Alex Gino’s children’s novel George, about a transgender girl who wants to play Charlotte in her fourth grade production of Charlotte’s Web, has won a Stonewall Book Award, a Children’s Choice book award, and a Lambda Literary Award, and is Read more >
The place was Baltimore. The date was October 3, 1849—or, Election Day. The poet Edgar Allan Poe was found in a sordid state, lying in a gutter. He hadn’t been heard from in a week. His semi-lucid body was stumbled Read more >
In welcome news for fans of both books and strong antitrust regulation, the US Department of Justice filed a civil lawsuit today to block Penguin Random House’s acquisition of Simon & Schuster. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court Read more >
Tomorrow, the 2021 winner of the Booker Prize, the biggest literary prize in the UK, will be announced in a ceremony hosted by Samira Ahmed and broadcast live by the BBC starting at 3:15 EST. As you probably know, six Read more >
Literary Hub is pleased to announce that the Guggenheim Museum, in collaboration with the Academy of American Poets, has established a year-long poet-in-residence program, beginning in January 2022. The hybrid position focuses on public engagement; the poet-in-residence “will collaborate with Read more >
We’re just accepting the fact that the TBR pile is an ever-growing beast, and that we’re never going to catch up, right? This week brings us new titles from Gary Shteyngart, Ai Weiwei, Mario Vargas Llosa, and more. * Kyle Read more >
Exciting news for scientists—and for the future of shared information: Nature has reported that technologist Carl Malamud has released a huge index of words and short phrases contained in over 107 million journal articles, including many paywalled papers, online for Read more >
Today OUT began the rollout of their annual OUT 100 list, a list of LGBTQ+ leaders and changemakers who “made us proud . . . in their local communities or on the world stage.” So far, their cover stars include Read more >
We’ve talked a lot about “Who Is The Bad Art Friend,” the saga of Dawn Dorland vs. Sonya Larson. Dorland posted extensively on Facebook about donating her kidney; Larson lifted the post and put it in a short story; the Read more >
Well, Hot Vax Summer may not have materialized, but as a consolation prize, how about… Cool Vax Dictionary? A year after announcing that 2020 was a year “that could not be neatly accommodated by one word,” Oxford Languages, the publisher Read more >
If you like wall-to-wall beige carpeting, recessed lighting, and sprawling, beautiful, half-mad epics of the human soul, do we have the real estate listing for you! Apparently Herman Melville stayed for a for weeks in 1849 at 25 Craven Street, Read more >
Today, The New Yorker published a profile of the late Bennington College classics professor Claude Fredericks, who you may know primarily as the inspiration for enigmatic Hampden College classics professor Julian Morrow in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History—especially if you’ve been listening to Read more >
It’s Halloween weekend—time for two powerful concepts: outfits and mischief. The outgoing among us might go out and play some tricks; the more introverted might stay inside and read the unofficial book series of Halloween, Goosebumps. But if you don’t Read more >
Hallow’s Eve is nearly upon us. The leaves have died off. The pumpkins have been carved, the jack-o’-lanterns lit. The candy has been bought (and eaten, oops, and re-bought for distribution to the children). And hopefully you, dear reader, have Read more >
Come November, Neil Young will be 76—but he shows no signs of taking a well-deserved artistic break. Today, he and Crazy Horse released the second single from their upcoming album Barn, “Heading West,” and the full album will be released Read more >
Yesterday, Deadline announced that Legendary Television is developing a true crime drama series based on perhaps the most infamous literary true crime story of the 20th century: Norman Mailer’s (ultimately disastrous) relationship with forger-turned-murderer-turned-writer-turned-murderer-again, Jack Henry Abbott. As well as Read more >
In case you haven’t noticed all of the Seasonal Content on the internet this week, it is almost Halloween. It is almost Halloween, in a pandemic, again. [Insert joke about masks here.] Even though we all know that the real Read more >
Look, horses are really hard to draw, but I quite like Franz Kafka’s idle doodle (above) of a “horse” and rider (the action, the motion, the urgency!), just one of several dozen drawings that Max Brod refused to burn, along Read more >
This week, Merriam-Webster added 455 new words and phrases to its online dictionary. As always, the list makes me feel deeply uneasy about where the world has been and is going, and features a fun/confusing mix of new and old Read more >
This evening, at a virtual ceremony hosted from the Austin Central Library, Kirkus Reviews announced the winners of its eighth annual Kirkus Prizes in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature. Each of the three winners, chosen from the 1,531 Read more >
