Actor M John Kennedy will read all 75 books in a single day during Toronto’s Nuit Blanche art festival
Children’s author Robert Munsch has sold more than 82m copies of his books and entertained generations of readers with his tender and sharp sense of humour.
His stories have been translated into 45 languages, including 20 Indigenous languages and dialects. He still receives about 10,000 fan letters a year, and has two public schools named after him.
Continue reading...Novelist given suspended sentence after staging peaceful protest calling for political reform
Renowned Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga has been given a suspended prison sentence after being found guilty of inciting violence by staging a peaceful protest calling for political reform.
Dangarembga and co-accused Julie Barnes were convicted of participating in a public gathering with intent to incite public violence at Harare magistrates court on Thursday. The pair were also each fined 70,000 Zimbabwe dollars (£200).
Continue reading...The German author’s contribution will remain unseen, alongside contributions from authors including Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell, until 2114
German writer Judith Schalansky has become the ninth author to be selected for the Future Library, which asks authors to create a work that will not be revealed to readers until 2114.
The Future Library is an organic artwork dreamed up by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson. It began in 2014 with the planting of 1,000 Norwegian spruces in a patch of forest outside Oslo, and one writer a year is asked to contribute a manuscript to the project.
Continue reading...Paul Gosar and Louie Gohmert were eager to believe ‘wild, dramatic fantasies’, claims Denver Riggleman in new book
The Republican congressmen Louis Gohmert and Paul Gosar adopted such extreme, conspiracy-tinged positions, even before the US Capitol attack, that a fellow member of the rightwing Freedom Caucus thought they “may have had serious cognitive issues”.
Denver Riggleman, once a US representative from Virginia, reports his impression of his former colleagues from Texas and Arizona in a new book.
Continue reading...Readings boss sends angry rebuke after more than 250 writers campaigned for better pay and conditions for booksellers
For many Melburnians, Readings is more than just a bookstore – it’s a bricks-and-mortar embodiment of progressive values, a business that doubles as a community space where ideas are shared and diversity is celebrated.
But an ongoing pay dispute has divided staff and threatens to tarnish the independent retail stalwart’s image, with hundreds of authors – such as Michelle de Kretser, Jennifer Down, Clementine Ford and Omar Sakr – recently campaigning on behalf of booksellers, and protesting outside the company’s flagship Carlton store.
Continue reading...€3 charge aims to gives independent booksellers a chance against e-commerce firms that use free delivery loophole
France’s crusade to protect independent booksellers against huge online retailers was stepped up on Friday as the government proposed a €3 (£2.66) minimum delivery fee for all online book orders of less than €35.
The government’s fixed fee for online deliveries is part of a quest to support independent bookshops against the domination of big tech firms, such as Amazon.
Continue reading...Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian’s Unchecked reports the Senate Republican leader vowed never to speak to Trump again
The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said Donald Trump was “crazy” and vowed never to speak to him again after the Capitol attack – then voted both to call Trump’s impeachment unconstitutional and to acquit the former president in his second Senate trial.
McConnell’s deliberations are reported in a forthcoming book, Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump, by Rachael Bade of Politico and Karoun Demirjian of the Washington Post. An extract was published on Wednesday.
Continue reading...News of ‘stunning’ attempt to rescind dramatic election night call contained in The Divider, by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser
Fox News anchor Bret Baier wanted the network to withdraw its famous call of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in 2020, citing pressure from Donald Trump’s campaign and saying the swing state should be “put back in his column”, a new book says.
News of Baier’s email is contained in The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021, published in the US on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Challenges from conservative parent groups and others targeted 1,651 different titles, the American Library Association said
Books for children and young adults containing themes of race, gender and sexual identity received an “unprecedented” number of challenges last year, the American Library Association (ALA) has said, reflecting a growing national trend of attempted censorship.
The challenges came from conservative parent groups and others. In some cases, the group says, librarians and elected officials were threatened with violence by members of the Proud Boys and armed activists at school board and library board meetings.
Continue reading...John Kelly secretly consulted The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, according to new book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser
Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff secretly bought a book in which 27 mental health professionals warned that the president was psychologically unfit for the job, then used it as a guide in his attempts to cope with Trump’s irrational behavior.
News of John Kelly’s surreptitious purchase comes in a new book from Peter Baker of the New York Times and Susan Glasser of the New Yorker. The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Continue reading...Revelation about former president’s concern reported in new book The Divider by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser
In December 2020, Donald Trump told friends he was afraid Iran would try to assassinate him in revenge for the death of Qassem Suleimani, an Iranian general killed in a US drone strike nearly a year before.
The startling news is reported in a new book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, a husband-and-wife team who write for the New York Times and the New Yorker.
Continue reading...Section of the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh is expected to fetch between £4m and £6m at auction next month
A folio from the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh, one of the “finest illustrated manuscripts in existence” according to Sotheby’s, is expected to fetch between £4m and £6m at auction next month.
The Shahnameh, also known as the Book of Kings, is an epic poem containing 50,000 rhyming couplets, telling the history of Persia’s rulers. It was written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between 977 and 1010.
Continue reading...Defeated president told aide ‘we’re never leaving’ despite Biden’s win, according to new book Confidence Man
In the days after Joe Biden defeated him in the 2020 election, Donald Trump told an aide he was “just not going to leave” the White House, according to a new book on his presidency and its chaotic aftermath.
“We’re never leaving,” he vowed to another aide, says the book from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman titled Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. “How can you leave when you won an election?”
Continue reading...Marías, also a translator and columnist, was described as ‘one of Spain’s greatest contemporary writers’
The Spanish novelist Javier Marías, author of All Souls, A Heart so White, and the epic, three-part Your Face Tomorrow – and a writer regularly touted as a candidate for the Nobel prize for literature – has died at home in Madrid at the age of 70.
Marías, who had been ill with pneumonia for the past month, died on Sunday, according to his publisher, Alfaguara.
Continue reading...Ex-adviser says president in 2020 agreed that his son-in-law had to be replaced by Steve Bannon but did not dare try to fire him
In June 2020, less than five months before polling day, Donald Trump agreed to a “coup d’état” to remove his son-in-law Jared Kushner from control of his presidential re-election campaign and replace him with the far-right provocateur Steve Bannon.
The coup had support from Donald Trump Jr but according to a new book by the former Trump aide Peter Navarro it did not work, after Trump refused to give Kushner the bad news himself.
Continue reading...Kohei Saito’s book Capital in the Anthropocene has become an unlikely hit among young people and is about to be translated into English
The climate crisis will spiral out of control unless the world applies “emergency brakes” to capitalism and devises a “new way of living”, according to a Japanese academic whose book on Marxism and the environment has become a surprise bestseller.
The message from Kohei Saito, an associate professor at Tokyo University, is simple: capitalism’s demand for unlimited profits is destroying the planet and only “degrowth” can repair the damage by slowing down social production and sharing wealth.
Continue reading...Gabriel Debenedetti, author of book on Biden’s relationship with Obama, reports call on night of 2018 midterms
On the night of the 2018 midterm elections, as a wave of anti-Trump sentiment swept Democrats to take control of the House, top Republican Mitt Romney urged Joe Biden to run for president.
“You have to run,” said Romney, the Republican presidential nominee Biden and Barack Obama defeated in 2012, speaking to the former vice-president by phone.
Continue reading...Ex-mayor derailed ‘train wreck’ dinner with clients and colleagues, then was later considered for secretary of state
At a law firm dinner in New York in May 2016, an “unhinged” Rudy Giuliani, then Donald Trump’s suggested pick to head a commission on “radical Islamic terrorism”, behaved in a drunken and Islamophobic manner, horrifying clients and attorneys alike.
According to a new book by Geoffrey Berman, a former US attorney for the southern district of New York (SDNY), at one point Giuliani turned to a Jewish man “wearing a yarmulke [who] had ordered a kosher meal” and, under the impression the man was a Muslim, said: “I’m sorry to have tell you this, but the founder of your religion is a murderer.”
Continue reading...Set at Oxford in the 1800s, Rebecca F Kuang’s new novel is a magic-infused allegory for structural oppression – and social media can’t get enough of it
A boy lies still beside the body of his mother. Her skin is blue and her eyes are open, wet and glassy. It is 1828, and a cholera epidemic has swept through Canton, China.
The boy is the only one left alive in the house and is on the brink of death when a quiet white Englishman brings him to London. There, the young Chinese boy is named Robert Swift and grows up in solitude, trained in English, Latin, ancient Greek and Chinese. For what reason, he does not yet know.
Continue reading...Ways With Words, the organisers of Words by the Water in Keswick, say low ticket sales mean it is not viable to run next year’s event
Ways With Words, which runs literary festivals in the Lake District, Suffolk and Devon, has cancelled its forthcoming festival, saying it is not “currently viable” because of the UK’s cost of living crisis.
The organisation had been due to put on Words by the Water, a 10-day event in Keswick, in March 2023. But after experiencing low ticket sales for its festival in Dartington, Devon, in July this year, the decision was made to cancel the Lake District gathering and cease planning events for the foreseeable future.
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