president at the conservative Center for Renewing America.

    Much of the new president’s agenda would be accomplished by reinstating what’s called Schedule F — a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the 2 million federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired.

    Biden had rescinded the executive order upon taking office in 2021, but Trump — and other presidential hopefuls — now vow to reinstate it.

    “It frightens me,” said Mary Guy, a professor of public administration at the University of Colorado, who warns the idea would bring a return to a political spoils system.

    Experts argue Schedule F would create chaos in the civil service, which was overhauled during President Jimmy Carter’s administration in an attempt to ensure a professional workforce and end political bias dating from 19th century patronage.

    As it now stands, just 4,000 members of the federal workforce are considered political appointees who typically change with each administration. But Schedule F could put tens of thousands of career professional jobs at risk.

    “We have a democracy that is at risk of suicide. Schedule F is just one more bullet in the gun,” Guy said.

    The ideas contained in Heritage’s coffee table-ready book are both ambitious and parochial, a mix of longstanding conservative policies and stark, head-turning proposals that gained prominence in the Trump era.

    There’s a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation. It calls for stepped-up prosecution of anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.

    There are proposals to have the Pentagon “abolish” its recent diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, what the project calls the “woke” agenda, and reinstate service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.

    Chapter by chapter, the pages offer a how-to manual for the next president, similar to one Heritage produced 50 years ago, ahead of the Ronald Reagan administration. Authored by some of today’s most prominent thinkers in the conservative movement, it’s often sprinkled with apocalyptic language.

    A chapter written by Trump’s former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security calls for bolstering the number of political appointees, and redeploying office personnel with law enforcement ability into the field “to maximize law enforcement capacity.”

    At the White House, the book suggests the new administration should “reexamine” the tradition of providing work space for the press corps and ensure the White House counsel is “deeply committed” to the president’s agenda.

    Conservatives have long held a grim view of federal government offices, complaining they are stacked with liberals intent on halting Republican agendas.

    But Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said most federal workers live in the states and are your neighbors, family and friends. “Federal employees are not the enemy,” she said.

    While presidents typically rely on Congress to put policies into place, the Heritage project leans into what legal scholars refer to as a unitary view of executive power that suggests the president has broad authority to act alone.

    To push past senators who try to block presidential Cabinet nominees, Project 2025 proposes installing top allies in acting administrative roles, as was done during the Trump administration to bypass the Senate confirmation process.

    John McEntee, another former Trump official advising the effort, said the next administration can “play hardball a little more than we did with Congress.”

    In fact, Congress would see its role diminished — for example, with a proposal to eliminate congressional notification on certain foreign arms sales.

    Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies the separation of powers and was not part of the Heritage project, said there’s a certain amount of “fantasizing” about the president’s capabilities.

    “Some of these visions, they do start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says — and that’s just not the system the government we live under,” he said.

    At the Heritage office, Dans has a faded photo on his wall of an earlier era in Washington, with the White House situated almost alone in the city, dirt streets in all directions.

    It’s an image of what conservatives have long desired, a smaller federal government.

    The Heritage coalition is taking its recruitment efforts on the road, crisscrossing America to fill the federal jobs. They staffed the Iowa State Fair this month and signed up hundreds of people, and they’re building out a database of potential employees, inviting them to be trained in government operations.

    “It’s counterintuitive,” Dans acknowledged — the idea of joining government to shrink it — but he said that’s the lesson learned from the Trump days about what’s needed to “regain control.”

    ___

    Follow the AP’s coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.

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  • Georgia made it easier for parents to challenge school library books. Almost no one has done so

    Georgia made it easier for parents to challenge school library books. Almost no one has done so

    CUMMING, Ga. — When Allison Strickland urged a suburban Atlanta school board in June to remove four books from school libraries, she was following a path cleared by Georgia’s Republican lawmakers.

    But after the bitterly debated Georgia law took effect Jan. 1, The Associated Press found few book challengers are using it.

    One key element restraining complaints: The law only allows parents of current students to challenge books.

    Although not new, book challenges have surged since 2020, part of a backlash to what kids read and discuss in public schools. Conservatives want to stop children from reading books with themes on sexuality, gender, race and religion that they find objectionable. PEN America, a group promoting freedom of expression, counted 4,000 instances of books banned nationwide from July 2021 to December 2022.

    But while fights are ongoing in Forsyth County, where Strickland was protesting, at least 15 other large Georgia districts surveyed by AP said they have received no demands to remove books under the law.

    Georgia conservatives last year aimed to ease book challenges. But lawmakers knew a parents-only restriction would also limit them.

    “We are not going to turn this bill into a weapon for every taxpayer to harass the school system,” said state Rep. James Burchett, a Republican from Waycross, during a 2022 hearing.

    Still, some books are disappearing. Kasey Meehan, PEN America’s Freedom to Read director, said some schools are removing books even before parents ask. That’s happened in Forsyth County, where documents obtained by AP show a librarian “weeded” two books Strickland was protesting from another high school’s library, just before they were challenged there.

    Those who object to books say Georgia’s law is being interpreted too narrowly and removing books should be easier. In most states anyone can challenge a book, not just parents, Meehan said. But some districts elsewhere also limit protests over books to parents.

    The Georgia law may be preventing widespread challenges by a handful of conservative activists. Research has found complaints nationwide are largely driven by just a few people — who sometimes aren’t parents.

    Forsyth County, a fast-growing suburb with 54,000 students, has been a hotbed for conservative agitation over public education.

    A parent of two West Forsyth High School students, Strickland complained in March about sexually explicit books, attaching excerpts from BookLooks. The conservative website highlights passages that its writers consider objectionable. Strickland was working with the Mama Bears, a group recruiting book challengers.

    Strickland targeted four novels: “Dime,” by E.R. Frank, in which a girl is lured into prostitution; “Tilt,” by Ellen Hopkins, in which a 17-year-old girl gets pregnant and a 16-year-old boy falls in love with an HIV-positive boy; “Perfect,” another Hopkins book about teens facing unrealistic expectations; and “Oryx and Crake,” by Margaret Atwood, about a plague that kills most humans.

    The principal examined the books, as legally required. In April, a Forsyth principal sided with a complaint, removing “The Nerdy and the Dirty” by B.T. Gottfred. But the West Forsyth principal concluded the books Strickland targeted should remain on shelves. She appealed to the school board.

    “There is not one educational thing to be had from any of these books,” Strickland told board members, saying the books “run the gamut of child prostitution, forced rape, pedophilia, bestiality, sodomy, drug and alcohol abuse, all of very young minor children, often with adult partners.”

    Others dissented, including T.J. McKinney, a departing teacher at a Forsyth middle school. She said students need to see their struggles reflected in books, and it’s pointless to shield older students from vulgarity or sex.

    “The book is not introducing kids to sex. If you’re in high school, they’re having sex,” McKinney said. “They are not learning this from books.”

    Forsyth Superintendent Jeff Bearden supported the principal’s recommendation to keep the books, as he did twice earlier. But the law requires the board to decide.

    In April, board members backed administrators, retaining “Endlessly Ever After,” a choose-your-own-adventure fairy tale. But in May, the board overruled Bearden and required advance parental consent before students could read Gottfred’s “The Handsome Girl & Her Beautiful Boy.”

    Faced with Strickland’s challenges in June, board members also required parental approval for the four books. The compromise left many unhappy.

    “Members of the board, I ask you, are you really going to compromise on child pedophilia?” asked Mama Bears leader Cindy Martin before the vote. “If the answer is yes, then what will you compromise on next?”

    “I see it as a loss,” McKinney said after the meeting. “The students still don’t have a right to choose their own books.”

    Forsyth County was once a rural locale where white mobs terrorized the Black minority into fleeing in 1912. But suburban growth made it well-educated, affluent and diverse. Only 47% of Forsyth students were white and non-Hispanic last year.

    But it’s also heavily Republican, and crowds attacked the system’s diversity, equity and inclusion plan in 2021. Agitation bled over into book protests. Officials pulled eight books from libraries in early 2022. They would later return all except “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” George M. Johnson’s memoir of growing up queer.

    Opponents organized against the bans. High school student Shivi Mehta said she wants libraries to “stay whole.”

    “I don’t want to have some books locked away,” Mehta said. “I don’t want to have books that I can’t read or can’t have access to because a group of politicians said I couldn’t.”

    Critics continued reading explicit book excerpts at board meetings, urging removal. After telling a Mama Bears member to stop, the board banned her from speaking at meetings. The Mama Bears sued, and in November, a federal judge ruled the policy unconstitutionally restricted free speech. The district paid $107,000 in lawyer’s fees.

    Others complained to the U.S. Department of Education that the district was excluding stories about people not white or straight. In a May warning, the department agreed, saying Forsyth schools may have created a hostile environment violating federal laws against race and sex discrimination, “leading to increased fears and possibly harassment” among students.

    The district settled the complaint, agreeing to explain the book removal process, offer “supportive measures” and survey students about the issue.

    But while federal government concerns may restrain administrators, the fight isn’t over.

    “I think the momentum to ban or restrict books is not going away anytime soon,” Mehta said.

    ____

    The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Books banned in other states fuel Vermont lieutenant governor’s reading tour

    Books banned in other states fuel Vermont lieutenant governor’s reading tour

    WATERBURY, Vt. — On a recent Sunday afternoon, Vermont’s lieutenant governor was at a local library, reading a book about two male penguins to a crowd of nearly two dozen. This was not the first stop for Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman nor would it be the last.

    While officials in some other states are banning or restricting certain books in schools and libraries, Zuckerman, in liberal Vermont, has taken a different tack: reading and discussing them at libraries and bookstores around the state.

    ″ These bans often target books that feature LGBTQ+ characters; talk about gender and sexuality; highlight racial disparities; or talk about difficult issues such as substance abuse and cases of police violence,” Zuckerman, a Democrat, said in a statement when he announced the tour in June. “Students, teachers, and curious minds should be able to access materials that spark critical thinking, cover difficult topics, and appeal to diverse interests without fear of government interference.”

    While Vermont hasn’t “fallen victim” to the trends in some other states, Zuckerman said that does not mean that books have not been challenged in this state. He said individuals have run for school board seats with the idea of curriculum management in mind and topics around race, and gender and identity have been elevated at school board meetings in recent years.

    He hopes the book reading tour will highlight what he sees as the value of representation, free speech, open dialogue and the exchange of ideas.

    According to the American Library Association, attempted book bans and restrictions at school and public libraries set a record in 2022. The association compiled more than 1,200 challenges in 2022 — nearly double the previous record total in 2021.

    PEN America also said it found more than 2,500 instances of books being banned — affecting more than 1,600 titles — from July 2021 to June 2022. Texas and Florida were the states with the most bans, according to the organization’s 2022 report.

    During his reading at Bridgeside Books in Waterbury on Sunday, Zuckerman read the book, “And Tango Makes Three,” which is based on the true story of two male penguins who were devoted to each other at the Central Park Zoo in New York. A zookeeper who saw them trying to incubate an egg-shaped rock gave them an egg from a different penguin pair with two eggs. The chick that hatched was cared for by the male penguins and named Tango.

    The book, written by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, is listed among the 100 most subjected to censorship efforts over the past decade, as compiled by the American Library Association.

    Zuckerman was joined by three Vermont authors, who each read segments from other banned books, including “Monster,” by Walter Dean Myers, and the bestselling children’s picture book “Where the Wild Things Are,” by Maurice Sendak, which was pulled off some shelves when it first came out in 1963.

    “I think books are a place for kids to explore and to be things that they’re not or see what it’s like to be something else,” said children’s author and illustrator Sarah Dillard. “To take that away from them I think is putting them at a huge disadvantage for being in the real world.”

    Paul Macuga, of Essex Junction, who attended the reading, said what frightens him about the move to restrict or ban books is that it’s coming from organized groups like Moms for Liberty — a conservative “parental rights” group that has gained national attention for its efforts to influence school curriculum and classroom learning, as well as its conservative support and donor funding.

    “It’s not a bunch of disorganized kooks,” he said. “It is a very well put together, with a lot of professional backing of people that know how to do this stuff,” he said.

    Several other attendees, including the local library director, recommended that people keep tabs on what’s happening in their communities, and get on their library commissions and attend board meetings to rebuff any moves to restrict books.

    Tanya Lee Stone, who is the author of a banned book — “A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl,” which she described as a cautionary tale about three very different girls consecutively dating a stereotypically bad guy — said there are organized people on the other side, too.

    “The National Council Against Censorship is a very large organization that’s dedicated to this,” she said.

    Stone said people who ban books often have not read them. And a number of people at the reading, including attendees, authors and Zuckerman, said the bans are based on fear.

    She said her goal in life is to write material that will educate, help and inspire young people. “To basically be accused of hurting young people is sort of the farthest thing from what you want to have happen. And that’s basically what people who are banning books and censoring books are doing,” Stone said.

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  • Fiction writers fear the rise of AI, but also see it as a story to tell

    Fiction writers fear the rise of AI, but also see it as a story to tell

    NEW YORK — For a vast number of book writers, artificial intelligence is a threat to their livelihood and the very idea of creativity. More than 10,000 of them endorsed an open letter from the Authors Guild this summer, urging AI companies not to use copyrighted work without permission or compensation.

    At the same time, AI is a story to tell, and no longer just in science fiction.

    As present in the imagination as politics, the pandemic or climate change, AI has become part of the narrative for a growing number of novelists and short story writers who only need to follow the news to imagine a world upended.

    “I’m frightened by artificial intelligence, but also fascinated by it. There’s a hope for divine understanding, for the accumulation of all knowledge, but at the same time there’s an inherent terror in being replaced by non-human intelligence,” said Helen Phillips, whose upcoming novel “Hum” tells of a wife and mother who loses her job to AI.

    “We’ve been seeing more and more about AI in book proposals,” said Ryan Doherty, vice president and editorial director at Celadon Books, which recently signed Fred Lunzker’s novel “Sike,” featuring an AI psychiatrist.

    “It’s the zeitgeist right now. And whatever is in the cultural zeitgeist seeps into fiction,” Doherty said.

    Other AI-themed novels expected in the next two years include Sean Michaels’ “Do You Remember Being Born?”, in which a poet agrees to collaborate with an AI poetry company; Bryan Van Dyke’s “In Our Likeness,” about a bureaucrat and a fact-checking program with the power to change facts; and A.E. Osworth’s “Awakened,” about a gay witch and her titanic clash with AI.

    Crime writer Jeffrey Diger, known for his thrillers set in contemporary Greece, is working on a novel touching upon AI and the metaverse, the outgrowth of being “continually on the lookout for what’s percolating on the edge of societal change,” he said.

    Authors are invoking AI to address the most human questions.

    In Sierra Greer’s “Annie Bot,” the title name is an AI mate designed for a human male. For Greer, the novel was a way to explore her character’s “urgent desire to please,” adding that a robot girlfriend enabled her “to explore desire, respect, and longing in ways that felt very new and strange to me.”

    Amy Shearn’s “Animal Instinct” has its origins in the pandemic and in her personal life; she was recently divorced and had begun using dating apps.

    “It’s so weird how, with apps, you start to feel as if you’re going person-shopping,” she said. “And I thought, wouldn’t it be great if you could really pick and choose the best parts of all these people you encounter and sort of cobble them together to make your ideal person?”

    “Of course,” she added, “I don’t think anyone actually knows what their ideal person is, because so much of what draws us to mates is the unexpected, the ways in which people surprise us. That said, it seemed like an interesting premise for a novel.”

    Some authors aren’t just writing about AI, but openly working with it.

    Earlier this year, journalist Stephen Marche used AI to write the novella “Death of An Author,” for which he drew upon everyone from Raymond Chandler to Haruki Murakami. Screenwriter and humorist Simon Rich collaborated with Brent Katz and Josh Morgenthau for “I Am Code,” a thriller in verse that came out this month and was generated by the AI program “code-davinci-002.” (Filmmaker Werner Herzog reads the audiobook edition).

    Osworth, who is trans, wanted to address comments by “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling that have offended many in the trans community, and to wrest from her the power of magic. At the same time, they worried the fictional AI in their book sounded too human, and decided AI should speak for AI.

    Osworth devised a crude program, based on the writings of Machiavelli among others, that would turn out a more mechanical kind of voice.

    “I like to say that CHATgpt is a Ferrari, while what I came up with is a skateboard with one square wheel. But I was much more interested in the skateboard with one square wheel,” they said.

    Michaels centers his new novel on a poet named Marian, in homage to poet Marianne Moore, and an AI program called Charlotte. He said the novel is about parenthood, labor, community, and also “this technology’s implications for art, language and our sense of identity.”

    Believing the spirit of “Do You Remember Being Born?” called for the presence of actual AI text, he devised a program that would generate prose and poetry, and uses an alternate format in the novel so readers know when he’s using AI.

    In one passage, Marian is reviewing some of her collaboration with Charlotte.

    “The preceding day’s work was a collection of glass cathedrals. I reread it with alarm. Turns of phrase I had mistaken for beautiful, which I now found unintelligible,” Michaels writes. “Charlotte had simply surprised me: I would propose a line, a portion of a line, and what the system spat back upended my expectations. I had been seduced by this surprise.”

    And now AI speaks: “I had mistaken a fit of algorithmic exuberance for the truth.”

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  • Simon & Schuster purchased by private equity firm KKR for $1.62 billion

    Simon & Schuster purchased by private equity firm KKR for $1.62 billion

    NEW YORK — Simon & Schuster has been sold to the private equity firm KKR, months after a federal judge blocked its purchase by rival publisher Penguin Random House because of concerns that competition would shrink the book market. An executive for KKR is calling the deal a chance to work with “one of the most effective” book publishers.

    The private equity giant will buy Simon & Schuster for $1.62 billion in cash, said Paramount Global, the parent company of the storied publishing house. Simon & Schuster will operate as a standalone entity, under the leadership of CEO Jonathan Karp.

    “We are delighted,” Karp said Monday. “We will remain an independent company and not only will we continue to thrive, but with the help of KKR we can become even greater.

    Paramount, which on Monday reported a loss of $424 million for the three months leading up to June 30, will use sale proceeds to pay down debt. The agreement is subject to government approval, but is unlikely to face the objections raised by the Penguin Random House deal.

    Simon & Schuster, where authors include Stephen King, Colleen Hoover and Bob Woodward, is one of the so-called “Big Five” of New York publishing, with others including Penguin Random House, HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan. HarperCollins, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, had expressed interest in buying Simon & Schuster.

    Simon & Schuster has had strong sales over the past two years, even as the book market has cooled off. The publisher has scheduled some of the most anticipated fall releases, including Britney Spears’ memoir “The Woman In Me” and Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk.

    Richard Sarnoff, chair of media at KKR, praised Simon & Schuster as effective and well run and said that it would retain editorial independence.

    “We’re not going to tell them what to buy, what to publish or what not to publish,” said Sarnoff, a former executive at Penguin Random House’s parent company, the German conglomerate Bertelsmann. “There’s a 99-year legacy of editorial independence that we’re going to protect.”

    Sarnoff said that no layoffs were planned, and that instead KKR hoped to invest in and expand Simon & Schuster, citing international sales as an area of possible growth. As with other companies that KKR has owned, it plans to give Simon & Schuster employees equity, an arrangement that could give the publisher a competitive advantage. In an industry where starting salaries range from $45,000-$50,000, a source of growing unhappiness among young people trying to afford living in the New York City area, an equity stake could end up being worth half or more of a worker’s annual pay, according to Sarnoff.

    “The upside is big,” he said. Sarnoff added that he didn’t know how long KKR would run Simon & Schuster before selling it, although he cited five to seven years as the typical range. “We don’t have a set timeline,” he said.

    Employee equity is rare in book publishing, but not unprecedented. W.W. Norton & Company, founded in 1923, has been wholly employee owned for decades.

    Late in 2020, Paramount had announced the sale of Simon & Schuster to Penguin Random House for $2.2 billion, a deal that would have made the new company by far the biggest in the U.S. But the Department of Justice, which under the Biden administration has taken a tougher stance on consolidation compared to other recent presidencies, sued to block the sale in 2021.

    After a three-week trial in the summer of 2022, with King among those opposing the merger, U.S. District Judge Florence Y. Pan ruled in the government’s favor, saying the DOJ had made “a compelling case that predicts substantial harm to competition.”

    Paramount declined to appeal the decision, and instead renewed its efforts to sell Simon & Schuster, which next year marks its centennial. The publisher, founded in 1924 by Richard Simon and Max Schuster, has changed ownership a handful of times since being purchased by Gulf+Western in 1975. Paramount has tried for years to sell the publisher, saying it didn’t fit into the company’s emphasis on video entertainment.

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