Validating many of us who have fought this fight in comment sections, newsrooms, and DMs for years (years!!!!), Merriam-Webster announced today that the pronoun “they” is its word of the year. Searches for “they” rose by 313 percent in 2019; Read more >
In case you missed it, Boris Johnson wrote a novel called Seventy Two Virgins and it’s even worse than you might think: “Hooked nose” Kosovar Muslims, Jews who control the media, “half-caste” characters, a “Chinaman,” hunter-gatherer African immigrants, and all Read more >
AbeBooks has published a list of the most expensive books they sold this year, with The Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, which sold for $40,000, at the top. Better luck next year, signed Harry Potter deluxe set ($38,560)! A first Read more >
Sure, in America we live in an autocratic dystopia where powerful college professors can just go around tweeting mean things at helpless New York Times op-ed columnists, but things are also bad in China. According to the Washington Post, “Library Read more >
I worry about kids and screens, just as I worry about grown-ups and screens, just as I worry about Boomers and Facebook. So I am fully behind the heartwarming story of Denise Bowers, a pre-kindergarten teacher from Bluffton, South Carolina, Read more >
As you no doubt know, Olga Tokarczuk was recently awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” Over the weekend, the Nobel Prize committee Read more >
Something to look forward to in 2020: the Pulitzer Prize Board has announced a new experimental category, Audio Reporting. “The renaissance of audio journalism in recent years has given rise to an extraordinary array of non-fiction storytelling,” says Pulitzer Administrator Read more >
Today saw two new developments in the ongoing Peter Handke controversy, which has set the literary world ablaze since October 10 when the Swedish Academy announced the Austrian writer/Slobodan Miloševic eulogist as the joint winner (with Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk) of Read more >
The National Books Critics Circle has just announced the seven finalists for the 2019 John Leonard Prize for Best First Book published in the last year. The winner will be announced on January 11th, 2020, but in the meantime, peruse 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 >
Today in unacceptable news: a report from the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice shows that New York City public school students from 3-K and pre-K to eighth grade are reading a disproportionately large percentage of white authors. Researchers looked at Read more >
Take a break from impeachment hearings, climate disaster, and Twitter threads about what everyone has accomplished this year to bask in the world of Julie Andrews’ bookshelf: a world kinder than our own, where we may momentarily forget the chaos Read more >
For almost a decade now, Italian author and academic Giovanni Catelli has been researching and writing about the untimely death of Albert Camus, the French author who died in 1960, at age 46, when a car driven by his publisher Read more >
The Academy of American Poets has announced their twelve Poem-a-Day guest editors who will each curate a month of poems in 2020. The twelve guest editors are: January: Meg Day February: Roger Reeves March: Dana Levin April: Joy Harjo May: Read more >
As reported by Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger earlier today, a pianist in the city is in the process of memorizing one of the most notoriously unreadable books of the 20th century: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Why would anyone do this, you Read more >
We talk a lot on these parts about supporting indie bookstores, but this story from The Washington Post adds an extra layer of of urgency: Patrick Darby, who worked as a bookseller at big chain stores for many years before starting his Read more >
It was announced today that Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne universe novels have been optioned for development by AMC. This is auspicious (and not accidental) timing, as today is also the pub day for VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts, the third novel set in 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 Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts (MCD) Read more >
I won’t lie to you: I originally set out to mock this “Adulting 101” class that a library in Norfolk, Virginia is offering, and now I can’t bring myself to, if only because its description is so guileless as to Read more >
I highly recommend listening to this special House of Anansi podcast (introduced by Noah Richler) on the occasion of the venerable press’ 50th birthday (even if you weren’t born in Toronto in the 1970s, there’s great stuff in here). Founded Read more >
