The books The First State of Being and Chooch Helped have won the Newbery and the Caldecott awards, respectively — the biggest honors in children’s literature. The awards were announced Monday morning at the American Library Association’s annual Youth Media Awards. Read more
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Strange Pictures is Uketsu’s second novel but the first to be translated into English. It’s a sinister and original book that straddles the line between crime and horror, drawing readers into a dark, unsettling and deeply immersive world of interconnected stories. With its haunting premise and intricate structure, Strange Pictures melds visual and textual storytelling to offer an experience that is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally affecting. Read more
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The 97th Academy Awards, hosted by Conan O’Brien, will air live coast-to-coast on Sunday, March 2, from the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood, starting at 4 p.m. PT / 7 p.m. ET, continuing with the earlier start time the show debuted last year, on ABC and Hulu. Read more
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What’s awkward about this whole debate is that, though we speak freely of “attention spans,” they are not the sort of thing that psychologists can measure, independent of context, across time. And studies of the ostensible harm that carrying smartphones does to cognitive abilities have been contradictory and inconclusive. Read more
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Clay McLeod Chapman kept hearing friends say, of their Fox News-watching parents, “It’s like they were possessed.” That’s what inspired him to write “Wake Up and Open Your Eyes.” Read more
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British writer Mick Herron, best known for his Slough House series beginning with Slow Horses, has been awarded the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Diamond Dagger award for lifetime contribution to crime writing. Read more
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In his long-running Village Voice comic strip and in his many plays and screenplays, he took delight in skewering politics, relationships and human nature. Read more
Mavis Gallant wrote short stories full of brutal humor that examined the hell of other people. Read more
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Judges for the £25,000 award say the collection, informed by grief for his two brothers, ‘braves large questions’ with its lyric sequence. Read more
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On July 8, 1723, a book was put on trial. The Grand Jury of Middlesex County Court, in England, was presented with a work that corrupted public morals to such an extent that it might “debauch the nation.” Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees was said to recognize no evidence of God’s influence or providence in the world; it attacked all the decent institutions of society — politicians were derided, the clergy were slandered, and universities mocked; and, most offensive of all, it attempted to “run down religion and virtue as prejudicial to society, and detrimental to the state … and to recommend luxury, avarice, pride, and all kind of vices, as being necessary to public welfare.” The book claimed that vice ought to be pursued because the immoral activities of individuals can generate an overall economic benefit for society as a whole. Vice was not only necessary but desirable. Like Milton’s Lucifer, its author seemed to declare: “Evil, be thou my Good.” Read more
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