There are people (cowards, philistines, general haters) who now roll their eyes when I talk about how much I love The English Patient—Anthony Minghella’s lush, multi-Oscar-winning 1996 adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning 1992 novel. They think it’s overlong, painfully Read more >
Writers on Twitter will sometimes tweet something about how nice it is to get in touch with an author whose work you love to tell them so. I do this only rarely, both because I try to avoid Twitter in Read more >
Today, i09 shared an excerpt from Star Child: A Biographical Constellation of Octavia Estelle Butler, a biography of the legendary SF author for young readers, told in verse and prose by Ibi Zoboi, who was one of Butler’s students at Read more >
Literary Hub is pleased to share the book cover for Richie Hofmann’s latest poetry collection, A Hundred Lovers, which will be published by Knopf in February 2022. The publisher describes the book like this: A Hundred Lovers is a catalog Read more >
Sixty-three years ago today, Lolita—Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous “Charles Atlas muscle-man of language“—first hit shelves in the US. While we try our best not to condone or endorse pedophilia here at Lit Hub, we are all of us pretty vocal Lolita fans. In fact, we’ve Read more >
Today I learned that Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 cult classic White Noise, which is currently filming in Cleveland, is, according to Stereogum, “tentatively titled Wheat Germ.” Um, what? Is this a good name for a movie about Read more >
Today marks the 63rd anniversary of Lolita’s publication in the United States, and for those 63 years, readers have been having similar conversations about the novel: about its prose and its morality. These knotty topics are worth discussing—but it’s 2021, Read more >
Good news: Publishers Weekly has reported that a total of 39 employees at two Greenlight Bookstore locations and one Yours Truly, Brooklyn (Greenlight’s sister stationary store) location have voted to join the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union. Greenlight Bookstore Read more >
Get ready for some excellent longform profiles, because everyone’s favorite filmmaker/delightfully bananas quote machine Werner Herzog is coming out with two books. The first, The Twilight World, is a nonfiction book about Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda, who refused to surrender Read more >
Today, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation announced the finalists for the 2021 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, which celebrates the power of literature to promote peace, social justice, and global understanding. A winner and runner-up in both fiction and nonfiction Read more >
In 1928, barber I.A. Persinger started compiling a collection of “Wash Tubbs” comics, artist Roy Crane’s daily newspaper strip. But he did something else: he had his friends and customers write in the scrapbook, as evidenced by its spine’s inscription, Read more >
Ted Cruz, lover of Cancún and basketball rings, has a scandal on his hands: Forbes reported yesterday that Cruz’s campaign may have spent one hundred and fifty-three thousand dollars on copies of his 2020 book, One Vote Away: How a Read more >
Good news for two intersecting subsets of people: Danny DeVito will be writing a story in Gotham City Villains Anniversary Giant, an anthology comic celebrating various Batman villains. DeVito’s story, drawn by Dan Mora, will—of course!—focus on The Penguin, who Read more >
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s this week’s biggest new books—coming to indie bookstores near you! * Billie Jean King, All In (Knopf) “[A] lively and inspiring portrait of pressure-cooker play and political upheaval in tennis, from one of its Read more >
Astrid Roemer, the first Surinamese author to win the Netherlands’s prestigious award the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, has had her award ceremony canceled after making Facebook statements supporting former Suriname president Dési Bouterse. Roemer will still receive the £40,000 award Read more >
Exciting Monday book news: Leslie Jamison has struck a two-book North American rights agreement with Little, Brown, her standing publisher. They’ll be publishing both a nonfiction book—Splinters—and a novel, Risk. Risk will be Jamison’s first novel since her 2010 debut, Read more >
Arnold Schwarzenegger is in the news today because he wrote an article for The Atlantic titled “Don’t Be a Schmuck. Put on a Mask.” The article itself is a lot—Schwarzenegger quotes John Adams and Team America, gives a shout out to “beautiful, powerful” Read more >
Last year’s summer of protests inspired a particular aesthetic of online activism. You’ve probably seen it on Instagram: a 10-image carousel of text and graphics that are probably set against a Canva-created backdrop. It’s what Vox writer Terry Nguyen calls Read more >
There are iconic voices and then there are iconic voices. Think of James Earl Jones’ rumbling grandeur. Sam Elliott’s laid-back Western drawl. Anthony Hopkins’ soothing-but-sinister enunciation. Lauren Bacall’s breathy bass—marvelous, mellifluous voices all. For my money, however, the greatest voice Read more >
It’s been a year of literary scams. Mysterious phishers have been scamming writers out of manuscripts; someone posed as Valeria Luiselli via email and stole £30k of prize money; fake agents were as present as ever; some jerk stole donations Read more >
