Text is biting rebuttal to a philosopher’s ideas about the 1604 supernova (“stella nova”). Read more
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Category: Authors
‘A Very Old Man’ by Italo Svevo
A Very Old Man collects five linked stories, parts of an unfinished novel that the great Triestine Italo Svevo wrote at the end of his life, after the international success of Zeno’s Conscience in 1923. Here Svevo revisits with new vigor and agility themes that fascinated him from the start—aging, deceit, and self-deception, as well as the fragility, fecklessness, and plain foolishness of the bourgeois paterfamilias—even as memories of the recent, terrible slaughter of World War I and the contemporary rise of Italian fascism also cast a shadow over the book’s pages. Read more
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Denzel Washington Honors August Wilson’s Legacy at House Opening
The August Wilson House is not a museum. Instead, the restored space is a community center that will offer artist residencies, gathering spaces, fellowships and other programming for up-and-coming artists and scholars. There is also an outdoor stage behind the home, which is currently showcasing the Pittsburgh Playwrights Theater Company’s production of Wilson’s play “Jitney” through Sept. 18. Read more
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Author Salman Rushdie Attacked On Lecture Stage in New York
Salman Rushdie, the author whose writing led to death threats from Iran in the 1980s, was attacked Friday as he was about to give a lecture in western New York. Read more
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Who is Colleen Hoover and Why Are Her Books So Popular?
Fifteen of Hoover’s novels are on this week’s list, with “It Ends With Us” topping them all at No. 2. The novel, which has reached No. 1 before, has been on the list for a total of 76 weeks. Her latest novel “Reminders of Him,” currently on the list, debuted at No. 1 in January. Read more
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Author’s Therapeutic Writing Program Aims to Help You Move Past Your Trauma
At Five Foxes, a wellness retreat that opened this July in woodsy, bucolic Connecticut and is run by the established private rehab company Privé-Swiss, Augusten Burroughs will coax clients to dig deep and then to find a way to accept what has happened and put the lessons learned to good use … “I’m very good at being useful to people,” he says. “I could not care less about being an author now.” From $50,000 for one week. Read more
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Why is the ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ author wanted for questioning in a murder?
It’s all resurfaced just before the movie’s release thanks to a recent article in the Atlantic by its editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, which updates and doubles down on a piece he wrote for the New Yorker in 2010. Back when Owens was known as the co-writer of a couple works of nonfiction, Goldberg published an 18,000-word exposé on Owens and her now-ex-husband, Mark, revealing that the couple — along with Mark’s son Christopher — were suspected by Zambian authorities of being involved in the killing of an alleged poacher (a homicide caught on camera) along with possible other criminal activities. Read more
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New Reality TV Show Aims to Discover America’s Next Great Author
America’s Next Great Author is dedicated to including writers who aren’t normally given a seat at the table in mainstream publishing. Contestants don’t have to be graduates of elite MFA programs that basically guarantee an open door to the book business. Read more
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An Introduction to Stanislaw Lem, the Great Polish Sci-Fi Writer, by Jonathan Lethem
Who was Stanislaw Lem? The Polish science fiction writer, novelist, essayist, and polymath may best be known for his 1961 novel Solaris (adapted for the screen by Andrei Tarkosvky in 1972 and again by Steven Soderbergh in 2014). Lem’s science fiction appealed broadly outside of SF fandom, attracting the likes of John Updike, who called his stories “marvelous” and Lem a poet of “scientific terminology” for readers “whose hearts beat faster when the Scientific American arrives each month.” Updike’s characterization is but one version of Lem. There are several more, writes Jonathan Lethem in an essay for the London Review of Books, penned for Lem’s 100th anniversary – at least five different Lems with five different literary personalities. Read more
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How Anton Chekhov became the playwright of the moment
More consumed with questions than with answers, Chekhov’s plays depict human beings rather than heroes or villains. Life is captured in plots in which not much seems to happen yet by the end everything is changed. All of this runs counter to our sensation-seeking, moralizing, politically divisive zeitgeist. But theater artists, filmmakers and novelists, drawn to the interior richness of Chekhov’s dramas, have discovered not only the timeliness of his untimely work but also its aesthetic pliancy and openness. Read more
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