Gorey said, “I write about everyday life.” His work reminds us that death is a major fact of existence. Read more
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Year: 2025
First Known Cookbook by a Black American Woman Gets New Edition 160 Years Later
Malinda Russell wrote A Domestic Cookbook: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen in 1866. We know sadly little about her, says Rafia Zafar, a retired professor at Washington University in St Louis, Mo., who contributed a foreword to the new edition. Read more
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The Badass Lady Pilot Who Revolutionized the Art of Food Writing
With a name like Clementine Paddleford, she should have been unforgettable. So why don’t you know who she is? Read more
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Jane Austen Fans Honor British Novelist’s Legacy 250 Years After Her Birth
This year, fans of the British romantic novelist Jane Austen are celebrating 250 years since her birth. In her homeland of England, residents are expecting a tourist boom. Watch video
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Antifascist, Feminist, Timeless: On Alba de Céspedes’s ‘There’s No Turning Back’
There’s No Turning Back follows eight young women living in a convent-boarding house in Rome, most of whom are studying at the university. They come from different backgrounds, have different desires and goals, and make different choices, yet they are united in the task of finding their way in the world. “It’s as if we’re on a bridge,” one of the girls says. “We’ve already departed from one side and haven’t yet reached the other. What we’ve left behind we don’t look back at. What awaits us is still enveloped in fog. We don’t know what we’ll find when the fog clears.” Read more
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Tom Robbins, Whose Comic Novels Drew a Cult Following, Dies at 92
Tom Robbins, whose cosmically comic novels about gargantuan-thumbed hitchhikers, stoned secret agents and mystic stockbrokers caught hold of millions of readers in the 1970s counterculture, died on Sunday at his home in La Conner, Wash. Read more
Inside the Blurb-Industrial Complex
One of literature’s most ancient traditions is under threat. Authors are thrilled. Read more
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Authors Guild Launches ‘Human Authored’ Certification
‘The Human Authored initiative isn’t about rejecting technology — it’s about creating transparency, acknowledging the reader’s desire for human connection, and celebrating the uniquely human elements of storytelling,’ guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said in a statement Wednesday. ‘Authors can still qualify if they use AI as a tool for spell-checking or research, but the certification connotes that the literary expression itself, with the unique human voice that every author brings to their writing, emanated from the human intellect.’ Read more
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Read Your Way Through New York City
We asked 10 writers to share slices of their literary lives in New York. Read more
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No Writer Better Understood the Agony of Expectation
During the past 50 years, the work of the Argentine writer Antonio Di Benedetto has found its way to readers like water trickling from a blocked stream. Beloved by an almost clandestine coterie of admirers that included Roberto Bolaño, Di Benedetto, who died in 1986, is still largely unknown in the United States.
With the publication in English of THE SUICIDES, the third novel of what can loosely be called a trilogy, this may be about to change. All three books have now been masterfully translated by Esther Allen, who has managed to capture the humor, the sobriety and the oscillations between realism and mental fragmentation that constitute the essence of Di Benedetto’s fiction. Read more
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