To the growing genre of drug-riddled fiction—Irvine Welsh, Denis Johnson, Joel Mowdy, Nico Walker—Krauze adds a flourish, a kind of harsh music, with his use of gang argot … A gritty read for its gore, drugs, and profanity, but possessed of a raw and honest eloquence. Read more
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Seven hundred years after the poet’s death, many believe he should be exonerated of the crimes for which he was exiled from Florence. Was he the victim of a conspiracy? Read more
Minnesota writer Louise Erdrich won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction Friday for her novel “The Night Watchman,” a glowing and multilayered novel based on the life of her grandfather, Aunishenaubay Patrick Gourneau. Read more
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…the best biblio-memoirs are a wonderfully quirky mix of autobiography, travel writing, literary criticism, self-help and immersion journalism. The list that follows includes books which push the genre boundaries, which explore and explode the form. So often books stay in our head precisely because we do not know exactly what they are. Read more
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Oxford University’s right to print books was first recognised in 1586, in a decree from the Star Chamber. But the centuries-old printing history of Oxford University Press will end this summer, after the publishing house announced the last vestige of its printing arm was closing. Read more
Lambda Literary announced the winners of the 33rd Annual Lambda Literary Awards, known as the “Lammys,” on June 1 at a ceremony hosted by Rakesh Satyal, who won a Lambda Literary Award for his debut novel, Blue Boy. Read more
The first book from renowned pitmaster and chef Rodney Scott puts a long-neglected keystone of Black American culture on the table. Read more
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The author of “Goodbye, Columbus” and “The Human Stain” left several thousand books, many of them with notes or letters, to the Newark Public Library. The collection will soon open to the public. Read more
The prize is given by free speech campaigners English PEN in memory of the Nobel laureate Harold Pinter. It goes to a writer of “outstanding literary merit” who, as Pinter put it in his Nobel speech, shows a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”. Previous winners include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Margaret Atwood and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Read more
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The century-old Drama Book Shop in Manhattan struggled for years. Then “Hamilton” happened. Read more
