Michael Silverblatt, the longtime host of the KCRW radio show “Bookworm” — known for interviews of authors so in depth that they sometimes left his subjects astounded at his breadth of knowledge of their work — has died. Read more
Author: GR
Ohio Prepares for Yearlong Celebration of Toni Morrison
The yearlong initiative, coordinated by Literary Cleveland in partnership with Ohio Humanities, the Ohioana Library Association and the Toni Morrison Society, officially launches Feb. 18, which would have been Morrison’s 95th birthday. Read more
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‘The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief’
Holmes, master biographer that he is, vividly conjures up this awkward, compelling figure. What gives his book its exceptional energy, though, is not what is happening on the surface of Tennyson’s life and Holmes’s narrative. It is the powerful undertow of threatened belief and existential anxiety tugging the reader down … This biography is a compelling story of an odd, brilliant, charismatic character, and a reappraisal of a man who had become so very established we could no longer see him. Read more
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Crime and the City: Reno
The international crime reading series pops in on the biggest little city in the world. Read more
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‘City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore’
Ferlinghetti was an orphaned child of immigrants, a self-proclaimed anarchopacifist, and a GI-Bill funded doctoral student at the Sorbonne. From his arrival in San Francisco in 1951 to his death on February 22, 2021, he was a poet, painter, critic, editor, activist, translator, and business owner. He was one of the most important public intellectuals of his day, an uncompromising champion for literature’s power, freedom of expression, and the necessity of both to democracy. Even as our civic institutions suffer, independent bookstores like City Lights have become stronger. And we need them now, more than ever. Universities are under threat of government interference, book banning has reached unprecedented levels, journalists and artists and media outlets and attorneys are being punished, silenced, and doxed, and dissent everywhere is being criminalized. Read more
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Sales of ‘Wuthering Heights’ Skyrocket Ahead of Film Adaptation
The number of novels sold rose nearly fivefold year on year in the UK in January, Penguin Classics reports, as Emerald Fennell’s hotly anticipated take is set for release next week. Read more Watch trailer
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‘The Final Score’ by Don Winslow
A collection of six short stories about crimes both planned and accidental, the collision of dreams and reality, and the things people do for love. Read more
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He Died at 49. His Collected Poems Rank With the Best of the 20th Century.
Larry Levis’s work, gathered in the expansive new book “Swirl & Vortex,” was equally concerned with the soul and the void. Read more
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James Sallis, 81, Dies; Novelist Whose ‘Drive’ Became a Hit Movie
A storyteller of modern America’s underbelly with a literary, ruminative style, he inspired a Ryan Gosling movie and earned critical acclaim. Read more
‘Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood’
Novelist and biographer Mann delivers a meticulous and humane reconsideration of one of America’s most sensationalized unsolved murders. Rather than dwell on the lurid mythology surrounding the 1947 killing of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, whose mutilated body was discovered in a vacant Los Angeles lot, Mann sets out to restore complexity and dignity to a woman long reduced to tabloid caricature. Drawing on extensive archival research and overlooked police files, he traces Short’s troubled upbringing in Massachusetts and her zigzag path to Los Angeles after dropping out of high school. Read more
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