In Alice Bolin’s book Dead Girls, she describes going to a karaoke bar by herself, soon after moving to Los Angeles. When it’s her turn to sing, she announces to everyone in the bar that she is “new in town and had no friends.” It reads like something that would happen right before the meet-cute in a romantic comedy…
Nearly a decade before Samantha Hunt published her haunting novel Mr. Splitfoot and years before The Invention of Everything Else was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, she published The Seas, a poetical and ghostly novel about a girl stuck in a seaside town struggling with the nature of identity and language.…
The sky was overcast and gray when I met Lauren Groff for lunch in her adopted hometown of Gainesville, Florida with the rollout of her new book, Florida, just weeks away. The weather was a grim but honest backdrop for our conversation about Florida, both the book and the state. For all of Florida’s insistence that…
The unnamed narrator of Sheila Heti’s new contemplative new novel Motherhood is ambivalent about having children. She never envisioned herself as a mother and still can’t quite see herself as one. But, now in her late 30s, the question of motherhood nags at her, demanding an answer. “Time is running short on making…
The narrative that important, authoritative female novelists ultimately owe their brilliance to men refuses to die as we close out 2017—and it’s ensnared one of our newest literary stars. The plagiarism allegations against The Girls author Emma Cline, leveled by her ex-boyfriend, have set off a bruising legal battle…
As a rule of thumb, studies in which writers, even famous and successful ones, work are usually ramshackle—gross, even—unless they’ve been turned into museums already. I don’t think Danielle Steel’s workspace is an outlier, except that it’s a type of disgusting I can really get behind: it’s tacky as hell.
Alissa Nutting’s wildly comedic Made for Love is a novel about many fetishes. It’s a book of a 76-year-old father’s obsession with a “life-size woman doll [...] the kind designed to provide a sexual experience”; as well as one about Jasper, a sexy, Jesus-looking con man who repents after a satisfying sexual encounter…
If, today, you encountered social media, a periodical, or—in any likelihood—another person, you undoubtedly learned, quickly, that this was no common Monday. Or perhaps you already knew. In any case, exactly twenty years ago, J.K. Rowling’s debut novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone—the first in a magical…
Paula Hawkins’s new page-turner, Into the Water, is set is in Beckford, a small tourist town in northern England. The town is unremarkable excepting its scenery; Beckford sits on an attractive river that draws tourists to play on its sandy banks and lures “troublesome women” to their watery deaths. The bend in the…
Japanese actress Sonoya Mizuno is joining Constance Wu, Michelle Yeoh, and Gemma Chan in the film Crazy Rich Asians, an adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s novel by the same name.
Elif Batuman’s debut novel, The Idiot, is a novel about language. Or, more specifically, it’s about language’s inability to communicate feelings or ideas accurately. If that sounds boring or unfunny, then I suppose I’m proving Batuman’s point because The Idiot is rich and comedic; it’s also meandering and wonderfully…
The narrator of Katie Kitamura’s novel A Separation has a secret. After five years of marriage, the unnamed narrator is separated from her philandering husband Christopher. He has asked for a divorce and, alienated from marriage and her spouse, she readily agrees. There’s just one catch: Christopher has also asked her…
You may recall that last summer, we celebrated some glorious news: the imminent production of a film chronicling the romance between writers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Well, my darlings, I return tonight to report the titular stars of Vita and Virginia. Our Woolf will be portrayed by Eva Green, our…
Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things opens in a prison. Ten women have been dragged from their homes, off the bus, or from workplaces awake from a groggy drug-induced sleep. Their modern clothes have been exchanged for antique-looking tunics and thick leather boots that mangle their feet; they are frightened and…
If ever a novel captured the frenzied feeling of girlhood, with all of its conscious choreography and missteps and pure elegance, it’s Zadie Smith’s Swing Time. The book traces the friendship of two girls, the unnamed narrator and her best friend, Tracey, from the 1980s through the modern day, jumping back and forth…
Game of Thrones writer George R. R. Martin, perhaps unnerved by the similarities between Donald Trump and the barbaric King Joffrey, made an appearance on the campaign trail to support Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Our chill, astronomically famous BFF Jennifer Lawrence has been cast to star in Zelda, a film about tragic writer and socialite Zelda Fitzgerald. The film is Ron Howard’s latest development project, one he may helm as director.
Today in droll coincidences: nearly 150 years ago, an anonymous author published The Odd Trump, a novel whose description leaves no doubt as to the reasons for its obscurity. It’s fanciful and trivial — and it happens to feature a protagonist named Trump with a pal and occasional rival named Clinton.
Samira Wiley is Gilead-bound. Together with Elizabeth Moss, the cherished star from Orange Is the New Black will join the cast of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, adapted from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel by the same name.
