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 >
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 >
