Claire Fallon writes: “The book world, like American society as a whole, has been squeezed by economic pressures, battered by the pandemic, swept up in the Me Too movement and forced to answer for its pervasive whiteness and racism. The book scandals of 2020 are not frothy bits of gossip, but complicated and unsettling controversies with sweeping implications for the power imbalances and forms of exploitation and exclusion that still pervade the entire literary ecosystem.”