The science fiction world is having a bit of a week. Today, New Zealand, the host of this year’s World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon), virtually kicked off one of the world’s most popular sci-fi events. New Zealanders had been preparing for Read more >
Yesterday, MacDowell, a prestigious artists’ residency in New Hampshire—who has suspended their regular fellowship program due to the coronavirus pandemic—announced a “pilot program” for a virtual version of its famous retreat. It will certainly look a lot different than usual, Read more >
Have you ever dreamed of being immortalized within the pages of a James Patterson novel? Of living on, long after your bones have turned to dust and your headstone has been weathered into illegibility, as a firecracker love interest or Read more >
The winners for the 32nd Will Eisner Comic Industry Award were announced online on Friday night, despite some controversy over a voting glitch. In lieu of the usual San Diego Comic-Con, the award ceremony featured actor Phil LaMarr (of Pulp Read more >
Substack, the (apparently pretty well-funded) newsletter distribution company, has announced its second round of fellows, led by novelist and essayist Kaitlyn Greenidge. Greenidge is the only Senior Fellow of the ten, a title that carries with it a $100,000 grant. Read more >
As you continue to support your local indies, here are 20 new titles to be on the lookout for! This list features the hotly-anticipated new books by the likes of Laura van den Berg, Natasha Trethewey, Yiyun Li, Zadie Smith, Read more >
This year’s Booker Prize longlist includes some books you expected—and also quite a few books you didn’t, including eight (8) debuts out of the thirteen books. “It is an unusually high proportion, and especially surprising to the judges themselves, who Read more >
Elizabeth Gabler’s 3000 Pictures—a joint venture between a joint venture with Sony Pictures and Harper Collins—just closed a preemptive deal for Kazuo Ishiguro’s upcoming novel, Klara and the Sun. The highly-anticipated new novel from the 2017 Nobel Prize-winner is the story Read more >
54 years ago today, the iconic mid-century American poet Frank O’Hara was buried in Green River Cemetery, in Springs, New York, two days after being struck down by a jeep on Fire Island at the age of 40—a freakish tragedy Read more >
Irenosen Okojie, a Nigerian-British author, is this year’s winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story “Grace Jones.” The story, which appears in her 2019 collection Nudibranch, follows a Grace Jones impersonator in the aftermath of Read more >
What are you up to this summer? Planning an excursion to the woods? Kicking back with some good television and a beer? Alternatively, why don’t you come along with me for the ultimate socially-distanced leisure activity for our times: poring Read more >
Lana Del Rey is releasing her forthcoming poetry collection, Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass, on Tuesday, July 28 in digital form. In case you prefer your celebrity poetry spoken aloud, though, she has also recorded an audio version of Read more >
As any and all Philip Pullman stans will undoubtedly already be aware, HBO just released the trailer for the second season of the latest adaptation of His Dark Materials, which features noted hot priest Andrew Scott, who will be portraying Read more >
If you watched the excellent HBO documentary last year about the Apollo Theater in New York City, you would have seen a moving, behind-the-scenes segment about Kamilah Forbes’s 2018 stage adaptation of her friend Ta-Nehisi Coates’ celebrated book, Between the World Read more >
Siobhan Reardon, president and director of the Philadelphia Free Library, has resigned under protracted pressure from local officials and staff over accusations that she created an unwelcome and hostile environment for black employees. “In the last several months, events have Read more >
Elisabeth Moss has been on a literary adaptation hot-streak of late. In just the past five years, the Emmy-winning breakout star of Mad Men (whom Vulture dubbed the “Queen of Peak TV”) has appeared in The Handmaid’s Tale, The Invisible Man, Read more >
In an address on the Senate floor yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell drew on novelist Salman Rushdie to decry the “grievance-industrial complex”—cancel culture—and bemoan what he sees as the erosion of law and order. Meanwhile, in Portland, protestors continued to Read more >
Yes, this is hockey news on a website devoted to book culture, but look: I am from Canada and the Kraken is an ancient mythological creature, and mythology is foundational to all of those books you’re carrying in that tote Read more >
[Updated 1:18 pm ET] Michael Cohen will be released from prison on Friday under orders from a federal judge, who said he was re-imprisoned after an initial release to home confinement in retaliation for his plans to publish a book Read more >
Early this year, we ran a story about GPT-2, an AI language program developed by the San Francisco-based research firm OpenAI. While language generation software can have a variety of commercial uses, we were more interested in seeing whether innovations Read more >
