Today marks 100 years since the birth of Truman Capote, the author of quietly devastating novels, charming short stories, and pioneering works of creative nonfiction. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Nelson DeMille, a beloved and prolific author whose propulsive thrillers featuring terrorist hijackings, Russian spy schools, gruesome murders, Mafia kingpins, wartime crimes and military malfeasance made him a publishing juggernaut, died on Tuesday in Mineola, N.Y. Read more
Lewis H. Lapham, the scholarly patrician who edited Harper’s Magazine for nearly three decades, and who in columns, books and later his own magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, attacked what he regarded as the inequities and hypocrisies of American life, died on Tuesday in Rome. Read more
The 3rd annual James Baldwin Festival of Words celebrates black excellence in the literary arts with a full slate of events. The festivities kick off on Friday, August 2nd at 4:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Chattanooga Public Library Downtown and is free to the public. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Once upon a time, writers were celebrities; now, the role of the public intellectual has gone up in smoke. For one novelist, a glamorous trip to France showed what literary life back home could be like. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
He and his band, the Texas Jewboys, won acclaim for their satirical takes on American culture. He later wrote detective novels and ran for governor of Texas. Read more
Caleb Carr, a military historian and author whose experience of childhood abuse drove him to explore the roots of violence — most famously in his 1994 best seller, “The Alienist,” a period thriller about the hunt for a serial killer in 19th-century Manhattan — died on Thursday at his home in Cherry Plains, N.Y. Read more
His fascination with terrorism, cults and mass culture’s weirder turns has given his work a prophetic air. Here’s where to start. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
Paul Auster, the prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening. He was 77. Read more
Didion was not really out to inspire us. She was looking at us and telling us what she saw, including our compulsion to weave myths for survival. Her distinctive prose and sharp eye were always tuned to an outsider’s frequency, even when she was actually an insider (as with most of her writing on Hollywood). Her essays are almost reflexively skeptical; she wrote with authority borne not so much from experience as from a refusal to give in to dogma. Read more
(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)
