A groundbreaking children’s book based on an equally groundbreaking sports hero comes out today: Fauja Singh Keeps Going by Simran Jeet Singh, featuring the story of the first centenarian marathon runner, is also the first children’s book from a major Read more >
Long a part of the BIG CANON OF IMPORTANT AMERICANS, Thoreau is also a part of that less vaunted group of writers judged severely by the quality of diehard fan they inspire (think Kerouac, Bukowski, Hemingway)—wild-eyed young men hurling themselves Read more >
If we’re lucky, we can recall that teacher in our lives who helped change the way we saw something about the world by unsettling a previously entrenched perspective on art, politics, or something of the kind. It sometimes happens that Read more >
The Bangles gave the world Manic Monday, and now, dear reader, it is New Book Tuesday. (Can we make that a thing? #newboosday) Here we’ve got the latest from Helen Macdonald, Ali Smith, Daisy Johnson, Joy Harjo, Erin Brockovich, and more. Read more >
I tend to try to avoid the dark crevices of the internet, because I have a terrible sense of direction and could easily get lost for hours. Or days. I had never even stumbled onto Reddit until a few years Read more >
Virginia Woolf is famous, among other things, for declaring that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” But did you know that Woolf’s own room for writing fiction was a Read more >
Welcome to the Book Marks Questionnaire, where we ask authors questions about the books that have shaped them. This week, we spoke to The Revisioners author Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. * Book Marks: First book you remember loving? Margaret Wilkerson Sexton: Read more >
A fiction prompt: Imagine you are Vanity Fair editor Radhika Jones. You wake up about a month or so after the hard, devastating flex that was the Viola Davis cover. Okay, cool. Earlier in August, you got people excited again with the Read more >
Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening, Jay Parini’s Borges and Me, and Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. Fiction 1. The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Read more >
Lucy Ellmann, author of Ducks, Newburyport, one of the biggest books (in every sense) to come out in 2019, won this year’s James Tait Black Prize in fiction. It is among the oldest literary awards in the UK, which Ellmann’s father, Read more >
Three competing design proposals are out for the forthcoming Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, a city of 112 people that sits on the southern border of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The finalists—Snøhetta, Studio Gang, and Henning Larsen—all Read more >
By now, the events of Oscar Wilde’s 1882 speaking tour, which formally introduced him and his ideas to the US, are thoroughly mythologized: the unintended laughter he received at his first lecture in New York City, his visit with Walt Read more >
Does anyone else remember the young adult series From the Files of Madison Finn? Surely I can’t be the only one who, as an awkward and bookish middle-schooler, devoured them. The series follows twelve-year-old Madison Finn. She lives in upstate New Read more >
I didn’t. But it’s true: in 1945 or 1946, Ray Bradbury (who was born 100 years ago tomorrow), then known mostly in the pulp fiction market, submitted one of his short stories, “The Homecoming,” to Mademoiselle, a fashion magazine known Read more >
The Huntington Library, part of a beautiful complex with an art museum and botanical garden in San Marino, California, turns 100 this year and they’ve found a great way to celebrate. The library announced a one-year fellowship that will fund Read more >
If you can remember as far back as February 2019, surely you recall Ian Parker’s barn-burner of a New Yorker story about the trail of deception left by book editor turned novelist Dan Mallory, whose authorship of the best-selling thriller Read more >
Apparently Spotify is looking for someone to run an audiobooks division, per this very thorough analysis by Mark Williams at The New Publishing Standard. With 299 million monthly users, that could actually be a pretty huge deal for a sector Read more >
Rachel Bloom, the ingenious creator and star of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, has written a book! Last night, she announced its November 17th publication on Instagram. (Shoutout to my dear friend who texted me at an odd hour of the evening to Read more >
This weekend, the Ray Bradbury Centennial team, in partnership with the Library of Congress, Los Angeles Public Library, and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, will present the first annual Ray Bradbury Read-A-Thon: a chorus of voices will read Read more >
Since 2014, I haven’t been able to convince myself that there is a literary genre as enigmatic, macabre, and folkloristically rich as a work of hagiography, the vita or “life” of a saint. Six years ago, I traveled to a handful of Read more >
