Rahele Megosha, a high school senior from South Dakota, has been named the 2021 Poetry Out Loud national champion. The competition invites high school students to memorize and recite great poetry, both classic and modern. Read more
We need comic novels more than ever. So where are they?
A nation recovering from the worst health emergency in 100 years needs novels full of humor. But if laughter is the best medicine, our fiction is in dangerously short supply. It’s an odd and persistent problem, compounded by the fact that most of the novels marketed as funny are, in fact, not very funny. Or they traffic in wit so dry their lips would crack if they smiled. Read more
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Minnesota writer’s memoir comes to life in new Kevin Hart film
Ten years after the debut of his memoir about life as a widowed father, a Minnesota writer is getting the Hollywood treatment — with comedian Kevin Hart playing him in a new film debuting in June. Read more
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For the Washoe Tribe of Lake Tahoe, a sundown siren is a ‘living piece of historical trauma’
In Minden, Nevada, a siren goes off every day at noon and 6 p.m. Members of the Washoe Tribe have been asking the town to silence the 6 p.m. siren because of its affiliation with a racist sundown ordinance that was in place for much of the 20th century. Read more
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What We Lose When Literary Criticism Ends
With mainstream media uninterested in books coverage that doesn’t get clicks, writers and readers are being left out in the cold. Read more
Never-before-seen Franz Kafka Drawings Go on Display
Following a long court battle, and after they had been held in a vault for decades, unknown illustrations by the great author can be seen at long last, 97 years after Kafka’s death. Read more
A Moment Or A Movement? Black Bookstore Owners On Business One Year Later
Eric Carle, Author of ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar,’ Dies at 91
A self-described “picture writer,” he wrote and illustrated more than 70 books for young children, selling more than 170 million copies. Read more
Robert Macfarlane on Roger Deakin and the Origins of Wild Swimming
To Roger Deakin, water was a miraculous substance. It was curative and restorative, it was beautiful in its flow, it was a lens through which he often viewed the world, and it was a medium of imagination and reflection. “All water,” he scribbled in a notebook, “river, sea, pond, lake, holds memory and the space to think.” Read more
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A Lost Bronte Library Surfaces
A trove of manuscripts acquired from the Bronte family in the 19th century, all but unseen for the past century, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s. Read more
