The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

How did Walmart end up promoting Hitler's Mein Kampf?

Union-busting retail behemoth Walmart has come under fire this week for prominently featuring Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in a sponsored Facebook post. According to Business Insider, the since-deleted post featured an oil painting of history’s greatest monster underneath a message Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

How Jeff and Ann VanderMeer picked stories for their new Big Book of Classic Fantasy.

Imagine being ushered into a vast and palatial room on a sumptuous estate to rival Versailles… and before you, across a golden table, lies a smorgasbord of delights. A banquet fit for a king, a queen, or even an emperor. Read more >

By Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer

The Chicago Review of Books gets a new editor-in-chief. (Congratulations, Amy Brady!)

Earlier today, the Chicago Review of Books founding editor, Adam Morgan, announced on Twitter that he is stepping down as editor-in-chief. After 3 years and 850+ reviews and interviews, I’m taking a step back from the @ChicagoRevBooks and naming the wonderful Read more >

By Katie Yee

Actually good news: translation publisher Deep Vellum is expanding.

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 >

By Jessie Gaynor

New Books Tuesday: Your weekly guide to what’s publishing today, fiction and nonfiction

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 >

By Emily Temple

Re-Enter Sandman: Neil Gaiman's beloved series will finally be a (very expensive) Netflix show

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 >

By Dan Sheehan

To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway failed Scout.

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 >

By Ellen Ricks

Your weekly deal memo: Eimear McBride, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, & 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 >

By Emily Temple

Michael Chabon is the new showrunner for Star Trek: Picard.

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 >

By Jessie Gaynor

Colson Whitehead is the first novelist to grace the cover of TIME since 2010

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 >

By Emily Temple

Debate Prep: what the critics wrote about every Democratic presidential candidate's memoir

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 >

By Dan Sheehan

It's George Orwell's birthday! Stay (Or)well-informed.

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 >

By Katie Yee

That v. which: a grammatical throwdown.

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 >

By Philip Hensher

New Books Tuesday: Your weekly guide to what’s publishing today, fiction and nonfiction.

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 >

By Emily Temple

Eimear McBride sold a new novel and it sounds amazing.

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 >

By Emily Temple

Constance Wu will star in an adaptation of Rachel Khong's Goodbye, Vitamin

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 >

By Emily Temple