Literature can speak to us. In this case, literally: Danish electronics company Bang & Olufsen has designed a new wireless speaker that resembles a book. The sleek ten-inch tall speaker fits neatly into a bookshelf and is nine hundred dollars. Read more >
In 1938, Of Mice and Men, a play adapted from Paul Walker lookalike John Steinbeck’s original 1937 novel and directed by George Kaufman, won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for Best Play. Steinbeck responded to the news of Read more >
Exciting news: Deadline reported this morning that the screen rights to Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji author Akwaeke Emezi’s forthcoming romance novel You Made A Fool of Death with Your Beauty have been purchased by Amazon Studios in Read more >
Today, the UK’s Women’s Prize for Fiction announced the shortlist for this year’s prize, which seeks to recognize the best fiction written by women every year, to the tune of £30,000, and a bronze figurine known as the “Bessie.” This Read more >
Two months ago, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld stepped down from the position of Dutch translator for Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem “The Hill We Climb” after journalists and poets raised concerns about a white translator’s unfitness to translate a poem authored by Read more >
Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, has won The New Literary Project’s annual Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a $50,000 award that recognizes “a midcareer fiction writer who has earned Read more >
Huge news: Kimberly Denise Jones—aka rap legend Lil’ Kim—has written a “deeply personal and revealing” memoir, and we get to read it later this year. THE QUEEN BEE, written with Kathy Iandoli, will be published in November 2021 by Hachette Read more >
Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, the 20th century’s most cosmically terrifying work of literary fiction, celebrates its 36th publication anniversary this week. McCarthy’s bloody, gnostic opus is the story of “the kid,” a battlesome teenage runaway Read more >
Do we really need another version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ubiquitous classic? Probably not, but I guess this is what happens when story calcifies into myth: its trace elements show up everywhere, forever. And now it’ll be on Broadway! At Read more >
On this day in 1934, the late Lois Duncan was born Lois Duncan Steinmetz in Philadelphia. Her parents, Joseph and Lois Steinmetz, were noted photographers who contributed to publications such as Life and The Saturday Evening Post. When she was Read more >
As more and more people get vaccinated, I’m both excited for indoor spaces to open back up and grateful for the public outdoor spaces that made this year much more joyful—so I’m obviously obsessed with this forest library that strikes Read more >
Before Pale Fire, or Pnin, or Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov was just like some of us: sending poems to the New Yorker. Nabokov—already famous in Europe for his Russian-language works—was suddenly plunged back into obscurity when he relocated to America, and Read more >
Everybody has at least one book in them, or so we all like to tell ourselves. But maybe you don’t really need a book—maybe all you need is a book cover. In that case, Canadian designer Steve St. Pierre has Read more >
There’s a lot of bad news in the world, but please, look over here for a moment and meet Roshan the Book-Carrying Camel. Roshan is basically a sentient bookmobile making his way to small, rural villages in Pakistan to deliver Read more >
Well, what’re you waiting for? These books aren’t going to read themselves. * Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts (Knopf) “Lahiri’s elegant phrases throughout the book reveal as much about her character as they do about the author’s understanding of her environment and Read more >
George Orwell probably hasn’t stopped spinning in his grave since that Apple Macintosh commercial came out in 1984. You know, the one with the lady in red gym shorts who throws a big old hammer at Big Brother, at which Read more >
Is this the dark woods or the shining world? The ice cream company Magnum, in partnership with the Dante Alighieri Society, is releasing a new series of ice cream bars to commemorate the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death. Three Read more >
On May 11th, Doubleday will publish national powerhouse Stacey Abrams’s novel While Justice Sleeps, a thriller about a Supreme Court justice who slips into a coma, leaving his law clerk responsible for untangling a conspiracy involving the president of the Read more >
Amid a flood of damning stories documenting producer Scott Rudin’s abusive behavior, Michael Chabon took to Medium and published an apology for “[his] part in enabling Scott Rudin’s abuse, simply by standing by, saying nothing, looking the other way.” Chabon Read more >
Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, Jenny Diski’s Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?, Anthony Bourdain’s World Travel, and Jonathan Ames’ A Man Named Doll all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. Brought Read more >
