Seemingly mundane items fetched large sums Wednesday, like a set of family recipes and a rolling pin, two serving trays and a drinking cup that sold for a collective $43,130. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday nominated writer, surgeon and public health expert Atul Gawande to lead global health development at the U.S. Agency for International Development, including for COVID-19, the White House said. Read more
His brilliantly idiosyncratic fiction has travestied everyone from Moses to Lin-Manuel Miranda, and laid a foundation for the freewheeling genre experiments of writers such as Paul Beatty, Victor LaValle, and Colson Whitehead. Yet there’s always been more to Reed than subversion and caricature. Laughter, in his books, unearths legacies suppressed by prejudice, élitism, and mass-media coöptation. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
King has partnered with Audio Up Media, iHeart Media, and producer Lee Metzger (The Voice) to create Strawberry Spring, a new show based on a tale from his 1978 short story collection Night Shift. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
An Iranian American journalist living in Brooklyn who has been a sharp critic of the Iranian government was the target of an international kidnapping plot orchestrated by an intelligence network in Iran, federal prosecutors said Tuesday. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Like many writers, García Márquez began in newspapers. Aficionados and newbies alike should consider “The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings,” a wide-ranging collection illuminating the real-life political concerns and characters that shape his celebrated fiction. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Mr. Vance, 36, enters the campaign as a well-known and well-financed first-time candidate facing an open field. The Republican incumbent, Senator Rob Portman, is retiring after two terms. The race is one of a few in next year’s midterm elections that could determine which party controls the upper chamber of Congress, which is now split 50-50. Read more
The U.S. Postal Service honors the cross-genre writings of Ursula K. Le Guin, the acclaimed science fiction and fantasy author, with the 33rd stamp in its literary series. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
John Locke is regarded today as one of England’s greatest philosophers, an Enlightenment thinker known as the “father of liberalism”. But a previously unknown memoir attributed to one of his close friends paints a different picture – of a vain, lazy and pompous man who “amused himself with trifling works of wit”, and a plagiarist who “took from others whatever he was able to take”. Read more
Edward Lear (1812–88) is beloved as the author of “The Owl and the Pussycat” and as one of Britain’s finest nonsense poets. He was also a successful artist and a frequent traveller, who captivated those who knew him with his humorous verses. One such devotee – and a frequent correspondent during Lear’s later life – was a young woman called Mary Theresa Mundella (1847–1922), the daughter of a Liberal politician, Anthony John Mundella (1825–97). This friendship led to a stream of correspondence between Mary Mundella and Lear, as he entertained her with comic letters and poems containing his own special brand of nonsense. Mundella hoarded Lear’s epistles and gifted them to her niece, Dorothea Mary Roby Benson (1876–1942), later Lady Charnwood. It is in the Charnwood Autograph Collection, held at the British Library, that three new Lear manuscripts have been discovered. Read more
