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How Dead Authors’ Characters Became the Hottest Property in Publishing

In recent decades, the industry has woken up to the fact that literary legacies can be big business, allowing well-loved characters to live on indefinitely. In the UK, books enter the public domain 70 years after the death of their author. Before that, control is in the hands of their descendants, or whoever they have appointed to look after their estate. They are the guardians of the late writer’s characters, aiming to keep an author relevant to modern readers, without diluting their brand. They can veto or approve projects such as spin-off books and screen adaptations. Read more

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Two Horror Authors on the Scary Books You Should Read

Halloween is just around the corner, so we turned to two great horror authors — Joe Hill (“The Fireman,” “NOS4A2”) and Stephen Graham Jones (“The Only Good Indians,” “My Heart Is a Chainsaw”) — for their recommendations of books to read this season. Read more

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‘American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond’

American history is kind of terrifying: Native American genocide, slavery and witch trials; the Civil War, the Great Depression and Vietnam; AIDS, 9/11 and COVID. As Jeremy Dauber writes at the start of his casually magisterial, endlessly erudite “American Scary,” “You can write America’s history by tracking the stories it tells itself to unsettle its dreams, rouse its anxieties, galvanize its actions.” He then does just that, analyzing nearly 400 years of scary literature, film, comic books, television, video games, urban legends and just about anything else that might haunt you on a sleepless night. Read more

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The MAD Files

Before MAD there were the funny papers, with their well-worn jokesters: Dagwood and Blondie, Archie and Jughead, Little Orphan Annie. The funnies were calculated to make you smile or (rarely) crack you up, but not to dangle you upside down and show you the sheer dimwitted lunacy of life itself. For that, comics reader, you had to wait for the advent of MAD, whose Usual Gang of Idiots poked smirking fun at cows both sacred and profane. Proudly unfurling its adolescent gibes, MAD was kin to wild card TV comedy like the Smothers Brothers and Laugh-In. Small visual doodads festooned its pages, and there were tiny, snide jokes strewn about like buried treasure. This was a device to make young readers pore over each panel repeatedly, while picking their noses and ignoring calls to come to the dinner table. MAD’s densely textured comic vibe inspired the Firesign Theatre, along with Dr. Demento, Monty Python, Second City, SNL, the Simpsons, the Onion, and on and on—a comic Valhalla. Read more

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Naomi Shihab Nye Is This Year’s Winner of the Wallace Stevens Award

Nye’s prize was announced Friday by the Academy of American Poets, which has previously given the award to Louise Glück, John Ashbery and Rita Dove among others. Nye, 72, is known for such collections as “Fuel,” “Yellow Queen” and “Grace Notes,” which came out this year. Read more

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Winners of the 2024 Kirkus Prize Announced

The winners of the 2024 Kirkus Prize were announced on Oct. 16 at the 11th Annual Kirkus Prize awards at the Tribeca Rooftop in New York City. The prestigious literary award is presented by Kirkus Reviews, the leading pre-publication journal of book reviews in the U.S, and awarded to one author of fiction, nonfiction and young people’s literature. Read more

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