Publishing has come to depend on fawning endorsements, but not every title can be electrifying, essential, and revelatory. Read more
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Month: August 2023
AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable, Federal Judge Rules
A federal judge on Friday upheld a finding from the U.S. Copyright Office that a piece of art created by AI is not open to protection. Read more
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Alice Winn Wins 2023 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize
The novel, inspired by archive clippings from a student newspaper, chronicles the love story between two first world war soldiers. It was announced as the winner at a ceremony in London on Thursday evening. Read more
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Gastronomical Delights Inspired By The Queen of Crime
Like Hercule Poirot, who appears in her first detective novel, Christie loved good food, but this collection of recipes doesn’t examine what she ate and drank herself. Rather, it examines the different ways she incorporates various meals, dishes, drinks, and ingredients into her novels. Occasionally she wields food as a weapon, but more often meals serve as plot devices. In her stories, food develops characters or invokes settings, whether familiar or foreign. Read more
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The Essential Ursula K. Le Guin
Her powerful imagination turned hypothetical elsewheres into vivid worlds governed by forces of nature, technology, gender, race and class a far cry from our own. By 1975, when she became the first author to have had multiple novels win both the Hugo and the Nebula awards, she had changed science fiction forever. Read more
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The Ritual of Rearranging Your Books
Take the books off the shelves. Dust them, thumb through them, find yourself surprised about what you do and don’t remember. Line them up however you like—by size, by color, by author, by vibes—and then, when everything you’ve read is sorted, tackle the real challenge. The unread books… Read more
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Ned Beauman Wins Arthur C. Clarke Award for ‘Venomous Lumpsucker’
Ned Beauman has won the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction with his “twisted” and “bleakly funny” novel, Venomous Lumpsucker. Read more
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The Twilight Zone and the Postwar American Dream
Historian Brokaw debuts with a penetrating analysis of how the Twilight Zone (1959–1964) exposed the dark underbelly of Cold War America. Examining key episodes, Brokaw argues that creator Rod Serling “sought to… reframe popular portrayals of white Americans’ wish-fulfillments as nightmares rather than aspirational dreams.” Read more
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The Master Fabulist of American Fiction
Millhauser reminds you of Borges sometimes, of Calvino and Angela Carter at other times, even of Nabokov once in a while. What sets him apart from other writers these days is that he’s a fabulist of a particular sort: his stories take place, for the most part, neither in the real world nor in one that’s wholly fantastical but someplace in between. Millhauser has a Nicholson Baker-like gift for meticulous, closeup description of the ordinary, but his world is also one that may be inhabited by ghosts, a realm where paintings and postcards come to life, where people can vanish or fly on carpets, and where it’s possible for someone to cohabitate with a frog. Read more
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‘The Changeling’ is Coming Soon to Apple TV+
Based on the acclaimed bestselling book of the same name by Victor LaValle, “The Changeling” is a fairytale for grown-ups. A horror story, a parenthood fable and a perilous odyssey through a New York City you didn’t know existed. Watch trailer
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