I am both a cat apologist and a Jonathan Franzen apologist. This means, in addition to being a lot of fun at parties, I am frequently in a position of trying trying to defend two creatures who have great disdain Read more >
Today, the Jewish Book Council revealed the winners of the 2019 National Jewish Book Awards, which span 24 categories. Winners include Bari Weiss, whose book How to Fight Anti-Semitism was written in the aftermath of the 2018 attack on a synagogue in Read more >
Excellent news for this bleak Tuesday, friends: the Romantic poets used to make fun of one another using (what else?) the kind of wordplay that reminds you they were basically all adolescent boys. According to Michael Wood’s recent essay in Read more >
Who doesn’t love watching actors float through space? From Interstellar to Guardians of the Galaxy, from Star Trek to Firefly, there’s something very captivating about people flung out of the Earth’s atmosphere. Well, move over, Jean-Luc Picard—there’s a new star Read more >
Good morning, everyone! It’s Tuesday, the Oscars are still racist, and Stephen King has some stuff to say! Apropos of nothing at all—apart from what we can only presume was the crushing sense of responsibility felt by all white men 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 >
British-Trinidadian poet Roger Robinson has won the prestigious TS Eliot prize. This is the first time Robinson, “a long-time performer of dub poetry—a form of spoken word with West Indian roots,” has been nominated for the prize, which carries with Read more >
The NYPL recently tallied up its all-time check-out numbers and released a top ten list of the most borrowed books in its history. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of children’s books and classics on there, but I wouldn’t have Read more >
Sooo. People are pissed—rightly so, I think—about the particularly white, particularly male slate of nominations for this year’s Academy Awards.* For example, in a year with movies like Little Women (directed by Greta Gerwig), The Farewell (directed by Lulu Wang), Read more >
As Bloomberg reports, J. D. Vance, bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy, Yale graduate, and venture capitalist has teamed up with Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt, and Marc Andreessen of Silicon Valley to establish a venture capital firm in Ohio called Narya Read more >
John le Carré, perhaps history’s greatest spy novelist, was this morning announced as the latest recipient of the $100,000 Olof Palme Prize, an award given for “an outstanding achievement in any of the areas of anti-racism, human rights, international understanding, Read more >
Today, Deadline announced that a Jonathan Lethem novel is going to be adapted for the small screen—no, not another version of Motherless Brooklyn, but a TV series based on Lethem’s first novel, 1994’s Gun, With Occasional Music. In this one, Read more >
Romance Writers of America president Damon Suede and executive director Carol Ritter announced Thursday that they were resigning following a protracted controversy over the organization’s suspension of a member who called another writer’s work racist. Suede’s resignation is “effective immediately,” Read more >
The three finalists for this year’s Story Prize, which recognizes an outstanding short story collection and comes with a $20,000 award, were chosen from nearly one-hundred submissions. The Prize was established in 2004 by Julie Lindsey and Larry Dark to Read more >
2020 will be a good year for readers (and viewers) who missed adventuring on Frank Herbert’s Arrakis, also known as Dune, the desert planet on which rival oligarchs fight for control of a resource that holds the key to intergalactic Read more >
Good news for all you James Fenimore Cooper stans out there: HBO Max has given a script order to a proposed television adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper’s 1826 novel about a young Mohican (actually an orphaned colonial adopted Read more >
Rakuten OverDrive, a platform for digital books (used by more than 43,000 libraries and schools worldwide), has released a list of its most-borrowed ebooks and audiobooks in 2019. There are no real surprises on the list, besides maybe the fact Read more >
When I think of Robert Caro, the 84-year-old author and journalist best-known for his monumental biographies of urban planner Robert Moses (nearly 1,200-pages long) and President Lyndon Johnson (about 3,500-pages and counting), I’m reminded of a line from Italo Calvino’s If Read more >
Yesterday, Courtney Maum, whose Before and After the Book Deal hit shelves this week, popped over to Reddit to do an AMA about getting published. The whole Q&A session is worth a look for all aspiring and new writers (actually Read more >
It has been 301 days since the White House held a press briefing. (Maybe whistleblowers are the new press briefings?) There are so many truly terrifying things coming out of the White House that it can be difficult to focus Read more >
