This week, The New Yorker is announcing the longlists for the 2024 National Book Awards, beginning with Young People’s Literature and Translated Literature. Check back on Thursday and Friday for the Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction lists. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter to receive each 2024 longlist. Young People’s Literature The titles on … Read more
Edna O’Brien, Ireland’s literary pride and outlaw who scandalized her native land with her debut novel, The Country Girls, before gaining international acclaim as a storyteller and iconoclast that found her welcomed everywhere from Dublin to the White House, has died. She was 93. O’Brien died Saturday after a long illness, according to a statement by … Read more
Another of those novelists – Chen Wentong, better known by his pseudonym Liang Yusheng – is also having the centenary of his birth celebrated this year. The statue of Guo Jing at the Terminal 1 Arrivals Hall at Hong Kong International Airport. Photo: Instagram / @hongkongairport Few writers captured the spirit, philosophy and beauty of … Read more
There was a time when people were shamed for reading smutty books, whether for the steaminess factor or the misconception that romance wasn’t real literature. But now, thanks to the surging popularity of books by authors like Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros, readers are loudly and proudly embracing the genre — and even appear to be naming … Read more
Paul Auster, a prolific, prize-winning man of letters and filmmaker known for such inventive narratives and meta-narratives as The New York Trilogy and 4321, has died at age 77. Auster’s death was confirmed on May 1 by his literary representatives, the Carol Mann Agency, which did not immediately provide additional details. Auster had been diagnosed … Read more
Eleanor Catton is among the five North American authors shortlisted for the second iteration of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. The $150,000 USD ($203,971.50 Cdn) prize recognizes the best fiction book by a woman or non-binary writer from the U.S. and Canada. It is presently the largest international literary prize for women writers. Each of the four remaining finalists will … Read more
Percival Everett’s novels seem to ward off the lazier hermeneutics of literary criticism, yet they also have a way of dangling the analytical ropes with which we critics hang ourselves. His latest novel follows the misadventures of a runaway named Jim and his young companion Huckleberry in the antebellum American South. As in another novel … Read more
In your story “Neighbors,” a couple moves west to San Francisco in the wake of an infidelity, hoping to “redraw the map” of their marriage. While they are there, the husband has an eerie encounter in a neighbor’s house. These two strands of the narrative are seemingly unrelated, but, of course, this is a crafted … Read more
In “The Book of Love,” a début novel from the short-story writer Kelly Link, three teen-agers find themselves in their music teacher’s classroom in the middle of the night. They are wearing costumes from “Bye Bye Birdie,” and they remember only “a blotted, attenuated, chilly nothingness” from which they’ve slipped “one by one by one,” … Read more
In “The Time Being,” your story in this week’s issue, a young man gets entangled with an older man, a distinguished European named Mr. V., whom he thinks of as a survivor, a “subject of history.” What does the young man—our narrator—mean by that? Is it merely a quality of age, or is there something … Read more
