Search results for

Anthony Heilbut's essay collection, The Fan Who Knew Too Much, features reflections on the Queen of Soul, soap operas and Jewish immigrants. The highlight of this sometimes harsh collection, says Michael Schaub, is a history of LGBT contributions to gospel.

To Kill a Mockingbird and Valley of the Dolls have more in common than you think. In his new book Hit Lit, mystery writer James Hall argues that best-sellers from the past century share 12 features.

Author Kevin Maher laughed off the Dubliners as a 12-year old, yet one line stayed with him. It was that line that convinced him to go back to the stories, discovering a love of James Joyce in the process.

Congressman John Lewis has co-authored a new graphic novel about the 1963 March on Washington, which he helped plan. Reviewer Jody Arlington says March: Book One is a "fresh and sometimes shocking work," with a message of reconciliation and hope that still resonates.

Ali Smith's new book, Artful, began as a series of lectures on comparative literature, given at Oxford last year. The lectures have been given a fictional shell, the story of an unnamed narrator finding a cache of essays in the study of her dead lover. Reviewer John Wilwol calls Artful "superb."

The White House says the program will provide paid training to 20,000 Americans in its first year. It's much smaller than its New Deal predecessor, but targets a more diverse group of young people.

Award-winning novelist Robert Stone hung out for many years with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. He recounts the group's cross-country road trips and experiences taking hallucinogenic drugs in his memoir, Prime Green.

Sometimes, when walking Brooklyn's streets, it doesn't feel as if its literary past is haunting. Rather, its literary soul is still alive and pulsating. Brooklyn is a world unto itself and a writer's enclave. Journalist and critic Evan Hughes has written a literary biography of the leafy borough.

The United Nations wants to finish a plastics treaty by the end of 2024. Almost every piece of plastic is made from fossil fuels, and the industry wants a big say in how it's cleaned up.

It's a tradition that ironically features an American president sanctioning an event sponsored by a lobbying group, which advocates the opposite of what actually takes place at said event.