George R.R. Martin has an omnivorous appetite for books, movies, and TV. Over the years, the Song of Ice and Fire series author has recommended dozens of works of entertainment on his blog and in interviews: historical novels, thrillers, epic fantasy, literary science fiction.
In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, her Nigerian narrator moves to the US for college, but still fondly uses Igbo with her family. “What kind of man bleaches his skin, biko?” Ifemelu asks her aunt. The characters of Viet Thanh Nguyen, refugees living in the US, recall customs from Vietnam. ”Mrs. Hoa was dressed formally, in an ao dai of midnight velvet embroidered with a golden lotus over the breast,” describes one of the narrators in The Refugees.
Science fiction allowed for freedom, the legendary writer Octavia E. Butler believed.
Hundreds of children arriving illegally at the US border have been separated from their families and placed in detention centers. Former US first lady Laura Bush wrote an op-ed condemning the zero-tolerance policy, but people on Twitter are wondering where other former US presidents are, and why they haven’t spoken publicly about the shelters.
James Patterson has finally met a collaborator worthy of his brand name. The President Is Missing, a political thriller by the bestselling author and former US president Bill Clinton, is a bonafide hit.
In 1970, a New York woman went to a popular army-navy store on the east side of Manhattan called Hudson’s. She picked out a pair of jeans, and tried them on in a storage room since there wasn’t a proper fitting room. As she was changing, a member of staff came into the room, climbed a ladder, and went about rummaging around with his back to her.
Last year Penguin Random House UK announced it would start actively tracking the diversity of its staff and the authors it publishes, with the goal of matching UK demographics by 2025. American writer Lionel Shriver—author of We Need to Talk about Kevin and vocal critic of what she views as a too-PC culture—wrote a scathing op-ed June 9, after she found out about the announcement.
In March, at Barnes & Noble’s Union Square New York location there was a shelf just 50 ft. from the Fiction & Literature section marked “LGBT and Queer Identity.” It’s where you’d find Amanda Lepore’s memoir, Doll Parts, Laura Jane Grace’s Tranny, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, and interviews with Harvey Milk.
Poems, it seems, are just another form of shareable content.
Bill Gates loves to give the gift of reading to aspiring adults—especially if that reading contains a hopeful outlook for humanity based in science and reason.
After a brief, troubled tenure as White House press secretary during Donald Trump’s first six months as US president, Sean Spicer resigned from his post. One year later, the endlessly mocked and memed man is back—this time hamming it up, with a palpable sense of relief that he has moved on from the White House.
The heads of three American publishing powerhouses met to discuss the state of the books business May 31 in New York City. Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle, Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy, and Macmillan CEO John Sargent, speaking at the BookExpo conference, discussed their generally positive (or at least non-negative) outlook for print books.
Bill Gates has become a powerful influence on publishing. An endorsement from the philanthropist and Microsoft cofounder can cause tangible sales spikes, reminiscent of the golden ticket that once came with being picked for Oprah’s book club.
This morning, Harvey Weinstein arrived at the 1st precinct police station in New York City to turn himself in to face charges of rape and sex abuse. As he left his car and entered a throng of flashing camera lights, the former movie mogul clutched three books under his arm, like a shield.
US students are starting their summer vacation, which means a brief respite from stacks of required reading. For college kids, that’s three months without any Sophocles, Milton, or Woolf.
Today at Harvard University, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie told the graduating class of 2018 an anecdote about meeting an established male writer at a conference, well before she herself was famous. She knew his name, but not his works. Despite that, she shook his hand and told him she was a huge fan. Then his wife turned to her: “So which of his books have you read? she asked. Adichie froze. “The one about the man discovering himself?” She fled the scene quickly.
Philip Roth, one of the OG white dudes of American literature, has died. The prolific, ruthlessly funny, sometimes cranky writer was 85.
Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft, has won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. The £50,000 award (around $67,000) goes to a book translated into English, and is split equally between writer and translator.
In the ongoing Olympics of the world’s most powerful passports, Japan just scored a gold medal.
Americans are gearing up for summer vacation, which for Microsoft cofounder and famous bookworm Bill Gates means loading up the suitcase with books. The philanthropist and ardent reader has issued his annual summer reading list. This year his recommendations for beach reads touch on some of Gates’ favorite themes. They include two popular history books, a meditative novel on mortality, and a techno-utopian book about logic.
Cudjo Lewis was a teenager when his home town in modern day Benin was decimated by a neighboring king. Lewis was captured, put into a barracoon, a structure to hold slaves, before spending 70 days crossing the Atlantic Ocean. He eventually arrived in Alabama, where he was given over to white masters. For all the horrors he saw in his lifetime—neighbors beheaded, people caged for two weeks while crossing the ocean, his son murdered by a cop—it is Lewis’s remarkably calm recounting of his story that makes his tale so affecting.
Anne Frank’s diary is famous for its final passages on the essential goodness of humanity. But taken as a whole, the book is remarkable for its mundaneness: Frank worries about avoiding stuck-up girls, receiving a good report card, getting along with her mother, and attracting the attention of boys.
The next time you step into a hushed, quaint bookstore, check the fine print.
Tom Wolfe, the acerbic American satirist and bristling contrarian, has died. The author of Bonfire of the Vanities, The Right Stuff, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was 88.
