On this very day in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter. You know the story. But in case high school English class feels very far away to you now and it’s been a while since you’ve seen Emma Stone in Read more >
Well, we have been in this mess for over a year now. For those of you who are being very good at social distancing but who miss the physical touch of a friend, might I recommend (gently) stroking the covers Read more >
Sic semper tyrannis—a quote attributed to Brutus, one of Julius Caesar’s assassins; the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia; and the cry of John Wilkes Booth right after he shot Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre in 1865. Although one might Read more >
Here’s an unconventional literary award! A new type of jumping spider has been discovered and promptly named after children’s author Eric Carle. The spider was discovered in a park in Hong Kong by naturalist Stefan Obenauer, who contacted the Manchester Read more >
Today, Lambda Literary announced the finalists for its annual Award, which recognizes and celebrates the best queer fiction and nonfiction published in the last year. The 120 finalists of the Prize, now in its 33rd year, were selected across 24 categories—Lesbian Read more >
Some welcome adaptation news! Deadline has reported that Searchlight Television has optioned N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy for live-action series development. Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s production company Westbrook Studios will produce, with David Boorstein, Westbrook Studios’s Head of Scripted Read more >
Recently, I’ve started watching America’s Next Top Model, which is a show about discomfort; a show where contestants are forced to hold snakes and spiders and withstand darkness and rain and hang upside down like bats and leap from skyscrapers. Read more >
Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation, Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were, Walter Isaacson’s The Code Breaker, and Michelle Nijhuis’ Beloved Beastsall feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes Read more >
Shed Simove insists that he has bad timing. For eighteen years, the London-based writer has been working on his manuscript about a pandemic—only to attempt to publish it during a pandemic. Amid the throes of COVID-19 is perhaps not the Read more >
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (not to be confused with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) is, to my mind, the single greatest horror story ever written, as well as the single greatest work of art ever created by a teenager (with apologies to Messrs. Read more >
Art by Xavier Marabout When I was a kid, I loved the Tintin books. I had every one (except the ones that Hergé pulled from print due to their racist undertones), and a poster, and a little stuffed Snowy to Read more >
The UK arm of Bookshop.org, the online retailer that partners with indie bookstores, has a new initiative on the way: it’s launching a series of online events for its customers as well as customers of unaffiliated indies. For the first Read more >
Every so often, there comes a piece of adaptation news so perfect that I almost regain my faith in Hollywood (which is technically just a small piece of the expanded Marvel Universe at this point). Today, that news is that Read more >
Though the mentions of Shakespeare writing King Lear in quarantine have mercifully decreased, it’s hard to shake the hustler’s mindset. With this vaccine rollout comes a nagging thought: when the pandemic ends, what will you have to show for it? Read more >
Today in 1959, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun opened to widespread acclaim at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway; the show, after a century of Broadway productions, was the first work on Broadway written by a Black woman. Read more >
Pop culture depictions of, for lack of a better term, Twenty-Something Girls Just Figuring Shit Out, rarely include anyone who isn’t white. Despite living in New York City, the girls of Girls were white. Two Broke Girls? Again, white. Frances Read more >
At least once a season—on Twitter, or Facebook, out back of saloons—there erupts an intense and all-consuming fight about how many spaces you should leave after a period. By now most of you reading this are familiar with the outlines Read more >
In the last days of my pregnancy, I despaired of how long it would be until I could finish a book again. The day my induction was scheduled, I raced through the last 50 pages of The Last Samurai, which Read more >
Today, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, in collaboration with Bailey’s and Nat West, announced the longlist for its annual award, which recognizes and honors a female author of any nationality for the best novel written in English published in the Read more >
Photo by Jill Krementz More than four decades on from its original publication, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon—which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1978 and was cited by the Swedish Academy in awarding Morrison the 1993 Nobel Prize Read more >
