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News, Notes, Talk

Beverly Cleary, beloved creator of Ramona Quimby, has died at the age of 104.

Legend of children’s literature Beverly Cleary died on March 25th in Carmel, California, HarperCollins announced on Friday. She was 104. Since publishing Henry Huggins in 1950, when she was a librarian, Cleary has sold 85 million copies of her books, which have Read more >

By Emily Temple

Behold: A reading list for Women's History Month (and all months).

Dear reader, I know what you are thinking! Isn’t Women’s History Month basically over? Isn’t it a little too late for this listicle? No! To put this reading list before you at the very beginning of the month would be Read more >

By Katie Yee

A Shakespearean parody of the upcoming Shakespearean parody of The Avengers.

Two franchises alike in type of work, One Marvel, one that puts out parodies, That’s called Quirk Books, the main word being “quirk”; They’re behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies— From forth their fertile loins comes a collab Which any Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Here are the best reviewed books of the week.

Andrea Lee’s Red Island House, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan’s Francis Bacon, Andrew J. Graff’s Raft of Stars, and Alexander Nemerov’s Fierce Poise all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s Read more >

By Book Marks

Dear Amazon: Why can’t we sell our ebook on your platform?

Dear Amazon, We are writing today in response to your refusal to publish our most recent ebook, written by an emerging author who has not yet published a book of her own. In doing so, we wonder whether we are Read more >

By The Massachusetts Review

Just what you never knew you always wanted: a playlist of Jane Austen’s favorite songs.

Regardless of our feelings toward Emma’s Mrs. Elton, we can agree with her sentiment that “without music, life would be a blank”—so it’s a happy occasion that Colorado Public Radio, aided by Austen scholar Joan Ray, has assembled a playlist Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove author (and sly American existentialist), dies at 84.

Larry McMurtry, storyteller and subversive mythmaker of the American west, has died at age 84. Best known for his Lonesome Dove tetralogy—and the blockbuster TV miniseries that followed—McMurtry was a prolific writer of novels, screenplays, essays, and more, whose keen Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Read Tennessee Williams’s first published short story. (It’s weird.)

Today would be Tennessee Williams’s 110th birthday; to celebrate, we’re looking way back to before his storied career, when he was a teenager that knew he wanted to be a writer. When Williams was sixteen, he made his fiction debut Read more >

By Walker Caplan

The best writing advice I’ve ever read comes from Robert Frost.

I write prose, not poetry, but the most helpful piece of advice I’ve ever read was written by a poet: Robert Frost, who was born 147 years ago today. In the second, expanded edition of his Collected Poems, published in 1939, Read more >

By Emily Temple

Here are the winners of this year's National Book Critics Circle awards.

This evening, during a virtual event, the National Book Critics Circle announced the recipients of its 2020 book awards, spread across six categories, and also awarded the previously announced Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award (to the Feminist Press) and Nona Read more >

By Emily Temple

Book workers are declaring their support for Amazon employees' union drive.

Book industry professionals from around the country are declaring this Friday a Book Workers Day of Solidarity with Amazon employees in Bessemer, Alabama, whose fight for unionization continues to draw national attention. Employees of more than two dozen publishers, along Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Carmen Maria Machado has won the Rathbones Folio Prize for In the Dream House.

In a unanimous decision by the judges, Carmen Maria Machado has been awarded the £30,000 Rathbones Folio Prize for her genre-bending memoir In the Dream House. Machado joins an illustrious list of former winners since the prize was founded in Read more >

By Walker Caplan

This online reading platform that mines kids' preferences to create new books is deeply creepy.

Maybe it’s just because I am an Old, but when I read about the data collection activities of Epic—an online reading platform that, in fairness, is free to schools and has helped kids access digital library books during the pandemic—I Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Here's the shortlist for the 2021 International DUBLIN Literary Award.

The shortlist for the 2021 International DUBLIN Literary Award, six books chosen from a longlist of nominations from public libraries around the world, has been released. The winner will be announced in May 2021, and will receive a prize of Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Americans and debuts dominate the shortlist for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize.

The Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize, one of the UK’s most prestigious literary awards as well as the largest literary prize for writers 39 and under, has released its shortlist for the 2021 award. This year, US-based authors dominate the Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Renaissance man David Duchovny is about to do the impossible.

Plenty of writers have adapted, or had a hand in adapting, their own novels for the screen. Gillian Flynn did it with Gone Girl. John Irving did it with The Cider House Rules. Nick Horby did it with Fever Pitch. William Peter Read more >

By Dan Sheehan