Ivan and Peter Koubek’s father has just died, but neither seems willing to talk much about it, let alone to one another. After all, it’s not like the two brothers are even friends. Peter, the eldest by a decade, pities his awkward, 22-year-old brother, a competitive chess player whose prowess for the game hasn’t done … Read more
“The barn… is long and narrow with sliding doors in the middle,” writes Wright Thompson in ‘The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.’ “Nobody knows when it was built exactly but its cypress-board walls were already weathered in the summer of 1955.” What happened inside the barn on Aug. 28, 1955, changed … Read more
NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Robert A. Caro stands between two giant columns in a second-floor library of the New-York Historical Society, looking out on dozens of friends, family members and colleagues. A research room named for him looms behind. Portions of his archives are on display nearby. “The most honest thing I … Read more
New York magazine says that its highly regarded Washington correspondent, Olivia Nuzzi, is on leave after disclosing that she violated the publication’s standards by having a personal relationship with a former reporting subject. The newsletter Status, which broke the story, and The New York Times both cite unnamed sources in identifying Robert F. Kennedy Jr. … Read more
NEW YORK — When he wasn’t working on mystery stories, and he completed hundreds, G.K. Chesterton liked to think of new ways to tell them. Detective fiction had grown a little dull, the British author wrote in a rarely seen essay from the 1930s published this week in The Strand Magazine, which has released obscure … Read more
NEW YORK — Less than two weeks before his 100th birthday, former President Jimmy Carter is receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, which has set aside its longstanding rule that the winner accept the honor in person. The Ohio-based foundation announced Thursday that Carter was this year’s winner of … Read more
Becoming a parent is life changing. Raymond Antrobus’ third poetry collection, “Signs, Music,” captures this transformation as he conveys his own transition into fatherhood. The book is split between before and after, moving from the hope and trepidation of shepherding a new life into the world to the sleeplessness and shifted perspective of being a … Read more
Percival Everett’s “James,” his acclaimed retelling of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” is a fiction nominee for the National Book Awards NEW YORK — Percival Everett’s “James,” his acclaimed retelling of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” is a fiction nominee for the National Book Awards. The long list of 10 also … Read more
NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Oprah Winfrey ‘s latest book club pick will be a story of familiar faces — in more ways than one. Winfrey announced Tuesday that she had chosen “Tell Me Everything,” the new novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout. It’s the second time Winfrey has cited a book … Read more
NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Barbara Kingsolver, this year’s recipient of a National Book Award medal for literary achievement, remembers well the years she couldn’t imagine receiving such honors. “I just felt this continuous skepticism, not from readers but from critics and the gatekeepers. It was on two counts,” Kingsolver, 69, said during … Read more
