Morgan Talty, award-winning author of ‘Night of the Living Rez’ and ‘Fire Exit,’ recommends his favorites. Read more
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Read Your Way Through New Orleans
New Orleans is a thriving hub for festivals, music and Creole cuisine. Here, the novelist Maurice Carlos Ruffin shares books that capture its many cultural influences. Read more
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The Very Online Afterlife of Franz Kafka
One hundred years after his death, the Czech writer circulates as a pop idol of digital alienation. Read more
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2024 Thriller Award Winners Announced
Goodness and community may not be the first words that spring to mind when thinking about the thriller genre, a broad category that the International Thriller Writers (ITW) association defines as including “murder mystery, detective, suspense, horror, supernatural, action, espionage, true crime, war, adventure, and myriad similar subject areas.” But both were at the heart of the 19th ThrillerFest, which culminated with an awards banquet on June 1 at the Sheraton Times Square in Manhattan. Read more
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Poverty for Profit – How Corporations Get Rich Off America’s Poor
Beginning in the 1980s, the U.S. government aggressively pursued the privatization of many government functions under the theory that businesses would compete to deliver these services more cheaply and effectively than a bunch of lazy bureaucrats. The result is a lucrative and politically powerful set of industries that are fueled by government anti-poverty programs and thus depend on poverty for their business model. These entities often take advantage of the very people they ostensibly serve. Today, government contractors run state Medicaid programs, give job training to welfare recipients, and distribute food stamps. At the same time, badly designed anti-poverty policies have spawned an ecosystem of businesses that don’t contract directly with the government but depend on taking a cut of the benefits that poor Americans receive. I call these industries “Poverty Inc.” If anyone is winning the War on Poverty, it’s them. Read more
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Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?
Last fall, while reporting Esquire’s “Future of Books” predictions, I asked industry insiders about trends they’d noticed in recent years. Almost everyone mentioned that debut fiction has become harder to launch. For writers, the stakes are do or die: A debut sets the bar for each of their subsequent books, so their debut advance and sales performance can follow them for the rest of their career. For editors, if a writer’s first book doesn’t perform, it’s hard to make a financial case for acquiring that writer’s second book. And for you, a reader interested in great fiction, the fallout from this challenging climate can limit your access to exciting new voices in fiction. Unless you diligently shop at independent bookstores where booksellers highlight different types of books, you might only ever encounter the big, splashy debuts that publishers, book clubs, social-media algorithms, and big-box retailers have determined you should see. Read more
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Birds Aren’t Real: The Prank That Turned Misinformation on Its Head
Birds Aren’t Real delivers a knowing satire of American conspiratorial thinking in the century of QAnon. Beneath the collegiate humor, however, lies a profound grasp of conspiracism’s psychic appeal, and a valuable provocation. How to best fight false claims and conspiracies online is currently the subject of fierce debate among social and computer scientists, policymakers, even the Supreme Court. Read more
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Why Did Satirical Genius Tom Lehrer Swap Worldwide Fame for Obscurity?
In the 1950s and 60s, his songs stunned and delighted listeners with their irreverence, wit and nihilism. Then he gave it all up to teach mathematics. Lehrer is still alive at 96 – so I went in search of answers. Read more
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On Harlan Ellison’s ‘Greatest Hits’
Greatest Hits assembles Ellison’s most popular, award-bedecked stories, science fiction or sci-fi adjacent all, mostly from his middle and early-late career, when he was at the apogee of his powers. Selections include “The Deathbird,” “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” “Shatterday,” “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World” (God, he was good with titles), and other winners of Nebulas, Hugos, and Locuses. Given the fact that many of his best books are out of print and the behemoth The Essential Ellison (1987) costs a fortune, this book, while hyperfocused on his sci-fi output, is both an excellent introduction to the man for neophytes and a convenient volume for acolytes. Read more
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Dublin Literary Award Won by Romanian Author Mircea Cartarescu
Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu and American translator Sean Cotter have won the €100,000 Dublin literary award for the novel Solenoid. “By turns wildly inventive, philosophical and lyrical, with passages of great beauty, Solenoid is the work of a major European writer who is still relatively little-known to English-language readers,” said the judges. Read more
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