Jamil Jan Kochai wins the Aspen Words Literary Prize for his short stories focused on the absurdity and violence Afghans have endured. Read more
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Month: April 2023
Lydia Davis Refuses to Sell Her Next Book on Amazon
Due to be published just before Bookshop Day on 7 October, Our Strangers will only be sold in physical bookshops, Bookshop.org and selected online independent retailers. Read more
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Man Gets Prison for Threatening Merriam-Webster over Definition of ‘Female’
A California man who pleaded guilty to making online threats to shoot up and bomb the offices of dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster was sentenced to a year in prison this week. Read more
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‘The Garden of Seven Twilights’ by Miquel de Palol
…upon its publication in 1989, Garden of Seven Twilights was hailed as a masterpiece and showered with accolades—the Serra d’Or Critics prize, the National Prize for Catalan Literature, and many others. Critics blessed Palol with comparisons to Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Georges Perec, dubbing his work “the postmodern Decameron.” Garden especially earns this last epithet—it is a frame-narrative monolith, a monstrously pregnant matryoshka doll of nested stories, and a cerebral, ludic, and unapologetically pulpy affair. Read more
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The Forgotten Drug Trips of the Nineteenth Century
Long before the hippies, a group of thinkers used substances like cocaine, hashish, and nitrous oxide to uncover the secrets of the mind. Read more
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It’s Okay to Like Good Art by Bad People
Art transcends the artist. Read more
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‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ Now Streaming on Hulu
Based on the best-selling collection by Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things follows Clare (Kathryn Hahn) a writer who becomes a revered advice columnist while her own life is falling apart. Watch trailer
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It’s Time to Put the ‘True’ Back in True Crime
…As a writer and editor of true crime, I might be more sensitive to these sorts of factual errors than most people. But they are part of a troubling trend. Errors like the one in “Boston Strangler” threaten the integrity of true crime, which as a genre has grappled with whether the stories it tells about crimes are, in fact, true. Read more
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The Extraordinary Ways Rhythm Shapes Our Lives
Why do we care about rhythm? It connects us to the world. It plays a role in listening, in language, in understanding speech in noisy places, in walking, and even in our feelings toward one another. Read more
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Anne Perry, Crime Writer With Her Own Dark Tale, Dies at 84
She was well into her career as a prolific author of historical crime fiction when a murderous past was publicly revealed and dramatized in a 1994 movie. Read more
