John Updike, with one notable exception, was an incredibly kind reviewer. Patricia Lockwood, in her London Review of Books survey of Updike’s work, observed Updike’s criticism “was not just game and generous but able, as his fiction is not, to Read more >
Good news for Ottessa Moshfegh fans, general book fans, productivity enthusiasts, and perhaps the world at large: Ottessa Moshfegh has finished a new novel over the course of the pandemic. This news received a soft rollout today in Vox’s feature Read more >
If you feel trapped or crazy or unwell, and want a movie to heighten rather than alleviate those feelings, you’ll be thrilled by this news: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s well-known short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” has been made into a horror Read more >
Yesterday morning, TechCrunch announced that the copywriting tool CopyAI has raised $2.9 million in a seed round led by Craft Ventures. This is a big deal: CopyAI is one of several companies using the language prediction model GPT-3, which uses Read more >
How do you picture the Internet? What color is the Internet? What does the Internet sound like? Strangely, I’ve heard these questions asked several times over the last few months, on podcasts and at book talks; perhaps because we’ve spent Read more >
St. Patrick’s Day is upon us, a chairde, and what better way to mark the occasion than by curling up with a novel penned by an author from the Emerald Isle. The trouble is, there are far too many wonderful Read more >
The news of last night’s shootings at three Atlanta-area massage parlors, in which a white gunman killed eight people—including six people of Asian descent—is a tragic, sobering reminder that anti-Asian hatred and violence remains a deadly threat in the US. Read more >
As the saying goes, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Considering his literary output, I’m willing to bet that National Book Award winner Ibram X. Kendi would wholeheartedly agree with this statement. And now, the Read more >
Since its publication in 2015, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer has become one of the most widely celebrated debuts in recent memory—winning the Pulitzer Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Read more >
As far as I can tell, Tom Hiddleston attaches himself to only two kinds of project: Marvel tentpole properties and somber literary adaptations. Consider the evidence: in the past decade, Hiddleston has starred as Marvel Cinematic Universe fan favorite Loki Read more >
Look: maybe our puny mortal book clubs are only allowed to select one book at a time, but that’s one of the many ways in which Oprah differs from us: she can, if she chooses, anoint four books at once Read more >
News broke yesterday that Peter Thiel, founder of Pay-Pal and the not-at-all sinister-sounding security and surveillance concern Palantir, is backing Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance for a 2022 run at the Ohio senate seat left vacant by Rob Porter. Today, Read more >
On this very day in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter. You know the story. But in case high school English class feels very far away to you now and it’s been a while since you’ve seen Emma Stone in Read more >
Well, we have been in this mess for over a year now. For those of you who are being very good at social distancing but who miss the physical touch of a friend, might I recommend (gently) stroking the covers Read more >
Sic semper tyrannis—a quote attributed to Brutus, one of Julius Caesar’s assassins; the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia; and the cry of John Wilkes Booth right after he shot Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre in 1865. Although one might Read more >
Here’s an unconventional literary award! A new type of jumping spider has been discovered and promptly named after children’s author Eric Carle. The spider was discovered in a park in Hong Kong by naturalist Stefan Obenauer, who contacted the Manchester Read more >
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