ebookPorn

Josep Maria Junoy. Cal·ligrams & poems.

As someone who grew up in a bilingual household I understand the difficulty in translating nuance and meaning without in some way betraying the original. This a very good piece on that very issue.

by Emma Loffhagen

Between enemies-to-lovers and ‘shadow daddies’, BookTok has fallen in love with the spicy stories combining romance and fantasy. But there is more to the subgenre than sex, say the fans who queued for hours outside the brick-and-mortar Oxford store

We left Warrington at 5.15am this morning to get here,” Emma tells me, standing in a queue that stretches down Walton Street. It is just after 9am on a Saturday in Oxford, the students are still in bed and the tourists have yet to descend on the city, but this corner of Jericho is already buzzing.

Oxford is rarely short of literary pilgrims. Every year, visitors flock to the colleges and libraries that shaped writers including JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and Iris Murdoch. But this crowd is here for something a little different. Instead of queueing for the Bodleian, they’re swapping recommendations for dragon riders and faerie kingdoms. Women clutch tote bags emblazoned with quotes like “hot girls read smut”, and compare their favourite “morally grey” heroes.

The bright pink doors they’re waiting outside belong to Bad Girl Books, the UK’s first romantasy bookshop. The subgenre, blending fantasy and romance, has gone from niche online obsession to one of publishing’s biggest commercial success stories. Sarah J Maas, author of the famous A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) series, has sold more than 75 million books worldwide, while Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm recorded the biggest opening week for a hardback fiction title in the UK since Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman a decade ago.

“My husband thinks it’s just pornography,” Emma says. “But it’s about much more than that.”