Henry Taylor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who drew on his upbringing in rural Northern Virginia — galloping on horseback, riding a combine through the fields — to write exquisitely crafted verses about wild places, the inevitability of change and what he called the “consequences of ignorant choices,” died Oct. 13 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Read more
The Best Music Books of 2024
There are enough great books about music each year to fill a library. It can be a lot to get through, so we selected a handful that we really love, including memoirs, history tomes, and more. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Winners of the National Book Award Announced
Percival Everett won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday for his novel “James,” a propulsive and slyly funny retelling of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of Huck’s companion, an enslaved man named James … The award for nonfiction was given to the anthropologist Jason De León for “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling,” an immersive account of the nearly seven years he spent embedded with human smugglers on the U.S.-Mexico border. The book depicts traffickers as both victims and perpetrators of violence, often suffering from the same poverty as migrants. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Richard Flanagan Wins Baillie Gifford Nonfiction Prize With ‘Astonishing’ Question 7
Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 has been named winner of the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction, making the Australian writer the first person to have won both this award and the Booker prize for fiction. Part-memoir, part-novel, part-history, Question 7 charts Flanagan’s attempt to understand his parents and Tasmania, where he is from. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
People Can’t Tell the Difference Between Human and AI Poetry – and Even Prefer the Latter
According to a new paper in Nature Scientific Reports, non-expert readers of poetry cannot distinguish poetry written by AI from that written by canonical poets. Moreover, general readers tend to prefer poetry written by AI – at least until they are told it is written by a machine. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Japanese Poet Shuntaro Tanikawa, Master of Modern Free Verse, Dies at 92
Shuntaro Tanikawa, who pioneered modern Japanese poetry, poignant but conversational in its divergence from haiku and other traditions, has died. Read more
Best Business Books of 2024
Andrew Hill selects his must-read titles. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
This Writer Perfected an Unusual Literary Form: Amazon Reviews
Killian’s largely five-star reviews of books, movies, poetry, CDs and the occasional object he may or may not have actually purchased (King’s BBQ Potato Salad, Aveda Sap Moss Conditioning Detangler, Gerber baby food that is “as resolutely sweet as a twenties Irving Berlin standard”) are learned, often laugh-out-loud funny, frequently moving, guilelessly enthusiastic and intellectually generous. The biggest laugh is that he conceived of a way to produce a wholly idiosyncratic art project on the ground of corporate real estate. In doing so he subverted the essentially cynical egotism of capitalism and reasserted art as, always and ever, communal. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
‘Interior Chinatown’ Debuts on Hulu on November 19th
Based on Charles Yu’s award-winning book of the same name, the show follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural called Black & White. Relegated to the background, Willis goes through the motions of his on-screen job, waiting tables, dreaming about a world beyond Chinatown and aspiring to be the lead of his own story. When Willis inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, he begins to unravel a criminal web in Chinatown, while discovering his own family’s buried history and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Watch trailer
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Books About Talented Criminals and Con Artists
Jesse DeRoy on literature’s greatest thieves. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
