The most famous “World’s Greatest Library” ever consumed by fire is that of Alexandria over 2,000 years ago (thanks, Caesar)—we don’t know exactly what was lost but we know that it was a lot. This, perhaps, is what makes such Read more >
Happy 179th birthday, Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce—prolific short story writer, roving journalist, feared critic, biting satirist, Civil War veteran, sometime poet, “weird” fiction pioneer, and surely the most famous missing person in American literary history. Now (and with apologies to the Read more >
Here’s some Thursday joy—and inspiration for your vaccinated group hangs. Unlike many book clubs, which involve a lot of sitting and not much excitement, every month the Bushwick Book Club gathers to present original work—mostly songs, but sometimes poems, meals Read more >
Here’s a project to keep on your radar: five groups across the country—Cave Canem Foundation in Brooklyn, NY; Furious Flower Poetry Center in Harrisonburg, VA; The Hurston/Wright Foundation in DC; Obsidian Lit in Normal, IL; and The Watering Hole in Read more >
You know writers. They obsess over comma placement. They can re-write a sentence a thousand times without being satisfied. And they always have to have the final word. For people whose lives revolved so much around language, what did they Read more >
The only good thing about Jared Kushner’s book deal: it’s making Trump angry. A source told CNN that Trump is envious of Kushner’s deal with Harper Collins’s conservative imprint Broadside Books. According to a Kushner associate, the book deal is Read more >
ITV News has reported that Amazon is destroying millions of unsold items each year—books, TVs, laptops, drones, headphones, computers, thousands of packaged COVID face masks are all among the waste. Undercover footage of Amazon’s Dunfermline warehouse in the UK from Read more >
There’s not enough observational comedy based on the differences between poets and fiction writers, in my opinion. (True, the market for this kind of humor might be vanishingly small and generally obnoxious, but that’s never stopped us [poets] before!) Nowhere Read more >
The publishing giant HarperCollins has reached an agreement with the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to acquire world publishing rights to the late Civil Rights leader’s entire archives—a collection which contains some of the “most historically important and Read more >
Actually . . . you don’t have to pay attention to this. But since you’re here, J.D. Vance, of Hillbilly Elegy fame, is upset that HBO is about to ruin Gossip Girl for him. Wokeness will make everything boring and ugly. https://t.co/u6bIgS12Rh — Read more >
In 2019, self-published novelist Mason Engel set out to promote his novel by visiting 50 bookstores in 50 days, heading across America to spread the good word, filming it as he went. At that point, he’d still planned to just Read more >
Like many other people on Literary Twitter and also in the General Media, I have recently received an advance copy of Jonathan Franzen’s next novel, Crossroads. I have not yet begun to read it, though I will, and not, like Read more >
Last month, Sotheby’s announced that a collection of rare Brontë-affiliated manuscripts, most notably a volume of 31 handwritten poems by Emily Brontë, was slated for auction along with other manuscripts by Robert Burns and Walter Scott. Now, Sotheby’s has agreed Read more >
In a satisfying full-circle moment, Hilary Mantel has won the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction with her novel The Mirror & the Light, the third book in her Booker Prize-winning, Thomas Cromwell-centered Wolf Hall trilogy—eleven years after Wolf Read more >
John Murry is a singer-songwriter from Mississippi, currently living in Ireland, and writing dark, lyrical, and haunting ballads about death and drugs and dysfunction and despair. So it’s not completely shocking to learn that he is related to William Faulkner, Read more >
Today is Octavia Butler’s birthday, which is as good an excuse as any to not only bask in her writing advice but also revisit her 2000 appearance on Charlie Rose, in which Rose mispronounces “Nebula” and asks Butler why she Read more >
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