Oh hey, this is good news for books, and friends of books! Deep Vellum, the Dallas-based nonprofit publisher of literary translations (and also a bookstore!), has acquired the backlists of two other indie publishers: Phoneme Media and A Strange Object. 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 >
For real this time, folks. Yes, more than three years after New Line dashed the hopes of millions by trying and failing to adapt Gaiman’s insanely popular horror fantasy comic book series for the big screen, Netlix has inked a Read more >
The Shubert Theatre was a sea of chinos and button downs. I was surrounded by law school graduation presents. Behind me, an older gentleman was lecturing his young son on the importance of what he would he be watching. This 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 >
Michael Chabon has been named the showrunner of Star Trek: Picard on CBS All Access (for the unacquainted, CBS All Access is a streaming service my husband pays for so he can watch the show The Good Fight, which—like Star Trek: Picard—is only Read more >
This week, Colson Whitehead is on the cover of TIME, with an accompanying profile, written by Mitchell S. Jackson, and the cover line “America’s Storyteller.” He is the first novelist to be featured on the cover of the weekly magazine Read more >
Well, we’re finally here. After months (years?…sigh) of feinting, blustering, saber-rattling, faux outrage, real outrage, grand promises, lofty speeches and snarky tweets, the opening event of the 2020 election cycle is upon us. I speak of course about the first Read more >
George Orwell (aka Eric Arthur Blair) was born on this day in 1903. His most famous work, 1984, is arguably one of the most influential books of the 1940s. You probably “read” it in high school, but in case you Read more >
Two weeks ago, I decided that the novel I had just finished shouldn’t use the word and as a conjunction. Auden once wrote in denigration of his early poems that “the definite article is always a headache to any poet 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 >
Attention all fans of Irish writers, Joycean texts, and weird language crazies: Publishers Marketplace has reported that Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians, has sold a new novel to FSG entitled Strange Read more >
Today, Variety reported that Universal Pictures has optioned the rights to Rachel Khong’s 2017 novel Goodbye, Vitamin, with Constance Wu, of Crazy Rich Asians fame, attached to star and produce. Goodbye, Vitamin, Khong’s debut novel, is a tragicomedy in which a newly single Read more >
Yes, after three centuries of Broets (I’m not sorry) hogging the big chair, Oxford University—arguably the world’s most venerable institution of higher education—has elected its first female Professor of Poetry in the form of Alice Oswald, a beloved and distinguished bard Read more >
88-year-old spiritual leader and author of Be Here Now Ram Dass has sold a memoir, with Rameshwar Das, which will detail the “psychological and psychedelic transformation from Harvard professor to the spiritual and cultural icon we know today.” Ram Dass Read more >
There is something about Toni Morrison, beyond the force of her wit and prose, that keeps me in check and straightens my back when I’m inclined to slump in my seat. I don’t doubt that it’s because she and my Read more >
As of this writing, 20,056 people, presumably Christians, have signed a petition asking Netflix to cancel the “blasphemous” television show Good Omens. The petition complains that the show, which is based on Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s thoroughly beloved novel Read more >
If you’re going to be in Brooklyn on September 22nd, I highly recommend you make your way to the Brooklyn Book Festival. If you’re not going to be in Brooklyn on September 22nd, I highly recommend you change your plans. Read more >
On International Refugee Day, PEN International is issuing a call for action in the case of Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish Iranian journalist currently detained on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. Boochani fled his native country of Iran in 2013 after Read more >
Best-selling memoirist, and National Book Award-winning poet Mark Doty has a new book forthcoming on April 14th, 2020, from W. W. Norton—a blend of biography, criticism, and memoir that explores Doty’s personal relationship to Walt Whitman. Here’s the cover, designed Read more >
