If you’re in need of a moment of aural respite, here’s one courtesy of Marsh’s Library, a “perfectly preserved library of the early Enlightenment in central Dublin.” (Also known as “the library that put readers in cages.”) Marsh’s Library, which Read more >
The latest in the ongoing controversy at the National Book Critics Circle: after a “special meeting” on Monday, over 130 members of the NBCC met to vote on whether or not to remove Carlin Romano from its board. Romano, you’ll Read more >
The International Booker Prize is awarded annually to the best book written in any language, translated into English, and published in the UK or Ireland. It comes with a whopping £50,000—shared equally between the author and translator. This year, the Read more >
If you’re looking for new ways to fill these waning days of our pandemic summer, here’s a good one: watch Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, a documentary of the author produced with Le Guin’s participation over the course of a Read more >
Many of us have been spending a lot more time with our book collections than usual—just another side effect of staying at home all the time. But if you’ve been idly wondering whether your books have been getting the TLC 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 H Is for Hawk and Vesper Flights author Helen Macdonald. * Book Marks: First book you remember Read more >
With voter registration deadlines approaching and misinformation around voter fraud spreading, a newly-formed coalition of writers is volunteering their time to defeat Donald Trump in the presidential election this fall. The group, Writers Against Trump—whose initial members include Paul Auster, Read more >
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 >
