Works written decades ago, often by female Jewish immigrants, were dismissed as insignificant or unmarketable. But in the past several years, translators devoted to the literature are making it available to a wider readership. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
The challenges here — for author and reader — are considerable. After all, Tokarczuk isn’t revising our understanding of Mozart or presenting a fresh take on Catherine the Great. She’s excavating a shadowy figure who’s almost entirely unknown today … As daunting as it sounds, The Books of Jacob is miraculously entertaining and consistently fascinating. Despite his best efforts, Frank never mastered alchemy, but Tokarczuk certainly has. Her light irony, delightfully conveyed by Croft’s translation, infuses many of the sections. What’s more, it turns out that the story of an 18th-century grifter inflated by Messianic delusions is surprisingly relevant to our own era. The quality that makes The Books of Jacob so striking is its remarkable form. Tokarczuk has constructed her narrative as a collage of legends, letters, diary entries, rumors, hagiographies, political attacks and historical records … This is a story that grows simultaneously more detailed and more mysterious … Haunting and irresistible. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
The first in-person PEN awards ceremony since the pandemic began in 2020 will honor the winners of PEN’s career-achievement awards: Broadway and Hollywood icon Elaine May will receive the $25,000 PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award, named in honor of her long-ago partner in comedy. Acclaimed Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, author of “A Grain of Wheat” and “Weep Not, Child” and a perennial Nobel Prize contender, will take home the $50,000 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. And Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, writer of “Fairview” and “Marys Seacole,” will be presented the $10,000 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Judges said The Kids was “a book to fall in love with”. “It’s joyous, it’s warm and it’s completely universal,” said chair of judges, the BBC News journalist and broadcaster Reeta Chakrabarti. “It’s crafted and skilful but also accessible.” Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Dillon Helbig, a second-grader from Idaho, wrote an 81-page book about his “Crismis” adventures. Now other children want to write stories. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Recitatif was originally published in a 1983 anthology that has since gone out of print and was rarely seen in intervening decades, as the Associated Press has reported. But it’s making a comeback, this time in book form. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Defense attorney Rudolf debuts with a searing look at systemic failures in the U.S. justice system. He notes that over the past three decades, nearly 3,000 people were exonerated and released from prison for crimes they had not committed, and delves into the factors behind these false convictions, including racial bias; the so-called trial penalty, which incentivizes defendants to plead guilty in order to avoid the likelihood of a harsher sentence should they be convicted at trial; and a reliance on suspect testimony. Rudolf also documents shortcomings in forensic science… Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
A bold and playful collection of erotic stories written by some of the world’s finest writers. The twist? Each story is “anonymous,” allowing for tales as subtle or explicit, strange or familiar, tender or fierce as each writer wishes–leaving readers to guess who wrote what. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
A school board in Tennessee voted unanimously this month to ban “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from being taught in its classrooms because the book contains material that board members said was inappropriate for students. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
The American Library Association (ALA) has selected The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu (Little, Brown and Company) by Tom Lin as the winner of the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance (Random House) by Hanif Abdurraqib as the winner of the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
