Manuscripts

A Carnival of Snackery (17 hours) collects highlights from David Sedaris’ diaries from 2003–2020, read by the author and British-born actor Tracey Ullman. Sedaris’ diary entries reflect much of what we love most about his short stories and essays—observations about the unusual people he meets on his travels, anecdotes about awkward situations and tales about
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In her autobiography, All In (18 hours), Billie Jean King tells of her triumphs and struggles both on and off the tennis court, from her hardscrabble childhood in Long Beach, California, to her present-day life in New York City. Growing up in the 1960s, King’s inquisitive and rebellious spirit reflected the era, as she refused
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Jordan Manning is a crime reporter at the top of her game, but staying there is proving increasingly exhausting. When she moved to Chicago from her home state of Texas, she hit the ground running in four-inch stiletto heels—which didn’t deter her from being first on the scene of a steady stream of crimes in
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It’s that time of the year for Best Of Lists–er, okay so maybe it’s not because it’s only October and this is way early. Usually this would feel a lot like “Well I guess they wanted to be first so every year the Best Of Lists will just release earlier and earlier and soon they’ll
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In Bad Girls Never Say Die, author and teacher Jennifer Mathieu reimagines S.E. Hinton’s groundbreaking 1967 YA novel, The Outsiders. She spoke with BookPage about “good girls,” “bad girls” and writing stories that help teens see beyond those labels. Tell us about your relationship to The Outsiders before you started working on Bad Girls Never
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YA author Kate McGovern’s first novel for younger readers is the story of a girl who has been keeping a big secret: She can’t read very well. When her secret is discovered and she is held back a year, she struggles to conceal the reason from her friends and classmates. Secrets are an important theme
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When B.B. King died in May 2015, the world lost an artist whose distinctive style shaped several generations of musicians. King’s fluid guitar riffs and lead runs still define the blues for many fans. Eric Clapton called King “the most important artist the blues has ever produced,” but as journalist Daniel de Visé points out
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In a powerful confluence of history, culture and color, poet and author Jackie Kay tells the story of the legendary American singer and songwriter Bessie Smith, known in her day as the Empress of the Blues. As an orphaned child, born in 1894 (or 1895; statistics about Black Americans were not considered important enough to
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On Wednesday, Deadline announced that Sue Grafton’s beloved Alphabet Series, which tragically ended with Y Is for Yesterday after Grafton’s unexpected passing in late 2017, will be adapted for television by A + E Studios. Book-to-screen adaptations, with the rise of streaming service production companies, have certainly grown in popularity, making this a prime property
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The Swedish Academy has awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” The Tanzanian author, who now resides in the United Kingdom, is the author of 10
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Naturally, the older a poem is, the more famous it tends to be. Someone like Byron has had centuries for his work to sink into the public consciousness; a poet like Dylan Thomas only a few decades. This is why, when I was researching the most famous poems in order to write this article, they
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Most of us understand that our public libraries in the United States are funded by tax dollars and staffed by trained librarians, who take care of the day-to-day tasks of running a library and planning for the future. But who has a say in library policy, budgeting, and the direction of a public library? That
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