Poet Dean Atta, writer and critic PD Smith and Guardian readers Jessica and Brenda discuss the titles they’ve read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments In this series we ask authors, Guardian writers and readers to share what they’ve been reading recently. This month, recommendations include Terry Pratchett’s fantasy novels, a […]
All billionaires are bad, but MacKenzie Scott—novelist, Toni Morrison protégée, and ex-wife of Jeff Bezos—is at least doing a better job than most at growing her vast fortune at a slightly less alarming rate than most of the other billionaires in the world. Scott, who recently donated $436 million to Habitat for Humanity International and 84 affiliates, […]
The Art of Losing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by French novelist Alice Zeniter has won the prestigious Dublin Literary Award, a prize which comes with a handsome glass trophy and the world’s largest purse for a single novel published in English—a whopping €100,000. Nominations for the Dublin Literary Award are submitted by public libraries worldwide, with over […]
If you enjoyed watching an 80-year-old Margaret Atwood buzzing around New Zealand on a scooter, you’re gonna love watching an 82-year-old Margaret Atwood wielding the coolest (and most supervillain-y) of handheld weapons: the humble American flamethrower. Yes, last night, during PEN America’s glitzy annual gala in New York (which also featured Ruth Negga presenting an […]
I’m sorry, you just shouldn’t write in library books. Do whatever you want with your own books—highlighter, pen, pencil, the blood of the innocent—but being a member of a library is a contract with your fellow readers, and you should leave your thoughts and/or doodles out of other people’s books. Apparently, though, no one ever […]
TODAY: In 1900, Italian actor, playwright, and screenwriter Eduardo De Filippo is born. “In terms of craft, I would need every move I ever learned, plus all the help I could get.” Diana Goetsch reveals how Virginia Woolf, J.A. Baker, and others helped her write a trans memoir. | Lit Hub Craft “I started work […]
I lay on my backpack, denying to myself that my arm was broken. The moon had made me think it was light enough to gambol down a mountain. The waterfall meadow, the tissue-paper leaves, the iceberg clouds and diamond rocks, the moon a puddle of dead frogs: looking down from the front steps, I had […]
It was a review of The Idiot, her 2017 debut novel, that made Elif Batuman revisit Martin Amis’s 1973 debut novel, The Rachel Papers. “The reviewer was upset that there isn’t any sex in The Idiot,” Batuman says now, remembering that the piece cited Amis as having said: “The only thing wrong with Pride and […]
The first issue of Sports Illustrated was published on August 16, 1954. The cover — a lush full-color photograph of the Milwaukee Braves’ Eddie Mathews batting in front of an overflow crowd — and the jaunty, slangy writing within gave notice that this was to be a new, fully modern kind of sports magazine, one built on “defying intellectual […]
In the first years of my journalism career I was a hip-hop-obsessed music writer who’d never made a Freedom of Information Act request. But while doing research for Fentanyl, Inc. I not only uncovered government documents, but met with dark-web traffickers and traveled to China, where I impersonated a drug dealer. I got in a […]
Jen Silverman’s novel, We Play Ourselves, is out now in paperback from Random House, so we asked about her favorite books to give to friends, the best stories to revisit, and how she procrastinates. * What is your favorite book to give as a gift? I am bad at many things in life, among them things […]
I was sent Omer Friedlander’s debut story collection, The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land, out of the blue by his editor Robin Desser. The truth is that several bouts of covid in my household and work responsibilities kept me from getting to it right away, but when I did start reading I […]
