Colin Dwyer

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Come Oct. 15, author Roxane Gay will be adding a bit of flavor to The Toast. The website, co-founded by Nicole Cliffe and Mallory Ortberg, announced Tuesday that it has brought Gay on board to head up ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Clear some space at this season's awards festivities: It's time to make room for 18 more writers. This morning, Kirkus Reviews shared with NPR the finalists for its first annual writing award, the Kirkus Prize — six writers ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

On Sunday night, the finalists for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize got together in an intimate Manhattan bar to read the books for which they were nominated. The winner of the annual prize, which recognizes one outstanding ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize this year will be going to Bob Shacochis, for fiction, and Karima Bennoune, for nonfiction. The international award, which brings with it a $10,000 purse per winner, recognizes writers "whose work uses the ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Amtrak has announced the inaugural class of its brand-new writers residency program. Out of a crop of some 16,000 applications, the railroad service has picked just 24 writers to ride the rails on a long-distance train — and ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Acclaimed author J. California Cooper, who famously leaped from the stage to the printed page, has died at the age of 82. According to her daughter, Paris Williams, Cooper passed away Saturday in Seattle. She wrote 17 plays ...

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

The writings of the late Gabriel Garcia Marquez are soon to make their leap from page to screen. Publisher Vintage Books has announced its plans to release nine of the Nobel Prize-winning author's works as English-language e-books for ...

Italo Calvino has a habit that's hard not to find disconcerting. Halfway through a story, or even a few sentences in, he often pauses — briefly, glibly — to mention in passing that everything he has written so far is wrong. Oh, and the same goes for what's to come. ...

If her name is Madeleine Altimari, she might just be smoking menthols on her way to the jazz club. And she's one of a number of characters worth rooting for in Marie-Helen Bertino's debut novel.

For All Things Considered's series on Men in America, we asked the guys out there: What are the movies that make you cry? While reading through the 5,000+ responses, we started to notice a recurring theme — or should we say, a recurring man: Tom Hanks.

...

Don't pay too much attention to the shifty eyes in the old portrait. Same goes for the mysterious tapping down the hall of the vast family manor — and, for that matter, the secrets lurking in its attic. Don't even be fooled by the ghost.

The Hundred-Year House may be ...

You drop into the world. You are beautiful, full-bodied, ready for anything, but the world is bigger than you — to your surprise, you are small. You try to make your way, but the big world spits you out, so you fight your way back.

And because life is like ...

First, a confession: I've been a serial intern. Like so many other millennials, I've hopped from internship to internship, my wages often paid more in promises than recognized currency. And though my last internship — here at NPR Books — was one of the best things to happen to me ...

Listen. It's a command that Maud Casey's quick to utter, and it's one she repeats often in her new novel. With good reason: If you're listening closely enough, you might just hear her pull off a feat as graceful as it is clever. Out of the clanging of church bells, ...

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor's Kenya is a country knit together by secrets. Each character in Dust, her debut novel, owns a share of his land's violent past, a history that longs to be forgotten. They live and love in an atmosphere of mutually agreed-upon silence, a mindset best summed up by ...

Working in radio, you learn one uncomfortable truth faster than you would have otherwise: Few things make a story more difficult to tell than having a listener expecting to hear it. A microphone can make even the most relentless gabber pause and become self-conscious.

It's this contradiction, among so many ...

When you hear the phrase, "writing guide," unpleasant things may spring to mind: sentence diagrams or even — shudder to think — your high school textbook.

Now, imagine the exact opposite, and you might get Jeff VanderMeer's Wonderbook. It's a writing guide, sure, but it's unlikely you've seen one like ...