[brooklinebooksmith]

Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again

Junot Díaz interviews Margaret Atwood about The Handmaid's Tale, political dystopias, and Drake.

[thetinhouse-deactivated20180604]

Our 2017 Summer Mixtape.

[windhamcampbellprizes]

Today on Lit Hub, 2015 Windham-Campbell Prize recipient Kia Corthron talks with linguist John McWhorter about Black English and Black American Sign Language. Check it out here.

[thepenguinpress]

We know it’s the unofficial start to summer, but we just can’t get enough of Autumn, the new book by Karl Ove Knausgaard! (beautiful photo by @bookbaristas!)

[windhamcampbellprizes]

And he’s delivering the 2017 Windham-Campbell Lecture in New Haven on September 13! More details here. (All festival events, including the lecture, are free and open to the public.)

[windhamcampbellprizes]

Check out this fantastic interview with our own Helen Garner on The Millions today.

“I can’t help thinking there are men who still somewhere deep inside them have an unconscious fantasy that one day they’ll be helpless again. And they don’t want the person who’s going to be looking after them to be thinking, ‘Fuck you, I wish you’d die in the night.’”

[windhamcampbellprizes]

A throwback photo of one of our 2017 prize recipients, the wonderful Ashleigh Young, who was first recognized as a “budding writer” by her local newspaper way back in the day.

Look for Ashleigh’s essay collection, Can You Tolerate This?, coming out in 2018 from Riverhead Books!

[therumpus]

[windhamcampbellprizes]

A huge congratulations to 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize recipient Ashleigh Young, whose essay collection Can You Tolerate This? sold to Riverhead Books in a pre-empt!

(And if you can’t wait until 2018 to get your hands on Ashleigh’s fantastic book, Victoria University Press ships internationally.)

[electricliterature]

Jeff VanderMeer & Cory Doctorow Discuss the Future of Sci-Fi & the World

Two modern masters talk biotech, climate change, activism & how sci-fi genre sensibilities have changed

Check out the conversation on Electric Lit

[poetsandwriters]

A good book will turn your world sideways. It will also turn your own writing inside out. The prose writers should read the poets. The poets should read the novelists. The playwrights should read the philosophers. The journalists should read the short story writers. The philosophers should read through the entire crew. In fact, we all should read the entire crew. Nobody makes it alone.

Colum McCann, from Letters to a Young Writer (2017)

[macrolit]

[digitalpubliclibraryofamerica]

In honor of National Library Week and National Bookmobile Day, we’re sending some library love! Explore the history of public libraries, including the important role of bookmobiles in sharing knowledge with all, in our History of US Public Libraries exhibition.

These photographs from the exhibition shows a number of bookmobiles and book delivery services in action: 

A Rockingham County Library bookmobile, 1955, from the collection of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources via @digitalnc.

A Charleston County Library bookmobile, 1967, from the collection of the Charleston Archive at CCPL via South Carolina Digital Library.

A WPA-funded bookmobile serving children through the Athens Regional Library, 1944, from the collection of Athens-Clarke County Library via Digital Library of Georgia.

And, last but not least, trucks are not the only the way to deliver books! This photo shows “packhorse librarians” ready to deliver books, ca. 1935-1943, from the collection of University of Kentucky via Kentucky Digital Library.

[npr]

A perfect day to celebrate libraries and bookmobiles! -Emily

[catapultbooks]

Black literature is a space where we define personal and movement-led resistance against oppression. It is how we begin to think about what life will look like once the battle has been won, and how to find joy as the fight continues.

Catapult | A Soulful Novel and Me: On Zora Neale Hurston | Cameron Glover (via catapultstory)

[literaryglamour]

[windhamcampbellprizes]

it’s raining books @mcnallyjackson . . .

[lastnightsreading]

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at Cooper Union, 3/7/17

[nprbooks]

Image: Ali Cobby Eckermann. (Woodford Folk Festival/Flickr) 

When Ali Cobby Eckermann received an email announcing she’d won one of the world’s richest literary prizes (the $165,000 Windham-Campbell Prize), the unemployed Aboriginal poet says she had no idea what to think. Then, she tells The Guardian, she “pretty much just cried.” The poet, who lives in a caravan in South Australia with her elderly adoptive mother, added: “It’s going to change my life completely.”

Unemployed, Living In A Caravan — And Now, Winner Of A $165,000 Literary Prize

[drkarenlord]

We’ve been going through a period where real-life experience, actual human trauma, have been valued above pure imagination. Now we’re seeing a kind of counteraction, not just in genre—vampires, etc.—but in literary fiction, where it’s acceptable again to use fantasy to talk about deep things.

André Alexis (via drkarenlord)