A new, highly concerning entry in the wave of classroom book bans sweeping the nation: Gene McGee, mayor of Ridgeland, Mississippi, is withholding $110,000 of funding from the Madison County Library System—funding already approved by the board of aldermen—until librarians Read more >
Jake Paul, an asshole, should not have made fun of Floyd Mayweather’s reading ability. (For background, Mayweather fought to an eight-round draw with Paul’s brother Logan, and Jake—also a boxer—might want some of that action for himself.) Look, I hate Read more >
Remember the tote bags? The bucket hats? The coffee carts? The pop-up shop? The mural? The Publisher’s Publicity Circle Awards, which celebrate the best campaigns carried out by publicists, remember—and as The Bookseller reports, they’ve shortlisted the Beautiful World, Where Read more >
I don’t need to tell you that the internet is usually a horrifying black hole of garbage and bad news and people screaming. But every so often, something comes across everyone’s screens and makes a little community out of us. Read more >
Today we’re celebrating the 190th birthday of Lewis Carroll, born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland author, mathematician, and, as it turns out, posthumous suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders. The unsolved murder and disembowelment of several sex workers Read more >
Yesterday, as the “Intellectual Dark Web” continued to hand-wring about the perils of over-wokening, a Tennessee school board voted unanimously to ban Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about his father’s experience in the Holocaust, ostensibly due to the book’s Read more >
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o’er him Read more >
Well, we made it to the 70s, and Elena has the haircut to prove it. Yep, HBO just released the first teaser trailer for the third season of its s gorgeous, slow-tv adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which Read more >
Big news for Terry Pratchett fans: The Guardian has reported that Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett’s former assistant and friend, is writing Pratchett’s official biography. A Life With Footnotes will be published in September 2022 by Transworld. According to the publisher, Read more >
This morning, PEN America announced the finalists for their 2022 Literary Awards. The list includes 54 authors and 11 translators who published works in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, biography, essay, science writing, translation, and more in 2021. Through the books on Read more >
A month into its release, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s atmospheric adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter has received praise for “consider[ing] women’s lives in intimate detail and in the light of wide-ranging, deep-rooted experience” (The New Yorker) and empathizing with “a Read more >
My fellow and favorite Aquarian, Virginia Woolf, would have turned 140 today. And given Aquarius’ water-bearing status, is it any surprise that we find water—in metaphors, in imagery, in rhythm, in flux, in just about everything—throughout Woolf’s novels? Not at Read more >
This week we’re celebrating the 160th birthday of Edith Wharton—novelist, short story writer, and the first woman to win a Pulitzer prize. But as it turns out, the 1921 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction wasn’t initially meant to go to Wharton—the Read more >
Today, on the 140th anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s birth, I have a moral obligation to speak my truth: with all due respect to my employer—whose own Joan Didion tote has been called iconic (by us)—the Virginia Woolf Barnes & Noble Read more >
No better way to break up the day than to trek over to your local bookstore! If you’re looking for a sign to get up and go for a jaunt, this is it! This week, we’ve got a treasure trove Read more >
Today in 1961, Marilyn Monroe filed for divorce from playwright Arthur Miller—a carefully chosen date, as she thought JFK’s inauguration would distract the media from the lows of her personal life. The pairing had always been surprising to Monroe’s adoring Read more >
It is “quite an exciting time to be a reader in Ireland.” So says Colm Tóibín, who has just been named the new laureate for Irish fiction. Now you, a provocateur, might ask, “Isn’t it always an exciting time to Read more >
Yesterday, the American Library Association announced the winners of the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. Tom Lin’s The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu was recognized in the Fiction category, while Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil in America was recognized in the Read more >
Whatever he puts his weird, imaginative mind to (a dark, nightmarish movie about fascism, a Saturday morning cartoon for kids) Guillermo del Toro makes strange and beautiful stories. And judging by the short trailer below, his Netflix adaptation of Pinocchio, out Read more >
Today marks the 72-year anniversary of the death of George Orwell, writer, journalist and scathing reviewer of Mein Kampf. Despite the distance between his lifetime and our own, it’s only this decade that we learned of a particularly surprising childhood Read more >
