November 12, 2020, 3:32pm Today, Penguin Press announced plans to publish New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s book about Donald Trump. The currently untitled book, set to hit shelves in 2022, will span several decades of the president’s life, from his early days as a property developer to his time on The Apprentice to his
Literature
November 11, 2020, 1:23pm Wow, yet another upside of quarantine—according to thinkpieces everywhere, they just keep coming! Research compiled by writing and proofreading service Global English Editing shows that 35% of people in the world have read more books than usual since COVID began. This statistic feels pretty intuitive—people are at home, out of work,
Retirement – by which we mean not only ‘giving up work after a lifetime of service to enjoy a well-earned rest’ but also ‘retiring away somewhere from something, for relaxation or contemplation’ – has been a topic of poems for centuries. The Romantics loved to retire among nature; modern and contemporary poets talk about reaching
November 11, 2020, 2:52pm The PEN America/L’Engle-Rahman Prize for Mentorship honors four mentor/mentee pairs in PEN America’s prison writing mentorship program, which links established writers with those currently incarcerated. The Award is named after the late acclaimed author Madeleine L’Engle and her 10-year written friendship with scholar, writer, and former Black Party leader Ahmad Rahman. Each winner
November 10, 2020, 12:37pm Kamala Harris-related books have seen a sharp increase in popularity post-Biden/Harris presidential win. On Sunday, a whopping four books on Amazon’s Top 10 bestsellers list were either about or penned by the vice president-elect. The books in question: Harris’s memoir The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, her children’s book Superheroes
November 10, 2020, 2:44pm You know what they say: November is the new December! When’s the best time to support your local bookstore and get holiday gifts? Well, there’s no time like the present. (Get it?) (I’m sorry.) (But seriously, support your favorite indie and check out these new books!) * Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest(Ecco) “Told in
Every Monday through Friday, AudioFile’s editors recommend the best in audiobook listening. We keep our daily episodes short and sweet, with audiobook clips to give you a sample of our featured listens. Vivienne Leheny’s narration captures each character’s outward persona and true self in Confessions on the 7:45. In today’s episode, host Jo Reed and
There aren’t perhaps many canonical poems written about Liverpool blacksmiths, but there is ‘Felix Randal’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), which is one of the poet’s most famous poems and, like all of Hopkins’s work, deserves closer analysis. Before we offer some notes towards a commentary on this wonderful poem, here’s the text of ‘Felix
November 9, 2020, 3:32pm By my count, 2020 has seen the publication of quite a few books featuring cannibalism. From Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation of Beowulf to Shalom Auslander’s Mother for Dinner, this has been the year of books that feature people eating people. Honestly, that sort of tracks. This year has been so horrific, so
November 6, 2020, 10:06am In 1934, The Observer’s crossword writer, Edward Powys Mathers, wrote a short mystery novel that was also a fantastically difficult literary puzzle. The book, Cain’s Jawbone—named after the “first recorded murder weapon” and published under his nom de plume, Torquemada—consists of 100 pages, bound out of order; the reader’s job was
November 6, 2020, 11:00am Aside from his scintillating prose, deadpan wit, and fearless approach to dealing with some of the darkest corners of American history, Colson Whitehead’s literary career has been marked by an audacious versatility. Though many of his works feature some element of the outlandish or fantastical, no two are alike. Over a
November 6, 2020, 12:00pm Happy Friday. We made it. It’s the end of the longest week of the longest year, and here’s a really cool looking cover for Anthony Veasna So’s forthcoming debut short story collection, Afterparties. Blurbed by Bryan Washington, George Saunders, and Mary Karr, So’s collection about Cambodian-American life has been called “immersive
TODAY: In 1910, Leo Tolstoy dies. “The Babur Nama is an oddly modern text, almost Proustian in its self-awareness.” William Dalrymple on the 16th-century memoir far ahead of its time. | Lit Hub Biography “We have had no truth and reconciliation process.” On the renaissance of American white supremacy, a conversation with Isaac Bailey, Kathleen Belew, and Connor
Eight billion people are waiting for an end to the long, long race for the presidency, and more than that an end to the clownish, chaotic destructiveness of the Trump era, but the networks and other powers that be are not calling it. They’re not because, to boil down all the elaborate evasive reasons to
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle celebrates one of the great science-fiction achievements of the 1960s What’s the most prophetic book you can name? Nostradamus’ notebooks? In my book The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History , which gave its name to this Friday books column, I
November 6, 2020, 2:54pm It’s (almost) over. It’s finally (almost) over [weeps with relief, turns off TV forever, flies kite in sunlit park]. Yes, thanks to Black voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia, and Latino voters in Arizona and Nevada, it looks very much like the abject nightmare that has been the Trump presidency is
November 5, 2020, 7:00pm Tonight, at its special virtual ceremony hosted from the Austin Central Library, Kirkus Reviews announced the winners of the 7th-annual Kirkus Prizes in fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature, which celebrate the most inventive, electric, and timely fiction of the year. The Award comes with a cash prize of $50,000; previous winners include Colson
November 5, 2020, 10:00am Jason Reynolds! The two-time National Book Award Finalist, and current National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, will host the 71st National Book Awards on November 18, 2020. “To be at the forefront of ushering in the celebration of my peers would’ve been a gift at any point in my career. But