If you thought the Choose Your Own Adventure books were magical, one Sri Lankan children’s book author might be up your alley. Sybil Wettasinghe, the 90-year-old author of The Umbrella Thief, a classic children’s book in Sri Lanka, set a new Guinness Read more >
Step aside Bad Company, Traveling Wilburys, Audioslave, The Highwaymen, and yes, even my beloved Velvet Revolver, because the supergroup we never knew we always wanted has finally been formed. Joe & Anthony Russo, Barack & Michelle Obama, Riz Ahmed, and Read more >
Brendan and Sully and Fitz are at again! Local youth (probably) have stolen a 6-foot-pencil sculpture off the front of the Gloucester Writers Center in Gloucester, Massachusetts. As the Gloucester Times reports: “It was quite the landmark,” Gloucester Writers Center Read more >
Today, employees at the Little, Brown and Company imprint of the Hachette Book Group have organized a walkout in protest of the company’s announcement that it will be moving forward with the publication of Woody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing. Read more >
Today feels like one of the bad days. But as your mother always told you, silver linings hang out in the strangest of places. The brilliant Tressie McMillan Cottom, Associate Professor of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, whose most recent Read more >
The debate around Jeanine Cummins’ controversial novel American Dirt will continue on March 6th when a new episode of Oprah’s Book Club airs at midnight (ET) on Apple TV+. The two-part episode centers on the Oprah Book Club selection that stirred one of the Read more >
At a private ceremony today in Lafayette, California, the finalists for this year’s Joyce Carol Oates Prize were announced. (You can read the full press release here.) The finalists were selected by an anonymous jury of publishers, critics, authors, and Read more >
After the massive blowback from its selection of American Dirt—a book about the migrant experience widely denounced for having very little connection to the migrant experience (or to Mexico, where the book is set)—it makes sense that Oprah’s Book Club Read more >
Remember when, in 2017, the President of the United States stood with the President of Egypt and the Saudi King around Saruman’s palantír, erm, a telepathic dark crystal, I mean a glowing globe orb? The event the three leaders were attending Read more >
Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen first met at a party in the summer of 1847. Andersen was not yet well known in England (his stories were being translated from Danish for the first time), and he was starry-eyed, introducing Read more >
Dolly Parton is, perhaps, the one celebrity left we can believe in (please, please don’t tell me if she supports Biden). At the very least, she’s the only person who could pull off creating a herself-themed amusement park and still, somehow, Read more >
Simon & Schuster is for sale, ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish said today at an investor conference for Morgan Stanley in San Francisco, while using the word “asset” far too many times and resurrecting the corpse of the “pivot to video” Read more >
Le Monde is reporting that sales of Albert Camus’s 1947 classic, The Plague, have sky-rocketed in Italy, which continues to be the European nation most severely affected by the coronavirus outbreak: according to reported sale numbers in La Repubblica, the Read more >
’90s basketball stans rejoice: Scottie “No Tippin’” Pippen, a six-time NBA champion and one of the greatest small forwards of all time, is writing a memoir. As Publishers Marketplace reported yesterday: Six-time NBA champion, two-time Olympic gold medalist and Hall Read more >
Today, a website called Mansion Global (which yes, is a website about buying mansions, globally) offers some tips for “how to design around your tomes.” This is part of a weekly series Mansion Global runs, which is all about designing Read more >
Here’s some uncharacteristically good news for our notoriously exclusive, non-diverse, barrier-laden industry: next summer, two publishing interns from diverse backgrounds will receive a stipend, thanks to a donation from author Celeste Ng. We Need Diverse Books, which in the past Read more >
Yesterday, Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, announced that they would be publishing Woody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing, a book we all once thought would never see the light of day, considering his history of sexual Read more >
More than 31,000 people have signed a petition calling on Oxford University Press to change the Oxford Dictionaries’ definition of “woman,” which includes “bitch” as a synonym and lists examples of usage that show men denigrating women. The campaign, created Read more >
The PEN/Faulkner Award celebrates the best published works of fiction by American citizens. It is the largest peer-juried award in the country, with three writers being selected by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation to act as jurors. Patricia Engel, Ru Freeman, and Read more >
If you’ve been anywhere near Literary Twitter™ in the last 48 hours, I don’t have to tell you that there has been some major AWP anxiety going down. But yesterday, after many mixed messages and rumors to the contrary, AWP Read more >
