Being now a grizzled veteran of many, many expeditions to used bookshops, I’ve gradually assembled a set of principles to guide me in my quests for biblio-treasure. What follows are a few of the unofficial rules and insider tips to bear in mind when you go out “booking.” Read more
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Claire Jiménez’s “What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez,” a hard-hitting and comic novel set in New York City about a Puerto Rican family’s search for a missing girl, has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Read more
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Mr. Barth was 30 when he published his sprawling third novel, the boisterous “The Sot-Weed Factor” (1960). It projected him into the ranks of the country’s most innovative writers, drawing comparisons to contemporaries like Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. Read more
Winslow concludes his Danny Ryan trilogy—and his career as a novelist—with an addictive finale that charts the Rhode Island mobster turned Las Vegas casino mogul’s turbulent business dealings and deadly feuds … Bolstered by careful plotting and meticulous attention to character, Winslow’s ambitious narrative culminates with an exhilarating climax that beautifully wraps up the series’ many plot threads. It’s a fitting swan song from a giant of crime fiction. Read more
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Ripley is an upcoming American psychological thriller television series based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 crime novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. Starring Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley, Johnny Flynn as Dickie Greenleaf and Dakota Fanning as Marge Sherwood, the eight-episode limited series was created, written and directed by Steven Zaillian. Watch trailer
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In January, S&S kicked off its centennial year with the release of The Simon & Schuster 100, a selection of 100 titles the company has published over its history—and as Karp suggests, what began with a windfall from four bestselling crossword puzzle books in 1924 quickly, and impressively, expanded. S&S’s first full list in 1924 would feature a biography of Joseph Pulitzer (a hero of Schuster’s), a poetry book, and Harvey Landrum—the only novel S&S published that year despite getting 241 submissions. A year later, S&S published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and in the following years heavyweights such as Ernest Hemingway and Dale Carnegie joined the list, as did Margaret Mitchell for her epic Gone with the Wind.
In choosing a list of 100 books to showcase, Karp said the goal was to show “the cultural sweep” of S&S’s publishing program over the past 100 years. It was no small task for a program that has yielded 61 Pulitzer Prize winners, 18 National Book Award winners, 18 Newbery winners, and 15 Caldecott winners. The original motto of S&S was to publish books that are “commercial, successful, and culture defining,” Karp noted. “That is still our mission today.” Read more
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The Hive and The Honey is a collection of astonishing breadth, offering a panoramic portrait of Korean diaspora, of lives rescued from the margins of history. These characters reveal themselves most acutely through intimate gestures, moments that infuse the ordinary with lasting wonder and could only be achieved by a writer as patient, curious, and masterful as Paul Yoon… Read more
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This superb study by University of Cambridge particle physicist Cliff (How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch) examines contemporary physics’ most intriguing mysteries through profiles of the scientists trying to solve them … Cliff’s lucid explanations do a remarkable job of making the complicated physics accessible and even exciting, and the focus on the scientists’ stories ensconces the heady ideas in approachable, human narratives. This is a first-rate dispatch from the cutting edge of physics. Read more
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The awards, which were announced at a ceremony at the New School in New York City, are among the most prestigious literary prizes in the United States. Unlike other major awards, the recipients are chosen by book critics instead of committees made up of authors or academics. Read more
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