PEN America has released a Campus Free Speech Guide aimed at helping students and educators navigate free speech-related conflicts and controversies on campus. The guide was in part a response to requests from educators who were eager for clear guidance, PEN America Read more >
Lit Hub is excited to announce the shortlist for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. This year’s judging panel included Tommy Orange, Emma Straub, Monique Truong, Maaza Mengiste, and Claire Messud. They are: De’Shawn Charles Winslow, In West Read more >
According to Variety, Andrew Scott, better known as “the hot priest” (though I still think of him as the Best Moriarty), has signed on to play the lead in a new Showtime series based on Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels. Ripley will Read more >
Today, Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell announced his next project: Utopia Avenue, which will be first full-length novel since 2014’s The Bone Clocks. (I suppose he has some time now that he’s done writing The Matrix 4.) Mitchell said in Read more >
Heads up: “You didn’t read that” is the new “You didn’t eat that,” because food and books are both good and life-sustaining things that look nice in Instagram pictures. Or something. Kourtney Kardashian posted a picture of herself reading Emma Read more >
As reported in The Republic, Columbus, Ohio’s Mason Engel had already tried to get his self-published reboot of Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, into the hands of New York literary agents—like, right into their actual hands. After reaching number one in Read more >
Today, the MacArthur Foundation announced its 2019 MacArthur Fellows—though you probably know these as “genius grants.” This year’s class of 26 includes 7 writers, including Ocean Vuong, who is just 30 years old. Each Fellow, who has “been chosen for Read more >
Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro—perhaps you recall Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) or The Shape of Water (2017)—has written a short story collection, and sold it to Amazon Original Stories. According to a press release from Amazon Publishing, the collection, slated 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 Third Age of Oprah’s Book Club began in earnest this morning as the beloved former talk show host and literary tastemaker revealed her first new selection in almost a year: Ta-Nihisi Coates’ debut novel, The Water Dancer. Making the announcement Read more >
After last week’s decision by the Nelly Sachs Prize jury to rescind the award they had initially offered to novelist Kamila Shamsie, the London Review of Books has today published a response from other members of the literary world. More Read more >
This morning, the National Book Foundation announced its annual 5 Under 35 honorees: a list of writers under the age of 35 “whose debut work promises to leave a lasting impression on the literary landscape,” each one selected by a Read more >
If you’re looking for the perfect gift for a special someone in your life who loves poetry and crime memorabilia—and honestly, there’s probably a fair amount of overlap in that Venn—you’re in luck! You can bid on this handwritten book Read more >
Surprising no one, climate hero Greta Thunberg, whose forthright, outspoken approach to environmental activism, will publish two books in 2020 with Penguin Press, a memoir Our House is on Fire (written with her family), and a collection of her speeches, Read more >
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 >
