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 >
This week is a doozy! There are new titles from Lauren Groff, Maggie Nelson, Sandra Cisneros, Simone de Beauvoir, Joy Harjo, and (in case you haven’t heard) Sally Rooney. Not to mention the slate of debut authors and small press Read more >
This week, The Moth, a quarterly printed arts and literature magazine, announced the winner of their 2021 short story prize, judged by Ali Smith: Janice Deal, for her short story “Lost City.” Deal’s debut novel, The Sound of Rabbits, is Read more >
This past Sunday marked the 61st anniversary of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s election as Senegal’s first democratic president, when the country gained independence from French colonial rule. And to honor the important day, I wanted to highlight Senghor’s role as a Read more >
Last year, Authors for Voices of Color, an initiative that “unites publishing professionals in the fight to dismantle systemic racism and elevate voices of color,” founded by Andrea Bartz and Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, raised over $14,000 for racial justice non-profits Read more >
Here’s someone living their dream: Nicolas Gentile, a 37-year-old pastry chef, has purchased two hectares of land in the Italian countryside. There, he’s in the process of building a real-life Shire, inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien. Gentile has already built his Read more >
Over the holiday weekend, we lost the expansive, charismatic actor and producer Michael K. Williams. Born in 1966, the Brooklyn native grew up in the neighborhood of East Flatbush. And although many members of the general public seem to only Read more >
Yesterday was a very bad day for iconic, charismatic actors: we lost both Michael K. Williams and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Therefore it seems as good a moment as any to bless this cursed timeline with a few images of the latter Read more >
Stephen King’s Billy Summers, Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties, Deborah Levy’s Real Estate, Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun, and Megan Abbott’s The Turnout all feature among the best reviewed books of the past month. Brought to you by Book Read more >
Amanda Gorman’s whirlwind year is finishing up strong: her poetry collection Call Us What We Carry is set to release on December 7th, and this week, she’s been announced as the new face of Estée Lauder. But that’s not all: Read more >
It was Jane Austen that wrote, “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid”—and this week, a British court is testing that theory by using novels to bring a Read more >
On this day in 1926, Alison Lurie was born. Lurie, a folklorist, children’s literature scholar, and the author of 10 novels, died last December at 94. I first encountered her work a few years ago, when I was poking around Read more >
If you’ve been paying attention to the news this week, you surely know about Texas’s newly enacted abortion ban. According to the Texas Tribune, the bill, which went into effect on Wednesday, bans abortions as early as six weeks into Read more >
Over three years since the series’s announcement, a trailer for Amazon Prime Video’s adaptation of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series has finally been released—and if we go by fans’ reactions, it was worth the wait. In the series, Read more >
If you take her characters’ opinion as the truth, Sally Rooney hates book events. In Beautiful World, Where Are You, the character Alice—a successful young Irish novelist who has recently moved to a small town, hm, who does this remind Read more >
On this day in 1977, Toni Morrison’s bestselling novel Song of Solomon was published. The narrative follows Macon “Milkman” Dead III, the son of the richest Black family in his Midwestern town. At a young age, Milkman learns that humans Read more >
