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This year's International Booker Prize shortlist is dominated by indie publishers.

The International Booker Prize has just announced the six books in the running for this year’s award, which celebrates the finest fiction from around the world, translated into English. The £50,000 prize is split evenly between author and translator. Said Read more >

By Walker Caplan

10 books that make the Earth come alive.

Today is a day specifically set aside to celebrate and support environmental protection efforts. Really, this should be every day. Climate change is real. Please read Greta Thunberg’s twitter. There is certainly no shortage of books on the subject. You Read more >

By Katie Yee

This Saturday is Independent Bookstore Day—go forth and buy books!

Just a little, happy reminder: Independent Bookstore Day is this Saturday, April 24th. This year, the celebration is both online and in person at over 700 stores nationwide, featuring free author conversations as well as Independent Bookstore Day-exclusive books and Read more >

By Walker Caplan

LeVar Burton is your new Jeopardy! guest host.

Ask and you shall receive! Actor, producer, and children’s television icon, LeVar Burton, was just named as one of the new guest hosts for Jeopardy! The announcement seems to be a testament to the tenacity of fan support. In November, Read more >

By Vanessa Willoughby

Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman has won the Aspen Words Literary Prize.

Last night, Louise Erdrich was named the winner of the $35,000 Aspen Words Literary Prize, established by the Aspen Institute to honor a work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on Read more >

By Walker Caplan

These are the 5 (er, 10?) best parentheses in literature.

I love a good aside. I live for literary intrusion. I want comments on my comments, discursive thinking, footnotes. I want to be distracted, taken off course for a while before being firmly set back down. What I’m saying is Read more >

By Emily Temple

Despite protests from employees, Simon & Schuster still plans to publish Mike Pence’s book.

This week, an open letter from the workforce of Simon & Schuster was circulated, demanding that S&S cancel Mike Pence’s two-book deal, as well as end their distribution deal with the far-right, murderous-cop-platforming Post Hill Press. The open letter called Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Antoine Fuqua is making a new, all-Black Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

I’m a huge Tennessee Williams fan, and a reasonably big Antoine Fuqua fan, so today’s news that the Training Day director will helm a movie adaptation of Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece of mendacity and buried familial trauma, Cat on a Hot Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Alyssa Collins has been awarded the Octavia E. Butler Fellowship.

Alyssa Collins, assistant professor of English Language and Literature and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina, has been awarded an Octavia E. Butler Fellowship by the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens for her project entitled Read more >

By Walker Caplan

The University of Cape Town’s African Studies Library, ravaged by wildfire, needs your help.

A wildfire displaced 4000 students and destroyed several buildings on the University of Cape Town’s campus over the weekend, including UCT’s Jagger Reading Room, which houses part of the UCT Libraries’ Special Collections. This is a major loss; UCT’s Special Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Blake Bailey has been dropped by his agency following sexual abuse allegations.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Blake Bailey, author of a new and much-discussed biography of Philip Roth, has been dropped by his agency, the Story Factory, after allegations of “grooming and manipulation” along with other sexual misconduct. The allegations were Read more >

By Emily Temple

This bucolic 1946 newsreel about Daphne Du Maurier could also be the beginning of a horror film.

Have you ever wanted the inside scoop on midcentury Gothicist par excellence Daphne Du Maurier’s personal life?  Did she really carry on illicit affairs with Gertrude Lawrence and Ellen Doubleday? What really prompted her retreat from public life? Was she Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Dakota Johnson is set to star in Netflix’s film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

How quickly come the reasons for approving what we like—when what we like is a Jane Austen adaptation, and there are many reasons to approve! Deadline just announced that Dakota Johnson has signed on to star as Anne in Netflix Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Monstrosity Plucked From Garbage Can: On Mae West’s early career as a controversial playwright.

Mae West is an icon: literally, a representative symbol. In the popular imagination, Mae West stands in for a certain type of seduction—blonde, campy, one-liner-heavy. But though West is best known for her distinctive performances, she was also a controversial Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Simon & Schuster workers are protesting their employer’s publishing decisions.

Framed as a “statement from the workforce of S&S” an open letter is now circulating that calls out Simon & Schuster for maintaining its distribution relationship with Post Hill, a far right small press that publishes the likes of Matt Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

13 new books to get on Independent Bookstore Day.

This Saturday is Independent Bookstore Day. So you basically have to stop by your local indie and stock up on books to your heart’s content! * Richard Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground (Library of America) The Man Who Lived Read more >

By Katie Yee