…the extremely rare document – now the longest continuing charter of government in the world – is one of just 11 known copies of the official printing produced for the delegates to Constitutional Convention and for the Continental Congress. Read more
Gailmarie Pahmeier Named Nevada Poet Laureate
Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak this week appointed author and University of Nevada, Reno professor Gailmarie Pahmeier as Nevada Poet Laureate. She will serve a two-year term from September 2021 through August 2023. Read more
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The Pomegranates and Other Modern Italian Fairy Tales
All but one of the stories in the forthcoming The Pomegranates and Other Modern Italian Fairy Tales have never been published in English before. The book, which is due out from Princeton University Press on 19 October, collects 20 fairytales published between 1875 and 1914, following Italy’s political unification. It brings together stories from Collodi, Domenico Comparetti (regarded as the Italian Grimm for his work gathering fairytales from around the country), and Grazia Deledda, the only Italian woman to have received the Nobel prize in literature. Read more
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Margaret Atwood and JM Coetzee demand release of jailed Iranian writers
The writers began a collective 15-and-a-half-year sentence at Evin Prison in Tehran in September 2020, on what writers’ association PEN America said were “spurious” national security and propaganda charges. Since then, Abtin and Khandan Mahabadi have both contracted Covid-19. Abtin is a poet, screenwriter and film-maker; Bajan is a novelist and journalist; and Khandan Mahabadi is an author and literary critic. Read more
I love books about books. Here are seven of my current favorites.
Gary Goodman helped establish Stillwater, Minn., as another “book town,” one deliberately modeled on the celebrated Welsh original, Hay-on-Wye. In Goodman’s witty, self-deprecating account of impulsively buying a crummy used bookstore, gradually improving its stock, and eventually meeting notable fellow dealers here and abroad (including McMurtry and Hay’s “King” Richard Booth), his tone periodically grows elegiac. Read more
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Jason Reynolds helps put a spotlight on Banned Books Week
This year’s Banned Books Week, which began Sunday, has the traditional list. But it also has a new feature: an honorary chairman. Jason Reynolds is a fitting pick for the job. He is the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature through next year, and he has two books on this year’s list. Read more
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Laura Jean McKay wins the Arthur C Clarke award
Twenty years before Margaret Atwood won the inaugural Arthur C Clarke award for her seminal novel The Handmaid’s Tale, she published a poem entitled The animals in that country. Now Laura Jean McKay, who borrowed the title of Atwood’s poem for her debut novel, has gone on to win the prestigious prize, with judges praising her story of a pandemic that enables humans to understand the language of animals for “reposition[ing] the boundaries of science fiction once again”. Read more
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Playwright Matthew López makes history as first Latino to win Tony for best play
“The Inheritance” was a play about the legacy of the AIDS epidemic (in two parts, it ran a total of six hours). It premiered in London in 2018, where The Telegraph called it “perhaps the most important American play of the century so far.” Read more
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This was the worst slaughter of Native Americans in US history. Few remember it.
The Bear River Massacre of 1863 near what’s now Preston, Idaho, left roughly 350 members of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation dead, making it the bloodiest — and most deadly — slaying of Native Americans by the U.S. military, according to historians and tribal leaders. The Indians were slain after soldiers came into a valley where they were camping for the winter and attacked, leaving roughly 90 women and children among the dead. Read more
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Gilgamesh Dream Tablet to be formally handed back to Iraq
A 3,600-year-old tablet showing part of the Epic of Gilgamesh will be formally handed back to Iraq by the US on Thursday. The tablet, known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, shows parts of a Sumerian poem from the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world’s oldest known religious texts. It is believed to have been looted from a museum in Iraq in 1991, and “fraudulently” entered the US in 2007, according to Unesco, the United Nations’ cultural body. It was acquired by Christian arts and crafts retailer Hobby Lobby for display in its museum of biblical artefacts in 2014, and seized by the US Department of Justice in 2019. Read more
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