France launches Saturday a year of events to mark the 400th anniversary of Moliere, the nation’s most illustrious and ever popular master of the stage and satire. Read more
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Black American journalist, suffragist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells will have her likeness transformed into a Barbie doll to honor her historic achievements. Read more
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“Black Reconstruction,” published against a backdrop of violence and segregation, met with a vitriolic reception. White writers leveled sharp-tongued critiques. Black journalists assessed the work favorably but with reservations. Despite the early criticism, over time “Black Reconstruction” came to be recognized as a towering analysis of American culture and an important work of history. Nonetheless, the book’s contribution to the understanding of American racism is, nearly 90 years after its publication, still subject to stale objections that echo those heard when it first hit bookstore shelves. Read more
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The 33rd ZORA! Festival, which runs through the month of January, is back to honor Zora Neale Hurston. Read more
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Sinclair Lewis captured the narrow-mindedness and conformity of middle-class America in the first half of the 20th century. On the 100th anniversary of his best-selling novel “Babbitt,” Robert Gottlieb revisits Lewis’s life and career. Read more
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At last, in “Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan S. Connell,” journalist, biographer and Kansas City resident Steve Paul has constructed a meticulous, intriguing, and long-overdue appraisal of a talent deserving of wider attention. Read more
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Bernardine Evaristo is to be the next president of the Royal Society of Literature, becoming the first writer of colour to hold the position. Read more
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Portis, who died in 2020, is best known for “True Grit,” the modern classic about 14-year-old Mattie Ross, who enlists a grizzled, one-eyed U.S. Marshal named Rooster Cogburn to help her hunt down her father’s murderer. Read more
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A rape conviction at the center of a memoir by award-winning author Alice Sebold has been overturned because of what authorities determined were serious flaws with the 1982 prosecution and concerns the wrong man had been sent to jail. Read more
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…Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), a towering genius successful in many genres, knew, influenced or was admired by virtually every major writer and thinker of his time, between the publication of his first novel, “The Time Machine,” in 1895 and the end of World War II. Read more
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