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 >
Some good news out of the Czech Republic this morning: officials there have restored citizenship for Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, more than four decades after revoking it for political reasons. A critic of the county’s Read more >
Taking their cue from this year’s Booker and Nobel judges, the 2019 Bad Sex writing award (judged, I am fairly sure, by a gangly quorum of 11-year-old boys who will not go to sleep) has been conferred upon Didier Decoin Read more >
Well, we’ve done it now. Our collective “laziness and ignorance” has killed the 18-year-old Apostrophe Protection Society, a group dedicated to “preserving the correct use of this currently much abused punctuation mark in all forms of text written in the Read more >
The most prestigious prize in literature continues to feel as if it’s being run like a corrupt county fair bake-off. After vowing to sort itself out after the sex scandal of the last few years, and claiming “the ($940,000) prize Read more >
A UK study (as reported by The Independent) has confirmed something we all kind of know: children who have books “of their own” at home are much more likely to read above the expected level for their age. The UK’s Read more >
In a press conference in London earlier today, embattled-but-unbowed leader of the British Labour Party, lifelong democratic socialist, and absolute boy Jeremy Corbyn revealed a dossier proving that the US is demanding that Britain’s National Health Service (a remarkable civic Read more >
Now that High Book Award Season is coming to a close (right??), we can focus on the prize that really matters: Literary Review‘s Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Since 1993, the UK-based magazine has “honored the year’s most outstandingly awful Read more >
Last night, the anonymous author (identified only as “a senior Trump administration official”) of the new book A Warning and that op-ed in The New York Times did an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) over at Reddit. Here are a few highlights from the question Read more >
On Tuesday night, Irish novelist Edna O’Brien was presented with the £40,000 David Cohen prize for lifetime achievement—which The Guardian notes is “regarded as a precursor to the Nobel”—for having “broken down social and sexual barriers for women in Ireland and Read more >
Well, this was bound to happen eventually: “ok boomer” has found its way into a book title. Once a meme that momentarily distracted my generation from our murderous rampage against every pillar of American life, including movies, Applebee’s, mayonnaise, home 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. Michael Eric Dyson, JAY-Z: Made Read more >
It doesn’t seem like editorializing is all that necessary around this cruel and dystopic idea—for-profit prison systems now seem as American as for-profit health care, for-profit education, and, uh, apple pie. But yes, West Virginia inmates will be getting free Read more >
It’s the New York Public Library’s 100 Best Books of the Year list! This one is noteworthy to me because it reflects, shall we say, a more direct engagement with people who read books outside of professional exigencies, who are Read more >
I’d like to salute the brave librarians at Willmar Public Library in Willmar, Minnesota who recently invited local kids to an afterhours shoot em up among the stacks, operating under the idea that if you get kids in the presence Read more >
Thanksgiving is this week, which can only mean one thing: we’ve entered high You’ve Got Mail season. I’ve seen the movie at least a dozen times, so when today I endeavored to find an exact quote—for a blog post about Read more >
For many of you, Thanksgiving represents an anxiety-laden series of conversational challenges. There you are, trapped at the table, trying to navigate the divergent political opinions of libertarian uncles and flat-tax cousins who can’t seem to resist owning you, a Read more >
Charlie Kaufman, the Oscar Award-winning screenwriter of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich, has written a novel! Antkind tells the story of a failed film critic who stumbles upon “an impossible movie”—a three-month-long (!) stop-motion (!!) Read more >
Acclaimed writers Jesmyn Ward, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Ondaatje, Edwidge Danticat, and Kevin Young were among the speakers who shared memories of the late Toni Morrison at a three thousand strong celebration of her life and work in the Cathedral Church of 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 >
