Here’s some great literary news for your afternoon: yesterday, Chicago-native and writer Gabriel Bump was awarded the 2020 Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, for his debut novel Everywhere You Don’t Belong. The Award, which recognizes and honors outstanding fiction from Read more >
Some adaptation news to send us into the holiday! A24 is currently working on the film adaptation of Ocean Vuong’s beautiful—and widely loved—novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The news was announced on Monday at the start of this week’s Read more >
Continuing on the Barack Obama’s Favorite Media end-of-year march, the former President has released a 20-song playlist to accompany his memoir A Promised Land, composed of songs that recall memories of his time on the campaign trail and in the Read more >
Some good news to close out the year! Recently, Roxane Gay announced on Twitter that she’s starting a book club, and anyone can participate. The Audacious Book Club will span at least one year, and the reading list for 2021 Read more >
It’s supremely gratifying to look upon a piece of literary adaptation news and think to yourself: perfect. Such was the warm, all-is-right-with-the-world-feeling I felt earlier this morning after reading the announcement that Sarah Polley will direct Frances McDormand in an Read more >
Barack Obama, the most powerful force in end of year book recommendations, has just dropped his 2020 favorites list. As we’ve come to expect from the most bookish president since John Adams (he was super into books, right?), it contains Read more >
Charlotte Charke, Sarah Bernhardt, Maxine Peake, Michelle Terry, Cush Jumbo, Ruth Negga—many towering women have played Hamlet throughout the years, and Noomi Rapace, known for her portrayal of Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish adaptations of the Millennium series, is next Read more >
George Saunders’ new book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, is out next month and promises to be a literary master class on the short Read more >
This week is a whirlwind for Shirley Jackson fans! On Monday we learned we’re getting a Jackson tribute anthology in 2021, and now, an unseen Shirley Jackson story has been published in The Strand Magazine. Jackson’s son, Laurence Hyman, found Read more >
The latest Ted Chiang story to be snapped up for adaptation is “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling,” which has recently been optioned by Steve Yockey, creator of The Flight Attendant. Yockey will be developing the story as Read more >
If you love a) a good set and b) a pugnacious critic, then you’re in luck. Nearly ten years after the death of Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic Books is releasing new mass-market paperback editions of 12 of his books, redesigned by Read more >
A set of almost 300 mostly unpublished letters from The Second Sex author Simone de Beauvoir to the French novelist Violette Leduc have sold at auction for over sixty-nine thousand dollars. The collection includes a missive from 1945 where Beauvoir Read more >
Henry Holt and Company announced today that Elizabeth Warren has written a memoir, to be released on April 20th of next year. The book is titled Persist, after the famous Mitch McConnell soundbite which was immediately reclaimed as a feminist Read more >
Talk about a pivot: after philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he grew unhappy, abandoned his teaching post at Cambridge, and started teaching elementary school in rural Austria. The dictionary he created for his students during his Read more >
Deadline announced this morning that Kate Atkinson’s bestselling, award-winning 2014 novel Life After Life is getting the prestige television treatment with the BBC green-lighting a four-part series miniseries adaptation. House Productions have assembled an impressive creative team to bring the Read more >
I had a sixth grade math teacher who told us about Frank Zappa’s children, Moon Unit and Dweezil, and used their names in word problems every class. He made towering realistic paper maché dragons. He was muscular and terrifying. This Read more >
Today, Penguin Random House announced the launch of its new publishing imprint with Roc Nation, an entertainment agency founded by Shawn Carter, known by most as Jay-Z. The imprint, aptly named Roc Lit 101, will focus on publishing “genre-defying literature” Read more >
As you may already know if you’re a frequent reader of this space, I love thinking about book covers. One particular sub-pleasure of this is comparing US and UK covers; it’s fascinating to see different designers’ takes on the same Read more >
This Halloween was . . . admittedly not the best, but next year’s is already shaping up to be much better—now that a collection of original stories in tribute to the late horror writer Shirley Jackson, featuring Joyce Carol Oates Read more >
Weather by Jenny Offill (Knopf) Congratulations to Jenny Offill, who fought off stiff competition (in the form of Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness and Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, among others) to claim the (much-coveted) title of Best Reviewed Novel Read more >
