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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
