It’s here: the final day of the National Book Foundations’ longlist announcements. Yep, it’s time for the fiction list, as chosen by judges Dorothy Allison, Ruth Dickey, Javier Ramirez, Danzy Senna (Chair), and Jeff VanderMeer from a pool of 397 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 >
As climate activists gather in hundreds of cities around the world today, Amazon employees will participate in the first strike at the company’s Seattle headquarters. Their action, spearheaded by the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, is part of the Read more >
Kamila Shamsie, award-winning British Pakistani author, was due to receive this year’s Nelly Sachs Prize—a biennial, €15,000 award given by the German city of Dortmund that recognizes “outstanding literary contributions to the promotion of understanding between peoples”—until yesterday, when the Read more >
Longmont, Colorado is a news desert. It’s one of many in the US at a time when readers increasingly rely on national legacy publications for news along with smaller online organizations, often supported by a single rich funder, that are Read more >
Day four of the National Book Foundations’ longlist announcements; today we’re looking at the ten titles judges Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Carolyn Kellogg, Mark Laframboise, Kiese Laymon, and Jeff Sharlet think illuminate “new perspectives on political, natural, cultural, historical, and personal Read more >
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 >
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 >
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 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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >
