A new book takes readers into collector Edward Brooke-Hitching’s “madman’s library” Read more
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Decades After His Death, Richard Wright Has a New Book Out
“The Man Who Lived Underground,” a novel publishers rejected in the 1940s, is about an innocent Black man forced to confess to the murder of a white couple. Read more
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Announcing the winners of the 2021 Whiting Awards
This evening, in a virtual ceremony, the Whiting Foundation announced the recipients of its 2021 Whiting Awards, which seek to “recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent.” These ten writers, working in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, will each be awarded $50,000, prize money that the Whiting Foundation hopes will allow them to “devote themselves full-time to their own writing or to take bold new risks in their work.” Past Whiting Award winners include Colson Whitehead, Anne Boyer, Ocean Vuong, Mary Karr, Lydia Davis, Layli Long Soldier, Denis Johnson, Terrance Hayes, Ling Ma, Sigrid Nunez, and many others.
The 2021 Whiting Award winners are:
Steven Dunn, author of Potted Meat (Fiction)
Tope Folarin, author of A Particular Kind of Black Man (Fiction)
Joshua Bennett, author of Being Property Once Myself (Nonfiction and Poetry)
Sarah Stewart Johnson, author of The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World (Nonfiction)
Marwa Helal, author of Invasive species (Poetry)
Ladan Osman, author of Exiles of Eden (Poetry)
Xandria Phillips, author of Hull (Poetry)
Jordan E. Cooper, author of Black Boy Fly (Drama)
Donnetta Lavinia Grays, author of Where We Stand (Drama)
Sylvia Khoury, author of Selling Kabul (Drama)
The 15th-Century Wool Worker’s Son Who Made Books for Princes and Popes
“The Bookseller of Florence,” by Ross King, tells the history of Renaissance bookmaking through the story of Vespasiano da Bisticci, who rose from humble roots to dominate the trade. Read more
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Top French publishing house asks would-be authors to stop sending manuscripts
Successive Covid-19 lockdowns in France have given budding writers the time to finally work on that idea for a novel or to polish up an old manuscript languishing in a drawer. As a result, publishers are overwhelmed. Before the pandemic, Gallimard received around 30 manuscripts a day; now they receive around 50. Read more
Granta names world’s best young Spanish-language writers
The Strange Undeath of Middlebrow
It is odd that anyone still uses the word middlebrow. Like its complements lowbrow and highbrow, it reeks of antique beliefs, specifically the English notion that the brow ridges of pureblooded Anglo-Saxon gentlemen jut out and up in a most lordly fashion. Read more
New York bookstore figures out the perfect sideline: pickles.
Even in boomtimes it is hard to keep a bookstore afloat: the margins are razor thin and you’re in constant competition for bookbuyers with the largest monopoly in the universe (Am*zon). This is why a lot of stores—particularly newer ones—build higher-margin sidelines into their business models… like, say… beer! (Alena Jones recently wrote for Lit Hub about what bookselling means in the context of selling everything but books.)
Well, I’m here to tell you about a bookstore in New York City that has boldly—zestily, even—gone with pickles as its main sideline. Sweet Pickle Books, conveniently located in the pickle Mecca of the Lower East Side, is your one-stop destination for used books, old cassette tapes(?), and two-pound jars of pickles. Read more
In ‘Beeswing’ Richard Thompson Revisits a Big Life Just Shy of the Mainstream
Richard Thompson, a British musician who somehow avoided pop stardom throughout his career, has just written about his early days in a new memoir called Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice. Read more
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Marshall D. Sahlins, Groundbreaking Anthropologist, Dies at 90
His work focused on the way cultures shape, and are shaped by, individuals — a framework he demonstrated through his passionate political activism. Read more
