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News, Notes, Talk

Wole Soyinka is publishing his first novel in five decades.

This one goes out to all the writers in the Year of our Lord 2020, as we all worry that our total inability to put a sentence together could turn into a lifetime of non-production: It’s never too late. Wole Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Edward Gorey designed the sets for the 1970s Broadway production of Dracula.

In 1977, Dracula came back to Broadway. Frank Langella played the lead in this production of the play by Hamilton Deane and John Balderston. The last time this show had been brought to Broadway, the lead had been Bela Lugosi. Read more >

By Olivia Rutigliano

The new cover of Bazaar Art is based on a Margaret Atwood poem.

Here’s an unusual bit of adaptation news: the painter Michaela Yearwood-Dan has created a limited edition cover for the November issue of Harper’s Bazaar‘s Bazaar Art based on Margaret Atwood’s poem “Feather,” from her latest book Dearly, her first collection of poetry Read more >

By Emily Temple

Noted billboard copywriters The Lincoln Project may be getting into publishing?

These days, if you’re any good at Twitter or Tik Tok and have a little money, you start to think maybe you can pull off a hydra-headed IP clearing house that takes teeny, tiny, little ideas and turns them into Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

16 new books to buy from your local indie bookstore this week.

With Halloween fast-approaching, I feel the need (along with every other person on the book internet) to remind you that one of the scariest things imaginable might happen: your local indie bookstore might close. Their fate is in your hands. Read more >

By Katie Yee

Here's the longlist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Today, the American Library Association (ALA) announced the longlist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. The prize, established in 2012, honors the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the U.S. Read more >

By Rasheeda Saka

Starting today, you can receive personalized book bundles from the New York Public Library.

Today, the New York Public Library announced the launch of its latest service, Shelf Help, a tool that provides its patrons with personalized book bundles curated by skilled librarians. Shelf Help is the Library’s latest initiative to support New York Read more >

By Rasheeda Saka

Colson Whitehead, Tegan & Sara, and more the week's literary film and TV news!

Many literary novelists, much like the little girls from Sweden Anthony Kiedis sang about in “Californication,” dream of silver screen quotation. Sure, book deals are nice, but do you know what’s even nicer than a book deal? A goddamn movie Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Artist Richard Kraft is documenting every single Trump transgression from 2017 to 2021.

I wanted to say something beautiful how we turn garbage into gold how we made a swamp fertile land how we turned a curse, into a blessing. –Abioudun Oyewole * Last Sunday, the English artist Richard Kraft gave Donald Trump Read more >

By Aaron Robertson

Jacqueline Woodson on the two books that helped her grow as a writer.

Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming, was recently named a recipient of the MacArthur fellowship for her inventive approach to children’s and young adult fiction; her stories bring attention to Black joy along with the challenges that young Black people Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Here are the best reviewed books of the week.

Don DeLillo’s The Silence, Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are, Les Payne’s The Dead Are Rising: The Life of Malcolm X, and Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath all feature among the best Read more >

By Book Marks

The Lucille Clifton House will become a sanctuary for artists in 2021.

On October 16th, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced that it would award a $750,000 grant to the Clifton House, an artist and writers workshop designed to honor the legacy of esteemed poet Lucille Clifton. Clifton was born in New Read more >

By Rasheeda Saka

Facebook's former in-house psychiatrist is writing a book about online dating.

Ah, love: it is “a smoke rais’d with the fume of sighs; / Being purg’d, a fire sparkling in a lover’s eyes”; it “jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope”; it happens on Read more >

By Corinne Segal

You can now read the only surviving full draft of a Jane Austen novel, in her very own handwriting.

I can hardly remember what was happening in January of this year, much less what I was doing when I was an 18-year-old. We do have a good sense of what Jane Austen was up to, though. Historians are mostly certain Read more >

By Aaron Robertson

WATCH: Tom Hanks tugs at your heartstrings in the first trailer for News of the World.

Paulette Jiles’ 2016 historical novel News of the World—about a traveling nonfiction storyteller and veteran, roaming the small towns of Texas in the aftermath of the Civil War, who agrees to transport a 10-year-old girl, taken in by the Kiowa Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Anna Burns has won the International Dublin Literary Award for Milkman.

Today, Graywolf Press announced that Anna Burns’ Milkman has been selected as the winner of the International Dublin Literary Award. The Award, now celebrating its 25th year, is the world’s largest annual prize for a single work of fiction published in Read more >

By Rasheeda Saka