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News, Notes, Talk

EXCLUSIVE COVER REVEAL: Jill Bialosky’s August poetry collection, Asylum, has a cover.

Subtitled “A Personal, Historical & Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections,” Jill Bialosky’s August, 2020 poetry collection, Asylum (Knopf), comes with a great cover (in full, below) and some impressive endorsements: Yiyun Li calls it “an urgent and expansive book,” Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Here are the 10 new books you should read this week.

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.   FICTION Miranda Popkey, Topics of Read more >

By Katie Yee

Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation, has died at 52.

Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation, has died at the age of 52, the Washington Post reported Tuesday. Wurtzel’s 1994 memoir, in which she chronicled her experiences with drug use and depression, became a New York Times bestseller and was Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Jack Reacher Lee Child announced as one of five Booker Prize judges.

The annual announcement of the Booker Prize judges always makes me think of Edward St. Aubyn’s Lost For Words, a wonderful, darkly comic satirical take on the hothouse mania that is a year in the life of any major awards Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Stacey Abrams is writing a book on voter suppression, and it's coming out in June.

Henry Holt and Company announced Tuesday that it would publish a book by Stacey Abrams on voting rights—and ending voter suppression—in June. Our Time is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America will draw on Abrams’ experience Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Irish writer gets into Twitter fight with… the Auschwitz Memorial Museum?

Irish writer John Boyne—whose 2006 novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, was an international bestseller—recently got into a Twitter tussle with the Auschwitz Memorial Museum over inaccuracies in fictionalized accounts of the Holocaust. Boyne originally Tweeted about the formulaic Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Here are the books that just entered the public domain.

Attention remixers, fan fiction writers, and indie publishers: as you may know, on January 1st, 2020, a whole slew of books—those copyrighted in 1924—entered the public domain in the United States.  You can see the full catalogue of copyright entries Read more >

By Emily Temple

If you're looking to write more in 2020, Rebecca Makkai has your strangely specific prompts.

It’s January 6th, which means you may be getting close to forsaking all your ambitious new year’s resolutions. If, though, you resolved to write more during this cursed (leap) year, Rebecca Makkai is here to help, in a delightful and Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

As Australia burns, writers seek to help those fighting the fires.

Australia has been on fire for nearly two months. Bushfires have consumed a total area much larger than any of the worst California fires of the last decade, displacing thousands, destroying homes, and killing what some estimate as nearly half Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Legendary editor and publisher Sonny Mehta has died.

As announced this morning via press release, Sonny Mehta—legendary and beloved editor in chief of Knopf, and chairman of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group—died yesterday in Manhattan at the age of 77. Even the shortlist of writers Mehta worked with—in both Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Here's the first trailer for the brand new adaptation of High Fidelity.

As you may have already heard, Zoë Kravitz stars in the new television adaptation of High Fidelity, based on the Nick Hornby novel of the same name. (You may also remember the hit 2000 romantic comedy starring John Cusack, Jack Read more >

By Katie Yee

Hulu puts a stake though the heart of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles TV series.

Bad news, thirsty Lestatians: according to Deadline, streaming giant Hulu will not be moving forward with a planned TV series based on horror queen Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles. The wildly popular series of homoerotic vampire novels—centered around the sexily villainous Lestat de Lioncourt, a Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

These are the 10 best-selling books of the decade.

According to NPD Bookscan—not perfect, as we all know, but the best the industry’s got—the best-selling book of the last decade in the United States was . . . well, I’m sure you guessed it before you ever clicked here. Read more >

By Emily Temple

All the book deals you need to know about this week.

My personal form of astrology is to anxiously trawl Publishers Marketplace every week. No, wait, hear me out: it’s how I can tell the only future that matters: which books I will be reading a year and a half from now. Also, Read more >

By Emily Temple

Amy Adams gets gaslighted in The Woman in the Window trailer.

With her sensitive turn in Arrival, Amy Adams showed us yet again how good she is, and proved that she can add emotional depth to a literary adaptation. Adams is set to star in another novel adaptation, The Woman in the Window, and Read more >

By Aaron Robertson

Everything you need to know about why the internet is so mad at J. K. Rowling right now.

If, like me, you woke up to tweets that seemed very angry at J.K. Rowling and want to know why without needing to wade through dozens of horrified gifs, here’s the deal. Why are people so mad? Rowling is attracting criticism Read more >

By Corinne Segal

These were the most checked-out books in the New York City library system in 2019.

As the second largest public library system in the US, and one of the biggest in the world, the New York Public Library can give us a definitive sense of what readers have been loving most this year. Yesterday, the Read more >

By Aaron Robertson

T. S. Eliot would have loved this version of Cats, no matter what the rest of us think.

The reviews for the new star-studded film version of Cats, adapted from the T. S. Eliot poem via Andrew Lloyd Webber, are in. And boy, they are bad. “It is very obvious that Cats should not exist,” wrote one critic. Read more >

By Emily Temple

"Why can't I buy a Joan Didion tote?" and more questions from the expanded Lit Hub universe answered.

Happy whatever to you all! This holiday season, I, Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor, have decided to give you the gift of time. All the time you might have spent @-ing us, or emailing us, or sending us a letter Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

The indie press that published Ducks, Newburyport is in trouble.

Galley Beggar, the independent press that published Lucy Ellmann’s Booker Prize-nominated novel Ducks, Newburyport, is facing a sudden financial crisis following yesterday’s news that Book People, an online retailer based in the UK, has basically declared bankruptcy (if you want to Read more >

By Aaron Robertson