The late Cormac McCarthy was no stranger to the cinema. Several of the writer’s novels, plays, and screenplays—No Country for Old Men, All The Pretty Horses, The Sunset Limited—were adapted into buzzy films, though your mileage may vary re: success-of-translation. Read more >
Out of over a thousand entrants, The American Academy in Rome has selected 31 artists and academics to receive their Rome Prize, a residency fellowship that provides a stipend as well as a place to live and work on the Read more >
Today on Xwitter, Ukraine offered up their own version of The Tortured Poets Department, honoring three Ukrainian writers who have died in the 790 days so far of the country’s war with Russia: Victoria Amelina, Maksym Kryvtsov, and Volodymyr Vakulenko. Read more >
On April 24, 1800, President John Adams signed an Act of Congress that moved the U.S. capitol from Philadelphia to Washington, forever denying us the spectacle of Congressmembers being regularly heckled by Philly sports fans. In the move, Congress would Read more >
Mosab Abu Toha—the Palestinian poet, scholar, and librarian who was forced to flee Gaza with his family back in December—is set to release a new collection of poems this fall. According to the announcement made on Publishers Marketplace earlier today, Forest Read more >
The Women’s Prize Trust, which “creates equitable opportunities for women in the world of books,” has announced the shortlist for its fiction prize, which spotlights English-language novels written by women. This year, the shortlists highlighted six novels that “both focus Read more >
I stand in solidarity with the countless German workers and activists within institutions such as yours who are appalled by and fighting against the current climate of racism, censorship, rising authoritarianism and atrocity-denial. Free Palestine. –China Miéville In a Read more >
The New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center has announced its annual class of Fellows. Awarded annually, The Cullman fellowship entitles a gifted cadre of writers and academics to a year of funding, a private office, and Read more >
I’ve never really liked Valentine’s Day. Some of that is probably down to being a shy nerdy kid who couldn’t get a date to the Snow Dance—but, at the risk of sounding even more like Charlie Brown, the holiday is Read more >
On waking last Friday to news that somewhere, some poets were being tortured, I spent some time trawling through album reviews. Music criticism has always fascinated me. On the one hand, there is something ineffable baked into the enterprise. (I Read more >
Ah, another Tuesday in April, a month (apparently) of earthquakes and eclipses, thunderstorms and thunderous yells about filing taxes. (Or was that just me?) Whatever the month in 2024 may mean to you, this particular Tuesday signifies something special: a Read more >
Image from Air Mail’s Instagram The foibles and flailings of the very rich, the very powerful, and the very New York were once the targets of Spy, the pioneering magazine started by Kurt Anderson and Graydon Carter. Spy once sent Read more >
Another day, another literary scandal. Such is BookX in 2024. Buckle up, for today brings news of an especially strange case of dissembling, involving a fantasy author writing under a few different racial identities and a handful of pseudonyms. I’m Read more >
Following months of escalating protest over the organization’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza, and the recent withdrawal of over a third of this year’s nominees, the 2024 PEN America Literary Awards have now officially been cancelled. In the last Read more >
Acclaimed Palestinian American poet, translator, and physician Fady Joudah has received a $100,000 prize from Poets & Writers. The Jackson Poetry Prize is awarded annually to an American poet of “exceptional talent,” and was chosen this year by a panel Read more >
This week, TIME magazine published its annual list of the 100 Most Influential People of the year. Usually, when this list comes out, I complain (to the universe, I guess) that there aren’t enough novelists (“enough” meaning “more than one”) on it. Read more >
If you’ve ever deep-cleaned your bookshelves, you’ve likely faced some hard choices over what to hang onto and what to donate to the library. As much as you might want to clear space by off-loading beat-up copies, shelf redundancies, books Read more >
The New York Public Library announced their Young Lions Fiction Award finalists today. Since 2001, the award has honored a writer under 35 for a novel or story collection. This year, the selection committee, composed of writers, editors, and librarians, Read more >
Gabo-heads (Gab-lins?), rejoice: the trailer for the upcoming mini-series adaptation of the Márquez masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, has officially dropped. And though we’ve been burned before by attempts to put the master’s works on celluloid (Love in the Time Read more >
In a recent entry from his excellent newsletter “How Things Work,” the labor journalist Hamilton Nolan decried the state of the column, as epitomized in the op-ed section of the paper of record. In a snort-inducing takedown, Nolan argued that Read more >
