Barnes and noble classics collection series#

They are also launching a Twitter donation campaign, giving a dollar to Hurston Wright each time someone tweets the hashtag #BlackStoriesHavePower.Ĭolor of Change, a racial justice organization, called Diverse Editions “literary blackface” and told the Guardian it is planning “a series of actions in response to the offensive initiative”.īarnes & Noble still plans to honor and participate in Black History Month this year. In response to the outrage, Penguin Random House announced it will donate $10,000 to the Hurston Wright Foundation, which works with up-and-coming black authors. “It’s bothersome they just wait for us to get pissed off and be in front of the drama.” “It’s people from communities of color who are being villainized,” he said, calling for white authors and editors to become more vocal. He added that he was putting his career on the line by protesting against Barnes & Noble, which sells a disproportionate amount of his books. POCs are not automatically exempt from being dumbasses.”īowles said he was tired of the publishing industry’s blunders, and had met with Macmillan executives about improving its relationship with the Latinx community after publishing American Dirt. “This was not a decision by white higher-ups. “Dillon said she and three other people of color were in the room,” Bowles said, arguing that people of color in positions of power can also make serious blunders around representation. A new study by Lee and Low Books found that, despite concentrated efforts and initiatives by the industry, publishing is just as white as it was four years ago.īowles told the Guardian on Wednesday that he confronted Sanyu Dillon, the director of publicity of Penguin Random House, the publisher that collaborated on the project, outside a Barnes & Noble location on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Flatiron made a commitment to hire more Latinx staff and publish more books by Latinx authors. Earlier this week, Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers, faced heavy criticism over its controversial novel, American Dirt, a book many say unfairly profits off the suffering and trauma of Mexican immigrants. In their own words: /R9c9CXeyMs- Justina Ireland Has A Sequel Out February 5, 2020īarnes & Noble’s swift apology comes as the publishing industry confronts increasing debates around race. Okay, real talk: here is why the whole Barnes and Noble and Random Penguin #DiverseEditions fundamentally doesn’t not work. Erasing cultural differences is not diversity … Because what it says is that at the end of the day people of color want to be white. Ireland wrote: “And this says nothing to the assumption that a little white girl raised in India as a colonizer (Secret Garden) would be culturally the same as a little Asian or Indian or Black girl raised anywhere else ever. She called it a quick attempt to “make a buck”. Justina Ireland, the acclaimed writer of YA novel Dread Nation, pointed out the flaws of this approach. The 12 classics found to meet this criteria were: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Moby Dick, Emma, The Secret Garden, Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, Frankenstein, Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz, The Three Musketeers, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Romeo and Juliet. The decision of which book covers to redesign was made using artificial intelligence to analyze the text from 100 of the most famous titles in western literature, searching the texts to “see if it omitted the ethnicity of primary characters”. Publishing industry: Black Frankenstein - Brit Bennett February 5, 2020

Us: Hey, it’d be great if you could publish writers of color.

Barnes and noble classics collection