Last night, the great pens of America convened at The Town Hall in NYC as Kal Penn presided over the 2023 PEN America Literary Awards. For those felled by late-winter viruses who desire to get a taste of proceedings, a Read more >
The portrait is stern, defiant, of bountiful hairline. Shot by Ramona Rosales for the cover of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare, it planted a flag in the golden Californian soil and hung a shark-tooth necklace around the decrepit institution it set Read more >
When they’re not launching NFTs or pasting their own labels onto mass-produced wine bottles, celebrities love to dip an Ozempic toe into the waters of children’s literature. Most recently, the world learned that Taylor Swift was getting the Golden Book Read more >
When Adam Sisman was in the process of writing John Le Carre: The Biography back in the 2010s, the author told his biographer, “I know it’s supposed to be warts and all … but so far as I can gather, Read more >
It’s true: a new Haruki Murakami novel—his first since 2017’s Killing Commendatore—will be published on April 13th . . . but only in Japan. Sorry to tease you, English-speaking readers! Still, not to fret: I’m sure this means that translations Read more >
This morning, Penguin Press announced that they will be publishing Zadie Smith’s next novel, The Fraud, on September 5, 2023. Here’s how the publisher describes the book: From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, The Fraud is a kaleidoscopic work of historical Read more >
Earlier this week, Ewan McGregor was photographed in Bolton on the set of A Gentleman in Moscow, Paramount+’s upcoming limited series adaptation of Amor Towles’ mega-bestselling 2016 novel. McGregor plays the titular gentleman, Count Alexander Rostov, who, in in the aftermath of the Read more >
Attention book lovers yearning to get out of Dodge: a down-on-its-luck bookstore in the Welsh mining town of Blaenavon (population 6,055) is headed to (online) auction next week, with bidding to open at the low low price of £72,000. Sure, Read more >
Travelodge has released some new house-keeping data on the books most often left behind at its hotels in Scotland, and no, “the bible,” doesn’t top the list. Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing is high on the list of forgotten Read more >
Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Quiet Street: On American Privilege by Nick McDonell, which will be published by Pantheon this August. Here’s some background about the book from the publisher: Growing up on New York City’s Upper Read more >
The new celebrity vodka is a celebrity-owned bookshop, I think. Take it from Judy Blume, who owns and runs Books & Books with her husband in Key West, and has thus been granted a birds’ eye view of our consumption Read more >
We English majors are not even dead and The New Yorker has moved to bury us. Nathan Heller reports in a new article that enrollment in English programs has dropped precipitously at universities across the nation as people pursue STEM Read more >
Oh to be the daughter of a dental surgeon in 20th century Prague! Like circus-goers marveling at a heap of bones in the straw, TikTokkers have been come upon the mortified works of Franz Kafka and found themselves overcome with Read more >
In a surprise to no one, aspiring presidential strong man and virtuosically charmless MAGA suit-stay Ron DeSantis has written a bland and charmless campaign memoir, out today. Early reports indicate that The Courage to Be Free (lol) is that most Read more >
Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Athena Dixon’s memoir in essays The Loneliness Files, forthcoming from Tin House this fall. Here’s a bit about the book from the publisher: In Spring 2020, the world as we knew Read more >
We’re getting out of the winter blues, you guys! The sun is setting later and later, and you know what that means: more daylight hours for reading books. * Priya Guns, Your Driver Is Waiting (Doubleday) “A retelling of the Read more >
Sigh. Let’s dig in. At 8:00 a.m. EST, The Cut published the online version of New York Magazine‘s newest print cover story, a longform reported piece from Matthew Schneier called “Life After Food,” about a new weight-loss fad involving the Read more >
Children: choose your fighter. In the red corner: evangelist actor, “loving husband,” and new children’s book author Kirk Cameron, who had a crowd of “hundreds” at his Christian-themed children’s book reading in Hendersonville, Tennessee, over the weekend, after conceiving of Read more >
Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Farah Ali’s debut novel, The River, The Town, which publishes in October 2023 from Dzanc Books. Here’s some more about the book from the publisher: In the rural town in Pakistan Read more >
Want a post-apocalyptic dystopia? I’ll give you a post-apocalyptic dystopia, said novelist Neal Stephenson, who has jumped into the NFT game with some glitchy Y2K-looking art. Stephenson authored the Y2K classic Snow Crash, a story credited with “predicting” the metaverse, Read more >
