The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has just announced the longlist for their 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In honor of the 40th anniversary of the award, which “honors the best published works of fiction by American citizens in a calendar year,” PEN/Faulkner Read more >
Here’s some welcome news on this dreary Friday morn: starting in 2022, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, a new annual prize named after the beloved and prolific novelist who died in 2003, will award a whopping $150,000 for a Read more >
In today’s New York Times, filmmaker Brit Marling reflects on the problems with Strong Female Characters in our stories—which, while better than the weak, disposable female characters that so often populate film and literature (but film in particular), are still reflective Read more >
Is there a more British sentence than “Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes will write the screenplay for a new adaptation of The Wind in the Willows“? (Perhaps only “What’s all this, then?”) Fellowes also wrote the book for the West End musical Read more >
When I read Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead (2004) for the first time a couple of years ago, I felt grateful to have found a book that eschewed cynicism in favor of earnestness and sincerity. Graduate school was on my mind at the time. Read more >
From the fog of a so-far-extremely-cursed 2020, do you even remember 2019 anymore? The albino panda? 30 to 50 feral hogs? The US women’s national soccer team at the World Cup? What else even happened? Roxane Gay is here to Read more >
Edward Kamau Brathwaite, the Barbadian poet, literary critic, and historian hailed as one of the towering voices in postwar Caribbean literature, died on Tuesday at 89. Brathwaite received his university education at Harrison College in Barbados and Pembroke College at Read more >
Another February, another ham-fisted attempts by a brand to cash in on Black History Month! This time, it’s Barnes & Noble, which teamed up with Penguin Random House to create new diverse covers for classics (written by white authors, with Read more >
John Buffalo Mailer (yes, Buffalo), son of notorious wife-stabber and Gilmore Girls guest star Norman Mailer, will be partnering with Hivemind, Washington Place Productions, and Mailer-Tuchman Media to adapt his father’s most famous novel, The Naked and the Dead, into a Read more >
Emily Books, Emily Gould and Ruth Curry’s 9-year-old project to publish and re-distribute “transgressive writers of the past, present and future,” will shut down next month, the pair announced in a statement today. The project began as a service that Read more >
English is the official language of Nigeria, a diverse and polyglot nation of 190 million; as such, it’s about time that linguistic richness was recognized. Thus has the august Oxford English Dictionary added 29 Nigerian-English words to its 2020 edition. Read more >
Garth Greenwell, he of the very sexy novel, Cleanness, which is built from very powerful sentences, also happens to live in Iowa City. As such, he found himself out and a-caucus’ing last night, as evidenced by his delightful Twitter accounting Read more >
Every week, the TBR pile grows a little bit more. It’s getting precarious. It’s taking up your whole nightstand. It’s threatening to crush you in your sleep. Well, what are you waiting for? Get cracking. What are you reading this Read more >
Congratulations to author and activist Edwidge Danticat, winner of this year’s Vilcek Prize in Literature! The Vilcek Foundation Prizes are awarded annually to immigrants who have significantly impacted American culture and society. In 2020, the Vilcek Foundation is awarding prizes Read more >
Twelve days after The Hollywood Reporter announced that Pamela Anderson had secretly married producer (and self-proclaimed “Trump of Hollywood”) Jon Peters, they further announced that the two have called the whole thing off. If you’re wondering why this is literary news, have Read more >
The Katniss Everdeen of our generation—aka the anonymous Trump administration official who wrote a high-fructose op-ed and bestselling book about… silently and ineffectually resisting?—is the subject of Beltway rumors, as some are suggesting that “Anonymous” is, in fact, a high-ranking Read more >
90s dorm room mood-setter Dave Matthews is teaming up with acclaimed children’s author Clete Barrett Smith to write a middle grade fantasy novel, reports EW today: “Titled If We Were Giants, the book follows a young girl who must confront Read more >
Daisy Waugh, the granddaughter of noted snob and novelist Evelyn Waugh, is apparently writing a “modern-day spin-off” of his famous and brilliant 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. Waugh the younger has worked as a journalist and has published novels pseudonymously, but Brideshead Revisited.">Read more >
For the better part of the last decade, outside of Seinfeld reruns we’ve mostly seen Jerry Seinfeld resting peaceably on his laurels with his ongoing web series, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. The series, which is exactly what it sounds like, has produced Read more >
Good news for fans of Philip Roth, The Wire, and unnervingly timely media: HBO has dropped the first trailer for David Simon’s miniseries adaptation of The Plot Against America. Roth’s novel is an alternate history of America in which aviation Read more >
