Author Valeria Luiselli just won the Dublin literary award. She says that she, her daughter, and her niece have been reading out loud to each other since the pandemic began. "I can say, without a hint of doubt, that without books – without sharing in the company of other writers’s human experiences – we would not have made it...
The history of the New York Times Book Review is pretty interesting for word nerds. "Although photos already appeared in other parts of the paper, these came only later to the Book Review. The publication turned instead to typography — some of it quite fanciful — to set its distinctive-looking pages apart." - The New York Times
And, as his five-year run writing for the comic series comes to an end, what it did for him. "Coates decided early on he wanted to see how Wakanda truly became the technologically unmatched African ideal, which meant looking in the closet for skeletons." - Washington Post
You ready for 75 nonfiction books in 90 days? (Oddly, LitHub also has recommendations for a mere 38 fiction works in the summer, but hey, perhaps fiction is slower than nonfiction for some people?) On your marks, as Memorial Day approaches. Get set! Hit up your local indie bookshop ... and ... GO. - LitHub
Curve began its life as Deneuve, a lesbian magazine founded by a 23-year-old who gambled all her money on horse races, won, and used the proceeds to start the mag. There's a new movie documenting its evolution, and how different things might be in 2021. Franco Stevens: "Once I came back from the Book Fair in Chicago, walked into...
"The manuscript, Murder at Full Moon, was completed in 1930 but was never published. A single copy has been sitting, mostly forgotten, in an archive in Texas since 1969. It includes drawings by Steinbeck himself. A scholar of American literature at Stanford University is pushing for the book to be published, but the agents for Steinbeck's estate vehemently refused...
Having decided that the old reference works, still in use in English schools and universities, were too "antiquated" to work from, the editors of the new Cambridge Greek Lexicon spent 23 years going over virtually every surviving piece of ancient Hellenic writing back to Homer and up to circa 120 AD. "The new dictionary's editors 'spare no blushes', ...
"The collection was put together by Arthur Bell Nicholls, the widower of Charlotte, who of the six Brontë children lived the longest, dying in 1855 at the age of 38. Nicholls sold the majority of the surviving Brontë manuscripts in 1895 to the notorious bibliophile and literary forger Thomas James Wise. The collectors and brothers Alfred and William Law...
In his new book, “Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020,” Rushdie attempts to perform a defensive castling move. He suggests his work has been misunderstood and mistreated because the literary culture has turned from brio-filled imaginative writing toward the humbler delights of “autofiction,” as exemplified by the work of Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard. - The New York Times
There is no doubting the clarity and vigor of his prose, but when it comes to assessing his capacity to face up to grim truths, there is good reason to doubt Orwell’s claims to his having looked reality unflinchingly in the eye and told it like it was. Orwell’s friend Malcolm Muggeridge believed that while Orwell displayed “an almost...
" the world's most renowned, prolific and peripatetic manuscript conservationist. Over the past 20 years his work has taken him from the Balkans to the Himalayas, from the Sahel region of Africa to the Middle East, injecting him into the heart of conflict zones and resulting in several narrow escapes from rebel movements and religious extremists." - Smithsonian Magazine
"The ubiquity of social media is often offered up as a solution to the paucity of mainstream book criticism. While it is no longer possible to earn a living as a working critic, the internet has provided us with arguably more amateur criticism than at any other point in history, from BookTube to Bookstagram to Twitter Books. But the...
Rogers: "When I started work on Mr Wroe’s Virgins I was 35. I was wildly ambitious, and had a chip on my shoulder. Faber had published my first three novels and all had found critical favour. But I was broke and my sales were poor, and I was spiky about the literary world." - The Guardian (UK)
"The beloved Samir Mansour Bookshop was destroyed on Tuesday by an Israeli airstrike. The shop, which was established in 2008, had thousands of books, including the largest collection of English literature in Gaza, and was also part of a publishing house that focused on Palestinian writers." Israel claimed the strike's purpose was to destroy Hamas tunnels. - LitHub
