Now that it’s officially summer, you might find yourself thinking about all of the books you might like to read in the sun. New Directions has a great list (summer of Lispector!), and of course there’s the LARB‘s #OccupyGaddis summer book club.
Summer Reading, happened so fast.
Convicts and Classics
Apparently, great books can be life changing: British prisons have begun using a literature course originally developed in the US and including Shakespeare, Dickens, and Steinbeck to help rehabilitate criminals.
Looking for a Job? In Space?
Water coolers across the nation were abuzz this week with news of the James Cameron-backed and billionaire-led initiative to begin mining resources from the asteroid belt. It's the stuff of science fiction, and it may seem hard to believe, but the company's actually already begun hiring prospective space miners!
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Beware of the Dog
This week in book-related news: a new coffee table book devoted solely to Marc Jacobs’ bull terrier, who happens to be an Instagram celebrity.
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Fin
How would you feel if your novels all fell apart at the end? The writer Ann Bauer knows this feeling, and it’s painful -- she says that her readers inevitably tell her the endings of her novels are all wrong. (You could also read our own Sonya Chung's essay on literary endings.)
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Young Lions Fiction Award Finalists
The New York Public Library announced their eighteenth annual Young Lions Fiction Award, which is "given annually to an American writer age 35 or younger for either a novel or a collection of short stories." The 2018 finalists are: Lesley Nneka Arimah's What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, Venita Blackburn's Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, Gabe Habash's Stephen Florida, Emily Ruskovich's Idaho, and Jenny Zhang's Sour Heart. From our archives: Habash and Zhang's 2017 Year in Reading entries.