Harry Potter
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
The World Bank houses a bookstore. Unfortunately, it’s closing. Harry Potter is causing a legal dispute between two bookstores in the Philippines, with one store claiming a legal monopoly over the book. CityLab checks out The Last Bookstore, a massive bookstore warehouse…
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Franchise Exploitation
Harry Potter fans are celebrating the release of J.K Rowling’s newest work, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the eighth installment in the Harry Potter series. However, unlike the other novels in the series, Cursed Child is the script of…
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
A woman met her husband when she fell in love with the man operating the Twitter account for Waterstone’s Oxford bookstore. Bookstores are more than just bookstores, declares the Chicago Tribune. You might not think the home of America’s television…
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Blame Harry Potter for Your Girlfriend Going Gone Girl
The then-girls, now-women who grew up reading Harry Potter are revitalizing the book market and steering publishing trends, and here’s what they want now: crime thriller fiction featuring calculating and vengeful female protagonists, now its own genre umbrella-ed by the…
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Save the Children
Graeme Whiting, headmaster of the Acorn School (motto: “Have courage for the truth”) of Nailsworth, Great Britain, recently published a blog post condemning “sensational” fantasy novels such as the Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Hunger Games series that…
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The Rumpus Interview with Minsoo Kang
Writer and historian Minsoo Kang talks about his new translation of The Story of Hong Gildong, a touchstone novel of Korea written in the 19th century.
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Publishing Industry’s Diversity Limits Revealed
JK Rowling has published rejection letters she received writing under the name Robert Galbraith. Rowling has racked up book sales worth billions for the Harry Potter series, but set out to see if she could sell a novel without Potter’s help.…
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The Slow Fall of the Hot Heroine
If nothing else, it’s the opinion of other women that encroaches on mine. Resemblances spark my joy; differences become character flaws.
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Less Is Pottermore
Since the Harry Potter series ended, the Potter universe has continued to expand with tie-in books and lore published on the website Pottermore. However, Rowling’s magic-based historical revisionism was challenged this week by Native American activists responding to her latest…
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Fan Fiction Gone Wild
Slate’s Laura Miller details the bizarre tale of the copyright lawsuit between two No. 1 New York Times best-selling fantasy authors, showing the potential messiness of fan fiction going mainstream: If these tropes sound familiar to you, you’re not alone.…
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Book Collecting Thrives
Book collecting of antique and rare books remains big business. For example, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the original British version of the first book in the Harry Potter series, could be worth as much as $40,000—only five hundred…
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Visible Only in Literature
From Cinderella and Oliver Twist to Anne of Green Gables and Harry Potter, Etan Smallman muses on the paradox of why so many of literature’s most celebrated protagonists are orphans: Many of the most powerful characters in our best-loved stories…