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LaKeith Stanfield will star in the new adaptation of Victor LaValle’s The Changeling

Apple TV+ today confirmed that not only has The Changeling—a fantastical urban horror drama based on Victor LaValle’s best-selling 2017 book of the same name—been given a series order, but that LaKeith Stanfield has been cast as the lead. The star of Atlanta, Sorry to Bother You, and Judas and the Black Messiah (for which he was Oscar nominated) seems (to me at least) the perfect choice to play Apollo Kagwa, a ruminative rare book dealer and anxious new father whose wife commits a terrible and incomprehensible act of violence before disappearing into the night, prompting Apollo to embark on a dangerous odyssey through New York’s supernatural underworld in an attempt to confront the supernatural evil that has torn his family apart. Read more

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Is the Tractatus more a work of poetry than philosophy?

“Philosophy,” Wittgenstein argued in the posthumously published Culture and Value, “ought really to be written only as poetic composition.” In keeping with its author’s sentiment, I’d claim that the Tractatus is less the greatest philosophical work of the 20th century than it is one of the most immaculate volumes of modernist poetry written in the past hundred years. Read more

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Walter Mosley is writing a new The Thing series for Marvel

Another acclaimed novelist is getting into the Marvel business. Like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Benjamin Percy before him, Walter Mosley, who is primarily known for his mystery and crime fiction but who has written across multiple genres, including science fiction and erotic, is expanding his reach into the Marvel Universe. His six-issue series featuring The Thing will debut this November. Read more

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The Loch Ness monster may not exist, but such mythical beasts fascinate for good reason

Sirens, mermaids, the Phoenix and the Sphinx, dragons, griffins and unicorns, the Roc, the Kraken and the Wendigo, basilisks and gorgons, vampires, werewolves and Martian invaders — as Julie Andrews once sang, these are a few of my favorite things. Read more

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Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

It’s hard to describe how much fun this novel is—Moreno-Garcia, whose Mexican Gothic (2020) gripped readers last year, proves to be just as good at noir as she is at horror. The novel features memorable characters, taut pacing, an intricate plot, and antiheroes you can’t help but root for. A noir masterpiece. Read more

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Amanda Gorman and PRH have established a $10,000 prize for public high school poets

Exciting news for high school writers: Amanda Gorman and Penguin Random House have teamed up to launch the Amanda Gorman Award for Poetry. The award will recognize a senior from a public high school for an original poem, and the winner will receive $10,000. The Amanda Gorman Award for Poetry is one of five creative writing awards given by Penguin Random House, whose categories include fiction/drama, personal essay/memoir, and spoken word; current high school seniors who attend U.S. public schools and plan on continuing their education in fall 2022 are encouraged to apply. As of this year, the Penguin Random House Creative Writing Awards have awarded over $2.8 million to public high school students for their original writing. Read more

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A new poll shows that most readers organize their bookshelves . . . completely randomly

Much has been made of the trend of organizing one’s books by color: some find it cute, some find it a disturbing, theatrical perversion of the insular process of reading. But despite the controversy of color-coordinated shelves, they’re not that popular: a new poll administered by YouGov has discovered that only 2% of British readers organize their bookshelves by color. Instead, by far, the most popular way of organizing one’s bookshelves is utter randomness. The YouGov poll found that a whopping 43% of bookshelf-having Britons don’t organize their bookshelves in any way; 23% organize them by genre, and 21% by size. Perhaps surprisingly, only 11% sort alphabetically by author, and only 3% sort alphabetically by title. Read more

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