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“In literature you get these magical moments when you can actually feel yourself to be somebody else...and those moments I think are incredibly important for the development of a society because they’re expansive moments.” Hisham Matar, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in autobiography for his debut memoir, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Random House, 2016), talks about the role literature plays in creating social change.
Poetry and prose books by Latinx authors to read for a hundred days and beyond; U.K. readers turn back to the print book while Chinese readers embrace the e-book; Almog Behar on bridging the gap between Arabic and Hebrew writers; and other news.
PEN America releases report on the state of free speech in the first hundred days of Donald
Trump’s presidency; Mohsin Hamid on writing fiction and migration; the New Yorker profiles poet Morgan Parker; and other news.
“Books tend to get short shrift in the cultural world,” says Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation, in this interview with James Brown. Lucas speaks about the foundation’s goal to promote a love of writing and the BookUp program, which connects young people with published authors and provides free copies of books.
Barnes & Noble names Demos Parneros as its new CEO; Michelle Dean on Granta’s “Best American Young Novelists” and the conflicting impulses of American fiction writers; Major Jackson’s “Renga for Obama” to conclude this Sunday; and other news.
Three current Monopoly board game tokens—the boot, the thimble, and the wheelbarrow—will be cycled out this fall and replaced with a penguin, a rubber ducky, and a T-Rex. Classic board games often get continually updated with new features, and brand new games are constantly created, but most of us have favorites and personal memories of playing board games in the past. Write an essay that focuses on an old board game you’ve held onto, or explores memories of playing, arguing, and competing with friends and family during game nights.
Viet Thanh Nguyen makes a case against the writing workshop; tracing the origins of well-known quotes; Mohammed Hasan Alwan wins International Prize for Arabic Fiction; and other news.
Robert M. Pirsig has died; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt makes another round of layoffs; Monica Youn on poetry, women, and property; and other news.
Theater company commissions thirty-eight new Shakespeare-inspired plays; what the Proto-Indo-European language may have sounded like; the growth of explicitly political poetry; and other news.
Man Booker International Prize shortlist announced; Bill O’Reilly’s 1998 novel about a fired TV newsman; the subjectivity of literary taste; and other news.
