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News, Notes, Talk

A new edition of Gone With the Wind comes with a warning.

The latest edition of Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War epic Gone With the Wind, published by Pan Macmillan in the UK, carries a warning on the first page, The Telegraph (which is really making this kind of thing their beat) reports. It Read more >

By Emily Temple

Book banning is the worst eighties throwback, says Judy Blume.

Nineteen-eighties-style shoulder pads are back, and so is a fervor for book banning, says Judy Blume, who told the BBC over the weekend that the cultural battle taking place is now “worse than it was in the 1980s.” The eighties Read more >

By Janet Manley

Teju Cole has a new novel out this Fall! Here's the cover...

Teju Cole’s new novel Tremor will be published by Random House this October. Cole told Lit Hub: The best book designs are, in my view, not illustrative. They stand as their own thing in some sort of relation to the Read more >

By Literary Hub

James Patterson has questions about the provenance of the NYT bestseller list.

Bestseller juggernaut James Patterson has sold over 425 million copies of his books, per Fox Business, but his latest, Walk the Blue Line: No right, no left―just cops telling their true stories to James Patterson, has broken with tradition. The Read more >

By Janet Manley

Exclusive: See the cover for E. Lily Yu's collection Jewel Box.

Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover of E. Lily Yu’s collection Jewel Box, 22 stories in which “the strange, the sublime, and the monstrous confront one another with astonishing consequences,” forthcoming from Erewhon Books this fall. Here’s some Read more >

By Literary Hub

20 new paperbacks hitting shelves this April.

As April rolls around and scattered showers might keep us indoors (or nudge us to a sheltered spot outdoors), it’s a great time to revisit the books we had been meaning to read. Whether you choose to read indoors or Read more >

By Gabrielle Bellot

Heroic DC library staff trolls all-star conservative story hour with LGBTQ display.

God bless the staff of Washington DC’s Cleveland Park Library who welcomed yesterday’s all-star story hour roster of Very Online Conservative Snowflakes—Jack Posobiec, Kirk Cameron, Sean Spicer, and a woman named Libs of TikTok—with a prominent display of queer reading Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

You can call the Booker Prize trophy 'Iris.'

Not for the Goo Goo Dolls song, but rather for Iris Murdoch, who won the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, The Sea and earned six additional nominations as she published 26 more novels. The quest to rename the Read more >

By Janet Manley

Here are the 2023 Whiting Award winners.

The crop of emerging writers who will receive $50,000 as a Whiting Award winner has been announced. Ten writers across fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry received the prize at the March 29 ceremony, with a keynote address by Pulitzer Prize Read more >

By Literary Hub

Literary baby names ranked from least to most cringey.

Tell me about my name, each of my children often begs, running through the kitchen like torn pages in search of their story. You can picture a young Rainn Wilson doing the same, and his parents sitting him on their Read more >

By Janet Manley

How did reactionary French novelist Michel Houellebecq end up in a Dutch arthouse porn?

Not sure if you’ve heard, but defiantly unctuous French novelist-cum-provocateur* Michel Houellebecq is having second thoughts about his whole “xenophobic libidinous creeper toad” thing—at least when it comes to doing it on camera with attractive young Dutch women. Allow me Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Chris Chalk will play James Baldwin in Capote's Women.

First, there was Helen Mirren as Regal Patricia Highsmith. Then came Oscar Isaac as Sexy Kurt Vonnegut. Now, get ready for Chris Chalk as Super Intense James Baldwin. Yes, continuing the recent trend of casting Hollywood and prestige TV stars as Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Did Truman Capote plagiarize Breakfast at Tiffany's from Willa Cather?

One fateful day at the New York Public Library, 10-year-old Truman Capote followed a lady—who turned out to be Willa Cather—home. He offered an evocative description of her in a remembrance found after his death: “She was of ordinary height Read more >

By Janet Manley

Revealing the Cover for Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee’s new novel...

Literary Hub is very pleased to reveal the cover for Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee’s new novel The Pole, which will be published by Liveright this September. Here’s more about the book from the publisher: Exacting yet maddeningly unpredictable, Read more >

By Literary Hub

Arinze Ifeakandu has won the 2022 Republic of Consciousness prize.

In a win for small presses, the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize winner has been announced: God’s Children Are Little Broken Things: Stories by Arinze Ifeakandu, published by A Public Space Books. God’s Children Are Little Broken Things has also Read more >

By Janet Manley

18 new books to check out today!

It’s Tuesday again, and a lot of fascinating new books are out today. Here are a few to consider picking up. * Stephanie Marie Thornton, Her Lost Words: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley (Berkeley) “Thornton writes lyrically about Read more >

By Gabrielle Bellot

New Jhumpa Lahiri stories coming fall 2023!

Alfred A. Knopf has done it, dropped a little grenade in the timelines this afternoon with the news that it will publish Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories this October. The Lahiri-hive was swift to celebrate what will be the first short Read more >

By Janet Manley

Authors of different genres react to the AI threat.

Firstly, I promise this is not one of those articles that begins with “I put a prompt into ChatGPT and this is what it generated.” This post is written 100% by me, a tired lady with an itchy head who Read more >

By Janet Manley

Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown has written a novel.

Everyone has a novel in them, right? For actor Millie Bobby Brown, that novel is a fictionalized account of her grandmother’s experience of the Bethnal Green Tube Disaster, a horrific moment in WWII when hundreds of Londoners died while attempting Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Read the meanest literary profile of the year (so far) ... and the subject's response.

Perhaps the fact that Mormon fantasy author Brandon Sanderson made $55 million last year started things off on the wrong foot. For Wired senior editor Jason Kehe, that was the peg on which to hang a profile of the author, Read more >

By Janet Manley