The Icelandic novelist, poet and Björk collaborator is a surrealist for our time. Read more
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Month: January 2022
France celebrates 400 years of Molière, the nation’s defining playwright
France launches Saturday a year of events to mark the 400th anniversary of Moliere, the nation’s most illustrious and ever popular master of the stage and satire. Read more
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Leading Bookseller’s Private Collection Goes Up for Sale
Christie’s will auction the personal Americana collection of William Reese, which carries an estimate of $12 million to $18 million. Read more
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Ida B. Wells, Black journalist and suffragist, honored with new Barbie doll
Black American journalist, suffragist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells will have her likeness transformed into a Barbie doll to honor her historic achievements. Read more
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Shit Cassandra Saw by Gwen E. Kirby
Kirby’s book succeeds not just because she’s a preternaturally gifted prose stylist, but because of her willingness to take risks. She experiments with points of view and occasionally dips into metafiction (“Midwestern Girl Is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories” is a master class in storytelling, as well as a hilarious commentary on a fiction scene that’s seen men overrepresented for decades.) And yet she also knows when to tap the brakes, when to step back and let her carefully drawn characters speak for themselves. It’s a stunning collection from a writer whose talent and creativity seem boundless. Read more
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Maya Angelou Becomes First Black Woman on a Quarter
The coins featuring the writer and poet, which began shipping this week, are the first in a series that will commemorate female pioneers in a variety of fields. Read more
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Joelle Taylor wins TS Eliot poetry prize for ‘blazing’ C+nto & Othered Poems
Joelle Taylor has won the TS Eliot poetry prize for her look at butch lesbian counterculture in the 1990s, C+nto & Othered Poems, praised by judges as “a blazing book of rage and light”. Read more
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Nine decades later, W.E.B. Du Bois’s work faces familiar criticisms
“Black Reconstruction,” published against a backdrop of violence and segregation, met with a vitriolic reception. White writers leveled sharp-tongued critiques. Black journalists assessed the work favorably but with reservations. Despite the early criticism, over time “Black Reconstruction” came to be recognized as a towering analysis of American culture and an important work of history. Nonetheless, the book’s contribution to the understanding of American racism is, nearly 90 years after its publication, still subject to stale objections that echo those heard when it first hit bookstore shelves. Read more
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‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ just entered the public domain. Here’s what that means for fans.
Among the many works in this year’s public domain trove — now that their requisite 95-year period has ended under U.S. copyright law—are Felix Salten’s original “Bambi, a Life in the Woods” novel; titles by Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes and Dorothy Parker; classic silent films and Broadway songs; and about 400,000 pre-1923 sound recordings. Read more
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The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan
The book doesn’t feel speculative so much as inevitable, which is all the more horrifying. In fact, although the book isn’t billed as a horror novel, I felt consistently spooked while reading, disturbed but propelled on by Chan’s excellent pacing . Read more
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