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News, Notes, Talk

Here's the cover for Elena Ferrante's next novel.

Today, EW revealed the cover of Elena Ferrante’s next novel, The Lying Life of Adults, which will be published in the US on June 9th by Europa. Designer Emanuele Ragnisco described it as “a close collaboration between the author, the publisher, Read more >

By Emily Temple

In case you missed it, here's Margaret Atwood on an electric scooter.

Beloved literary titan Margaret Atwood is currently in New Zealand to promote the release of The Testaments, her Booker Prize-winning sequel to the 1985 dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale. However, if you think Atwood is the kind of author who confines Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Again, a proposed federal budget would stop funding libraries, and again, it probably won't happen.

For the fourth time, President Trump’s proposed 2021 budget would eliminate all federal funding for libraries, a move that Congress has rejected in the past and that is unlikely to succeed this time around—even as leaders in the humanities caution Read more >

By Corinne Segal

I found the most boring headline on the Internet.

And here it is: Canadian Book-Buying Habits Haven’t Changed Much in the Last Year. In case you’re still reading, for some reason Forbes is reporting that Canadians (my people) aren’t taking to audiobooks in quite the same way their cousins Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

10 new books we're excited about this week.

Every week, the TBR pile grows a little bit more. It’s getting precarious. It’s taking up your whole nightstand. It’s threatening to crush you in your sleep. Well, what are you waiting for? Get cracking. What are you reading this Read more >

By Katie Yee

It's just a really good day on the queer book internet!

There was life before we saw Janelle Monáe in high-waisted tuxedo pants singing with Billy Porter in a gold cape, and it was a worse one. This morning—in the dawn of a new week and a world in which we Read more >

By Corinne Segal

A writer is honoring the lives of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper with a mural.

When tourism meets true crime, the results are bound to make you queasy, and the Whitechapel district of London, with its ghoulish Jack the Ripper tours, is no exception. Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five: The Untold Lives of the Read more >

By Molly Odintz

How not to separate your church from your state: Tennessee seeks to make Bible “state book.”

Reporting on all the crazy fucking things that Republican state governments attempt to pass off as “law” can be truly dispiriting, but here we are: two Tennessee reps have introduced a bill that would make the Christian Bible the official Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Pedro Almodóvar is adapting Lucia Berlin’s A Manual For Cleaning Women and I am nervous.

When I heard that Pedro Almodóvar was adapting A Manual For Cleaning Women, by Lucia Berlin, I yelled holy shit in my empty apartment, freaking out my cat and likely spooking the downstairs neighbor. Look, I love Almodóvar (Women on Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

A new law aimed at the gig economy is affecting writers. Lawmakers are trying to change it.

California runs on tech-driven gig labor, and its creepy, dehumanizing effects are everywhere, from lawsuits over working conditions at ride-share companies and horror stories about an algorithm-based work system to the literary lens of writers whose recent books have set Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Stephen Colbert thinks The Hobbit is only okay.

Stephen Colbert’s Tolkien fandom is well-established, but on last night’s Late Night, the host revealed that while he loves the Lord of the Rings trilogy, he thinks The Hobbit is a baby book for babies. Colbert showed a clip of his guest, Patton Oswalt, finishing Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Here's the longlist for the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has just announced the longlist for their 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In honor of the 40th anniversary of the award, which “honors the best published works of fiction by American citizens in a calendar year,” PEN/Faulkner Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

A new prize will award $150,000 to a female novelist every year.

Here’s some welcome news on this dreary Friday morn: starting in 2022, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, a new annual prize named after the beloved and prolific novelist who died in 2003, will award a whopping $150,000 for a Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

How Octavia Butler's radical vision of femininity inspired The OA.

In today’s New York Times, filmmaker Brit Marling reflects on the problems with Strong Female Characters in our stories—which, while better than the weak, disposable female characters that so often populate film and literature (but film in particular), are still reflective Read more >

By Emily Temple

V. British news: Julian Fellowes will write the script for The Wind in the Willows movie.

Is there a more British sentence than “Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes will write the screenplay for a new adaptation of The Wind in the Willows“? (Perhaps only “What’s all this, then?”) Fellowes also wrote the book for the West End musical Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

The next novel in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead saga could be one of the most important books of 2020.

When I read Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead (2004) for the first time a couple of years ago, I felt grateful to have found a book that eschewed cynicism in favor of earnestness and sincerity. Graduate school was on my mind at the time. Read more >

By Aaron Robertson