The Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust has announced the shortlist for the second annual Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction is an annual $25,000 cash prize given to a writer for Read more >
Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Marrying Friends, the forthcoming collection of short stories from Mary Rechner, which will be published by Propeller Books in October. Here’s a bit about the book from the publisher: When her Read more >
For some, being summoned for jury duty is like scheduling a colonoscopy; it’s a vague adult practice that you know from sitcoms is painful but necessary to keep a system functioning. Any interaction with government bureaucracy can induce some existential Read more >
It’s another Tuesday in a sweltering July, and for those of us trying to beat the heat—especially the chthonic, oven-like warmth of New York’s subway tunnels—finding somewhere cool can feel almost transcendentally delightful. What makes a cool place even lovelier? Read more >
You probably remember Mel Gibson shaving his legs with a pore strip on his nose and Meredith Brooks playing on the CD player. What Women Want came out in 2000, directed by Nancy Meyers, and offered a bizarro spin on Read more >
This fall, hundreds of books owned by Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts will go up for auction at legendary London auction house Christie’s. In case you didn’t know (I didn’t), Watts, who died in 2021 at the age of 80, Read more >
Canadian Nobel laureate Alice Munro celebrates her 92nd birthday today. Widely regarded as one of our greatest living writers and a consummate master of the short story, Munro’s collections have earned her more prestigious literary awards than you can shake Read more >
Even when the book was just a JPEG-less placeholder on GoodReads, it was destined for big things. Now it is official: Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS, the 544-page “memoir” of K-Pop supergroup BTS has shot to number 1 Read more >
How does Gillian Flynn do it, The Cut asks today in its recurring feature. How did she write Gone Girl and then the Gone Girl screenplay and then Sharp Objects and her other blockbusters? Well, her productivity is due at Read more >
Yu and Me Books opened in December 2021 on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and was named for owner Lucy Yu’s mother. It was the first Asian-American woman-owned bookstore on the island. Following a July 4, 2023, fire in a Read more >
AI can’t “learn” unless it has something to train on. Authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay are suing OpenAI on the grounds that ChatGPT, an OpenAI product, used their copyrighted material to improve the model, reports The Guardian: Books are Read more >
This week I’ve been pressing my degrees together between my tented fingers to figure out how a book that I did not recommend—nor did any other Critic—became a bestseller. How? I’m led to believe that someone named Colleen Hoover simply Read more >
On a beautiful Sunday at the end of April, I attended an illustrious event at Downtown Manhattan’s Metrograph movie theater: a screening of the Paul Schrader classic 2017 film First Reformed followed by a discussion with Schrader, himself. But this Read more >
Today is the 61st anniversary of the death of Mississippi’s marquee modernist and the granddaddy of Southern Gothic literature: William Cuthbert Faulkner. One of the most garlanded authors in the history of American letters (with a Nobel, two Pulitzers, and Read more >
This week, AIGA, the professional association for design, announced the winners of their annual 50 Books | 50 Covers competition, which this year evaluated 487 entries from 27 countries. “The jury and I were very impressed with both the quantity Read more >
It’s the 4th of July (although you’ll likely be reading this a day later), and, as befits a complicated day that some celebrate, some protest, and others simply relax on while fireworks blossom in the night, there’s a myriad of Read more >
Fans of the publisher World Editions, which has brought translations of work by Maryse Condé, Amin Maalouf, Pilar Quintana, Jaap Robben and Zhang Yueran to English-language audiences, has found a new owner—none other than the US director Christine Swedowsky. A Read more >
July is just a day away, and, if that seems startling in its suddenness, what shouldn’t be surprising is that a new month is bringing with it a fantastic new list of books in paperback. Below, you’ll find a myriad Read more >
I’m going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There’s something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I’ll never really be Read more >
The dizzying rise of AI and machine-learning in the last year, made manifest in the popular consciousness by ChatGPT, has followed a familiar pattern. Years (decades!) of specialized research grinds forward, yielding interesting but not necessarily groundbreaking results, until the Read more >
