Whether it’s fiction, fantasy, or biographies, books play a major role in our lives and we must celebrate their creators! Today, take a moment to appreciate the author(s) that spent countless hours writing your favorite books. Read more
Month: October 2021
Diana Souhami wins 2021 Polari prize for No Modernism Without Lesbians
No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami has won the 2021 Polari prize for LGBTQ+ books. The account of a group of gay women who helped to begin the modernist movement was called “richly researched, entertaining and hugely enjoyable” by judge and CEO of the National Centre for Writing, Chris Gribble. It offers “insight into the lives, passions and legacies of a group of outstanding women who together helped change the course of their culture”, he added. “Souhami is a brilliant guide and this book a celebration, corrective and fillip all in one.” Read more
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How Gruesome Penny Dreadfuls Got Victorian Children Reading
Despite causing a moral panic, these salacious tales helped boost literacy in Victorian England. Read more
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Here are the 2021 Kirkus Prize winners
This evening, at a virtual ceremony hosted from the Austin Central Library, Kirkus Reviews announced the winners of its eighth annual Kirkus Prizes in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature. Each of the three winners, chosen from the 1,531 books that received Kirkus stars this year, and narrowed down from the list of finalists announced in September, will receive a cash prize of $50,000. Read more
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Gary Shteyngart’s Pandemic Novel Is His Finest Yet
To read this novel is to tally a high school yearbook’s worth of superlatives for Shteyngart: funniest, noisiest, sweetest, most entertaining. To those I will add a few superlatives that were not celebrated at my own high school: most melancholic, most quizzical, most skilled at vibrating the deepest strings of the anthropoid heart. Read more
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An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed by Helene Tursten
Tursten effectively juxtaposes a cozy, Agatha Christie–like tone against the often surprisingly dark nature of Maud’s recollections, which are rife with clever satirical jabs and delicious ironies. This absorbing dive into the mind of a ruthless pragmatist posing as a Swedish Miss Marple will please psychological-thriller fans, once they realize that Maud isn’t nearly as cozy as she looks. Read more
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Newly Unearthed Work by a Revered and Reviled Novelist Causes a Stir in France
A legal battle is raging over manuscripts written by the antisemitic writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline that disappeared almost eight decades ago. Read more
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The 12 scariest books we’ve ever read
Horror is a cathartic genre, a place where we can explore our deepest anxieties and traumas, relive our worst nightmares and purge ourselves of the nagging fears that could otherwise overwhelm our psyches. Plus, it’s more fun and cheaper than therapy. Read more
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Nebraska native author’s controversial deep dive into unsolved killing now a Showtime series
By day, native Nebraskan Harry MacLean helps settle conflicts as an arbitration attorney. On nights and weekends, he ruminates over methods and motives of killing. The true-crime author’s book “Once Upon a Time: A True Story of Memory, Murder and the Law” examined a controversial case when a daughter’s playmate went missing. Decades later, the daughter, now an adult, reported a vivid memory: She had watched her own father kill her friend. The 1990 case that sparked a national conversation about repressed memory is now being retold in a new four-part Showtime documentary series. Read more
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No Mere Oddity: On Lafcadio Hearn’s “In Ghostly Japan”
BRAM STOKER, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lafcadio Hearn. In this list, Hearn — a contemporary of the other writers — stands out. Unlike the rest, his is no longer a household name. Yet, at the end of the 19th century, he was one of the most well-known authors in the West. “Lafcadio Hearn has been forgotten,” Romanian American poet Andrei Codrescu wrote in 2019, “with two remarkable exceptions: in Louisiana and in Japan.” Read more
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