This morning, Kirkus announced its 18 finalists for the 2021 Kirkus Prize, which each year celebrates the best in fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature. The winner in each category will be awarded $50,000, making the Kirkus Prize one of Read more >
I’m a sucker for a good short story collection. They are the commuter’s dream, every section break a gentle reminder to look up and make sure they didn’t skip your train stop. They are a salve for the short attention Read more >
The BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University has announced the names of this year’s five shortlisted writers. The award, considered to be one of the most prestigious honors for a single short story, will grant the winning writer Read more >
A denouement to the tote bags and the bucket hats and the pop-up shop and the mural and the coffee carts: after just three days of sales, Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You is Waterstones’s bestselling fiction title of Read more >
Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Lauren Groff’s Matrix, Colm Tóibín’s The Magician, Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom, and Joy Harjo’s Poet Warrior all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Read more >
Last year, University of Iowa Associate Professor Harry Stecopoulos led undergraduate students in an art rarely touched on in the classroom: fanfiction. In Stecopoulos’s honors fiction seminar, The Great Gatsby 2.0, the 19-student class met over Zoom to co-author their Read more >
State prosecutors in Nicaragua have ordered the arrest of one of the country’s most prominent writers, Sergio Ramírez, accusing the 78-year-old novelist of inspiring hatred and conspiring to destabilize Nicaragua. With only two months to go until the presidential elections Read more >
On this day in 1935, the highly acclaimed poet Mary Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio. Oliver, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and later the National Book Award for Poetry in 1992, was by all accounts a Read more >
Back in 2019, months before our current plague swept the earth, an industrious librarian at the University of Bristol was leafing though a 16th-century book and found within its pages a few stray fragments of parchment handwritten in Old French. Read more >
When asked to think of ancient Greek poetry, high, lofty verse is top of mind. But classics professor Tim Whitmarsh has found a very different type of Greek poem: a rhythmic, cheeky love poem that made its way via inscription Read more >
Exciting news for both fans of Stephen King and free expression: today, the author—partnering with Humble Bundle, which helps content creators provide exclusive art to support charities—released a never-before-published short story online. “Red Screen” is the story of a cop Read more >
All delicious mac and cheese recipes are alike; each gross mac and cheese recipe is gross in its own way. Or something. I haven’t actually prepared Leo Tolstoy’s family recipe for macaroni and cheese, but it involves only one cheese Read more >
Several hours after publishing an interview with legendary theorist Judith Butler, the Guardian has deleted several paragraphs where Butler and interviewer Jules Gleeson critically discuss the gender critical “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” (TERF) movement, a right-wing ideology that opposes transgender rights Read more >
Today, the Whiting Foundation announced the five print and digital winners for its fourth annual Literary Magazine Prizes, which seek to acknowledge, reward and encourage the publications that are actively nurturing the writers who tell the public, through their art, Read more >
Books. Tote bags. Pencils. T-shirts. Bucket hats. Coffee trucks. Pop-up shops. And now, murals. Because why not? As The Bookseller reports, the aforementioned Sally Rooney pop-up shop, which opens tomorrow, will be accessed through a newly unveiled Sally Rooney pop-up mural, Read more >
Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi has won the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Since publishing her debut Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, now a cult classic, 17 years ago, Clarke has suffered from chronic illness, which made writing difficult. Accepting the £30,000 Read more >
To all my Trekkies out there: Happy Star Trek Day! This year marks the franchise’s 55th (!) anniversary. Created by Gene Rodenberry, the show made its official debut on September 8, 1966, on NBC. At the time, Roddenberry’s vision of Read more >
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a famous text in possession of many adaptations, must be in want of a jukebox musical. Good thing we’ve all universally acknowledged that—for this fall an all-female pop musical adaptation of Jane Austen’s Read more >
You didn’t think there were video games about novelists, did you? Well, there aren’t that many.* But there is Alan Wake. For the uninitiated, Alan Wake was an Xbox 360 exclusive created by Sam Lake for Remedy Entertainment—and by most accounts, one Read more >
Deadline announced this morning that The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis, a biopic about the life of the English writer and B.F.F. of J.R.R. Tolkien, who was most famous for The Chronicles Of Narnia, will be Read more >
