Dear Reader, My friends and I are in the woods on the rez talking about being Indian. We’re eleven or twelve. I don’t know why or how the subject came up. Perhaps we all learned of “The Book.” We all have one. Or our parents do. It’s a small book, held together with a black binding

Dear Reader, Nearly 25 years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, writers, scholars, and the American public are still coming to understand their long-reaching effect—on civil liberties, civil discourse, and on domestic and global power dynamics—even as our domestic and global present continues to be shaded by the attacks and the U.S. response. My

  Téa Obreht is the internationally bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, which won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her second novel, Inland, won the Southwest Book Award, and was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her work has appeared in The Best American

Ebony LaDelle, author of Love Radio, is editing an anthology of love stories set at Historically Black Colleges and Universities to be published by Ballantine Books. Contributors include Kiese Laymon, Elizabeth Acevedo, Farrah Rochon, Dawnie Walton, and more. Ballantine is hosting an open call for submissions from current undergrad and graduate HBCU students for stories,

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy died on June 13th, 2023 of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was eighty-nine years old. His death was confirmed by his son, John McCarthy. McCarthy was one of the world’s most influential and renowned writers, His career spanned nearly six decades and several genres,

Where the Crawdads Sing, the #1 New York Times bestselling book by Delia Owens has been adapted into a major motion picture, coming to theaters nationwide on July 15.  For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found

It was a long wait before Gayl Jones broke her years of silence. When Toni Morrison first discovered her, she said “no novel about any Black woman could ever be the same after this” upon reading the manuscript for Corregidora. It was published in 1975 when Jones was twenty-six. She followed up her debut novel with Eva’s

Written by By M. Leona Godin, author of There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness In William Melvin Kelley’s A Drop of Patience, we follow the life of a young Black musician named Ludlow Washington, who is placed in a school for the blind when he is five and remains there until

William Melvin Kelley and illustrator Aiki Kelley are being awarded the American Book Award for Dunfords Travels Everywheres, a Joycean, Rabelaisian romp in which he brings back some of his most memorable characters in a novel of three intertwining stories.   “Among the most innovative and exciting novelists in the history of international literature, the

Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University Anthony Reed remembers William Melvin Kelley.   William Melvin Kelley is often described as a “lost” or “forgotten” author. Those who needed to know about him have always had a way of finding him. As a young writer, interested in fiction and poetry, I knew a lot about

A Burning is a novel about three unforgettable characters who seek to rise—to the middle class, to political power, to fame in the movies—and find their lives entangled in the wake of a catastrophe in contemporary India. Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of

We celebrate THE FRIEND by Sigrid Nunez, published by Riverhead, chosen by the panel of five judges from 368 submissions, as the recipient of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction, announced Wednesday evening, November 14, at the annual National Book Foundation dinner in downtown Manhattan. Sigrid Nunez’s previous literary honors include a Whiting Writer’s Award, and