Ripley is an upcoming American psychological thriller television series based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 crime novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. Starring Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley, Johnny Flynn as Dickie Greenleaf and Dakota Fanning as Marge Sherwood, the eight-episode limited series was created, written and directed by Steven Zaillian. Watch trailer
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In January, S&S kicked off its centennial year with the release of The Simon & Schuster 100, a selection of 100 titles the company has published over its history—and as Karp suggests, what began with a windfall from four bestselling crossword puzzle books in 1924 quickly, and impressively, expanded. S&S’s first full list in 1924 would feature a biography of Joseph Pulitzer (a hero of Schuster’s), a poetry book, and Harvey Landrum—the only novel S&S published that year despite getting 241 submissions. A year later, S&S published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and in the following years heavyweights such as Ernest Hemingway and Dale Carnegie joined the list, as did Margaret Mitchell for her epic Gone with the Wind.
In choosing a list of 100 books to showcase, Karp said the goal was to show “the cultural sweep” of S&S’s publishing program over the past 100 years. It was no small task for a program that has yielded 61 Pulitzer Prize winners, 18 National Book Award winners, 18 Newbery winners, and 15 Caldecott winners. The original motto of S&S was to publish books that are “commercial, successful, and culture defining,” Karp noted. “That is still our mission today.” Read more
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The Hive and The Honey is a collection of astonishing breadth, offering a panoramic portrait of Korean diaspora, of lives rescued from the margins of history. These characters reveal themselves most acutely through intimate gestures, moments that infuse the ordinary with lasting wonder and could only be achieved by a writer as patient, curious, and masterful as Paul Yoon… Read more
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This superb study by University of Cambridge particle physicist Cliff (How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch) examines contemporary physics’ most intriguing mysteries through profiles of the scientists trying to solve them … Cliff’s lucid explanations do a remarkable job of making the complicated physics accessible and even exciting, and the focus on the scientists’ stories ensconces the heady ideas in approachable, human narratives. This is a first-rate dispatch from the cutting edge of physics. Read more
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The awards, which were announced at a ceremony at the New School in New York City, are among the most prestigious literary prizes in the United States. Unlike other major awards, the recipients are chosen by book critics instead of committees made up of authors or academics. Read more
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As a sci-fi author, Vinge won Hugo Awards for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1993), A Deepness in the Sky (2000), and Rainbows End (2007). He also won Hugos for the novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) and The Cookie Monster (2004). As Mike Glyer’s File 770 blog notes, Vinge’s novella True Names (1981) is frequency cited as the first presentation of an in-depth look at the concept of “cyberspace.”
Vinge first coined the term “singularity” as related to technology in 1983, borrowed from the concept of a singularity in spacetime in physics. When discussing the creation of intelligences far greater than our own in an 1983 op-ed in OMNI magazine, Vinge wrote, “When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.” Read more
An American director’s adaptation of the beloved novel is resonating with moviegoers, who may recognize some similarities in its satire of authoritarian rule. Read more Watch trailer
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Frans de Waal, who used his study of the inner lives of animals to build a powerful case that apes think, feel, strategize, pass down culture and act on moral sentiments — and that humans are not quite as special as many of us like to think — died on Thursday at his home in Stone Mountain, Ga. Read more
Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Read more
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