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News, Notes, Talk

Women dominate the shortlist for the International Dublin Literary Award.

The International Dublin Literary Award is the world’s biggest annual prize for a single work of fiction published in English. The honor comes with a whopping €100,000. Mark your calendars: the winner will be announced on October 22. Congratulations to Read more >

By Katie Yee

Queer Eye's Bobby Berk has some tips for styling your bookshelves.

Hint: not (necessarily) with books. Also consider organic elements! And maybe one of those severed wooden hand things. Some outstanding questions: Who even has empty shelves like this anymore? Does Bobby have any suggestions for those of us with books Read more >

By Emily Temple

Octavia Butler has finally made the New York Times Best Seller list.

Why aren’t there more Science Fiction Black writers? There aren’t because there aren’t. What we don’t see, we assume can’t be. What a destructive assumption. —Octavia E. Butler, in Octavia E. Butler: Telling My Stories.   A small good thing Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

A whopping 600 books are coming out today in the UK.

As we all know, it’s pretty tough for new books—especially new books from debut writers—to get attention. And that’s in the best of times. As we also know, these are not the best of times. And attention is going to Read more >

By Emily Temple

400-year-old book sells for $3.1 million, PRH contemplates new business model.

Sure, sure, a $2 million advance for a writer in her early twenties is a lot, but what about $3.1 million for a 400-year-old book? Phillip Hainhofer’s 17th-century “friendship book”—basically a Renaissance scrapbook in which otherwise serious men would enthusiastically Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

The city depicted in To Kill a Mockingbird just elected its first Black mayor.

When Charles Andrew was a boy in Monroeville, a city in Alabama that today numbers under 6,000 residents, he used to watch the 1962 film adaption of To Kill a Mockingbird in the town’s segregated, single-screen theater. “It didn’t strike me that Read more >

By Aaron Robertson

A new edition of Pride and Prejudice reproduces the characters' letters to each other.

In a Jane Austen novel, the drama—confessions of love, pleas for help, realizations that your cousin is a jackass—is all in the letters. So it feels particularly fitting that Chronicle Books is releasing an edition of Pride and Prejudice that includes Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Lars Horn has won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.

The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize was created to celebrate the art of literary nonfiction and encourage emerging writers. You definitely know its previous winners, which include Esmé Weijun Wang (for The Collected Schizophrenias) and Leslie Jamison (for The Empathy Exams). Read more >

By Katie Yee

Happy birthday to Keanu Reeves, indie art-book publisher.

As you may have noticed from the state of the internet, today is Keanu Reeves’ birthday. He is 56. (56!) But just in case you didn’t know, when Keanu is not reading while walking or hanging out with puppies or, you Read more >

By Emily Temple

Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith and more famous writers join Extinction Rebellion protests.

Though it has indeed been a crazy summer of pandemic and protest, it’s also been a summer of fires and hurricanes: climate collapse cares naught for our human travails, and if we want to do much more than survive 2020, Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Excuse me while I salivate over these book-inspired pies.

While everyone and their mothers have been getting really into baking during this quarantine, I have been staring longingly at their Instagram posts. I, for one, am useless in the kitchen. There have been no sourdough starters. There have been Read more >

By Katie Yee

Ethan Hawke is now a book critic, thereby completing his Literary World Bingo Card.

Congratulations to Ethan Hawke, star of my favorite film (Gattaca) and arguably the most bookish man in Hollywood, who has, with today’s inclusion in the (web) pages of the New York Times Book Review, completed his Literary World Bingo Card! Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Kaveh Akbar is The Nation's new poetry editor.

Happy first day of work to poet Kaveh Akbar, who is the new poetry editor of The Nation as of… today! The magazine announced in a press release that Akbar, who teaches at Purdue University, is taking over the position Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Jonathan Franzen's best piece of advice for young writers will probably surprise you.

Jonathan Franzen, whose breakout novel The Corrections was published 19 years ago today, has since then gotten a reputation for being . . . well, kind of crotchety. He hates the internet (especially Twitter), he hates saying “I love you” Read more >

By Emily Temple

Thank you, Lois Lowry, for the Anastasia Krupnik books.

With all due respect to Jonas from The Giver, my heart belongs to a different Lois Lowry protagonist. Not a character who imagines themselves to be perfectly ordinary only to find out that they are, in fact, very special—so special Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Here are 20 new books coming to an indie near you this week.

This past weekend was Independent Bookstore Day! I hope you used it as an excuse to buy all the books your beautiful nerd heart desired. (Me? Yes, despite the fact that I had frequented two of my favorite indies the Read more >

By Katie Yee