@Bookworm My answer to that Maryse Condé quesion feels like explaining an elaborate joke.

@Randal'Thor It seems absurd to me to state that an author's skin color is not relevant to a discussion of their work. It matters, for instance, that J M Coetzee is a white South African and that Bessie Head is black. It matters that James Baldwin is African-American and Gore Vidal is not. Literature is enmeshed in, reflects, and reveals the world we live in. I find it impossible to respond to a work without thinking about race:

to read A Passage to India without being acutely aware that Forster is white and I'm Indian, for example, or to read The Lusiads without the same awareness of Camões's race vs mine. I would be surprised if any person of color would ever find it necessary ask whether race is relevant to the appreciation of literature.

And you're right, I left out August Wilson; he's black.

So I guess we do have an African American in our topic challenges at last!

This is the sort of thing that bugs me. Question asked; answer given in the comments; no actual answer provided, and now we're forever stuck with an unanswered question.

@Tsundoku I've seen that with the Tony Wolf books: new copies were cheaper than used copies. It was suspicious because that might indicate that the new editions are somehow worse. But I bought new copies, they seem fine, and my nieces were very happy with them.

@b_jonas Well, the suspicion that the new copies could be worse is sometimes justified. There are a number of publishers that simply scan old books or print online public domain text and publish them without checking quality. Those publications are often recognisable by their cover design: either the same cover for every book (except author and title) or very amateurish design with irrelevant images and cheap fonts. I encounter these all the time.

@verbose Well, there is a comment that identifies the story correctly, but its description of the content is incorrect.

Look for Ballantyne's The Coral Island on this website and you won't find a reprint by a single reputable publisher. One book cover even has an image from Monument Valley.

@Tsundoku Is that good or bad? In any case, I hope you had some fun in answering it.

@ClaraDíazSanchez I really had to chuckle about some of the things Condé wrote.

I haven't read much more yet, since I'm still reading Middleton ...

@verbose There's another black author you've left out of your list: Nalo Hopkinson, the August 2018 challenge, who is Jamaican-Canadian and who writes science fiction/fantasy (so maybe your anti-sf bias contributed to this).

@Tsundoku I've read nearly all of Terry Pratchett's discworld books, including Guards, Guards, where that quote is supposedly from, and I still had to look it up. (And since the quote doesn't show up in Google books, I suspect it may be apocryphal or distorted.)

@PeterShor I edited a few words out for brevity, but it is from Guards, Guards. archive.org/details/guardsguards19890000terr/mode/…

Nalo Hopkinson is interesting for people who don't like hard science fiction. I quite liked Midnight Robber. Hopkinson once made a comment about so many things related to space having names from Greek (or Roman) mythology, such as the Apollo missions; Midnight Robber replaces that frame of reference with references to Caribbean and Yoruba culture.

I didn't read any science fiction before joining Literature SE. I have read a bit since: G. R. R. Martin's Dying of the Light, Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy (mainly because it was Chinese literature), Carl Sagan's Contact, Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Word for World Is Forest and The Lathe of Heaven, and Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber.

Oh, wait, I read H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds many years before joining the site.

@Tsundoku Yes, those used to exist, scamming parents who'll buy anything for their children with terrible dictionaries. They were using this one weird trick that anyone can call themselves an "Academy", MTA does not have a monopoly on that word, but parents think it does. It works better than calling yourself "award-winning" by inventing awards.

(Also as bad reprints of old translations of Jules Verne books.)

@PeterShor You've read nearly all Discorld books? Nice

@b_jonas Those publishers still exist today. They're like weed.

@Tsundoku They popped up in 2002 when digital typography suddenly allowed anyone to publish books, but I am hoping they died down a bit now that fewer people are buying dead-tree dictionaries.

@b_jonas They haven't died down, at least to my knowledge, and reprint both fiction and non-fiction. Anything that is in the public domain is fair game. Quality doesn't matter, i.e. careful editing, checking that no pages are missing, checking readability (when printing scanned books).

Ok, but are they still printing dictionaries?

@b_jonas I have never checked. I have never bought a dictionary online.

@b_jonas So, yes, they also reprint old dictionaries (i.e. mostly over 100 years old). Three names of publishers that I often encounter are Kessinger, Salzwasser and Hanse.

@Bookworm The Count of Monte Cristo escaped from the HNQ prison.

New novel by the Algerian author Kamel Daoud: Houris, published by Gallimard.