Category: Authors

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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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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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New species of alga named for poet Amanda Gorman

Researchers discovered a new species of alga in central New York and named it Gormaniella terricola, with the genus named after poet Amanda Gorman. The new species is quite interesting in that its chloroplast genome is highly repetitive and contains quite a bit of DNA from fungi and bacteria, meaning it was likely invaded multiple times from other species through a process called horizontal transfer. Read more

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The Walter Tevis Renaissance

Gin, bourbon, valium, weed, horse racing, nine-ball, poker, pills, petroleum, chess, sex, television, losing, winning—the novels of Walter Tevis are queasy with addictions big and little. Most are hazardous. Some are deadly. A few seem nice enough, but nice is usually booby-trapped somehow, so that a character can’t enjoy, say, a game of pool without going on a bender a page later. These are novels without rising or falling action; they move to the jerkier rhythms of recovery and relapse. Read more

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The Rediscovery of a Lost Black Playwright

The playwright Alice Childress, who lived from 1916 to 1994, never saw her work produced on Broadway. Unlike some of her Black contemporaries—Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson—she wasn’t canonized or widely taught. In her later years, “she felt like she had been forgotten,” the dramaturge Arminda Thomas said the other day. Lately, though, Childress has been remembered. This past winter, her 1955 play, “Trouble in Mind,” about an actress navigating backstage racism, made its long-awaited Broadway début. And, this month, Theatre for a New Audience is staging her drama “Wedding Band” at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, in Brooklyn, its first New York production in half a century. Read more

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