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News, Notes, Talk

One of Elizabeth Warren's strategists is longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry.

Another reason to be pro-Warren: she supports (and is supported by) poets. Turns out that one of the poets up for the National Book Award this year, Camonghne Felix, is also the Director of Surrogates & Strategic Communications at Elizabeth Read more >

By Emily Temple

Lucy Ellmann says if you can't handle her 1,034-page book, you're probably a baby.

Pretty much anyone should be able to finish Lucy Ellmann’s one-sentence, 1,034-page novel Ducks, Newburyport, the author told the Washington Post, unless you are a baby. “One English reviewer claimed only 2 percent of people (besides himself) would understand the Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Here's what the first audio comic for blind readers sounds like.

Unseen, the first audio comic aimed at blind audiences, begins with a welcome from creator Chad Allen. “We’re living in a challenging time, and as a person with a disability, my perspective is often excluded from the conversation,” Allen, who Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Here's what that AI face-categorizer did with 12 famous author photos.

By now, you’ve probably seen the barrage of ImageNet Roulette photos on your Twitter feed. They’re basically just photos of people’s faces surrounded by a green box and a label, based on the site’s guess of what social role you Read more >

By Katie Yee

Here's the 2019 National Book Award Longlist for Poetry.

It’s day three of the National Book Foundation’s longlist announcements; today they’ve announced the list for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry. Publishers submitted a total of 245 books to be considered by judges Jos Charles, John Evans, Vievee Read more >

By Literary Hub

Here are the 10 best lines from Vulture's profile of "book-fluencer" Zibby Owens.

First, can we all agree that it should be “lit-fluencer”? Moving on: 1. “Gertrude Stein had time to read books. But do moms?” 2. “Owens’s dinner will be in a decidedly lower key: a gingham tablecloth, uniformed servers passing out Read more >

By Literary Hub

Booker Prize organizers clarify that despite that tweet, they haven't yet chosen a winner yet.

According to The Guardian, Margaret Atwood has not been chosen as the winner of this year’s Booker Prize—in fact, no one has. Yesterday, writer Matthew Sperling tweeted (then deleted) a photo from an unnamed bookstore, of two of the Booker Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Here come the sex cult books!

People like sex (I’ve been told) and people like (to read about) cults. Which is why two impending sex cult tell-alls could yield seven-figure publishing deals. The cult in question, Nxivm—which I refuse to even attempt to pronounce—came to national Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Here is the Translated Literature Longlist for the 2019 National Book Awards.

Day two of the National Book Foundation’s longlist announcements; today, the Translated Literature Longlist, a category that was added just last year. Publishers submitted a total of 145 books. The judges (Keith Gessen, Elisabeth Jaquette, Katie Kitamura, Idra Novey, and Read more >

By Literary Hub

Here are the finalists for this year's $50,000 Kirkus Prize.

Today, Kirkus announced the eighteen finalists for its 2019 Kirkus Prize. One winner in each category (fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature) will be announced in a ceremony on Thursday, October 24 and awarded $50,000. “We have another stellar lineup Read more >

By Emily Temple

10 brand new books you should pick up this week.

Every week, a new crop of great new books hit the shelves. If we could read them all, we would, but since time is finite and so is the human capacity for page-turning, here are a few of the ones Read more >

By Emily Temple

Here is the Young People’s Literature Longlist for the 2019 National Book Awards.

The National Book Foundation has announced the ten books longlisted for this year’s National Book Award in Young People’s Literature, chosen from a total of 325 books submitted to the foundation by publishers. The judges for YPL are An Na, Read more >

By Literary Hub

With Covering Climate Now, we're publishing new stories of the climate crisis.

When Elizabeth Rush was preparing to join a research expedition bound for Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, she immersed herself in literature written about the southern-most continent and quickly found a canon dominated by tales of domination: the firsts, the singular Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Writers were all over the Spring 2020 runways, because books are fashion.

Back in March, Vogue informed me that models could read books. Naturally this infuriated me, because as a non-model, I considered books my thing. Stay in your lane, models! But now the (fashionable) shoe is on the other foot: writers—otherwise known as “purveyors of Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Tayari Jones, Duchess Goldblatt, and the manager of the Wu-Tang Clan: the week in book deals

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

The longlist nominees for the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction are. . .

The longlist for the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, which carries a £50,000 purse, were announced today. The 12 nominated books cover a range of topics, from missing mothers to the dangers of the high seas to the true-crime Read more >

By Aaron Robertson

Watch the creepy first trailer for Dublin Murders, based on Tana French's novels.

Dublin Murders, the hotly-anticipated Starz adaptation of two of Irish-American crime writer Tana French’s wildly popular Dublin Murder Squad novels (In the Woods and The Likeness), dropped its first trailer earlier this week and it is creepy AF. Set in the Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Edmund White will receive a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation.

The National Book Foundation announced today that it will award its 2019 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Edmund White. “A master of narrative and craft across fiction, journalism, memoir, and more, White has built a career defined Read more >

By Eleni Theodoropoulos

Oxford American, one of the great lit mags of the American South, gets a facelift.

If you pick up the newest edition of Oxford American, the quarterly general-interest literary magazine founded in 1992 and best known for its annual Southern music issues, you’ll notice a bold design aesthetic: the conspicuous dearth of cover lines, a prominent Read more >

By Aaron Robertson

If you love absolutely everything about books except reading them, this app is for you.

This website’s position on books is that they’re best when you read them, but in the interest of journalistic(?) balance, here’s an app for people who love books, but don’t like reading. The 12min app, helpfully spotlighted by the New York Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor