Authors and publishers alike are finding that it’s hard to sell books in a political climate where truth is stranger than fiction. “I was told that it just came out at a really bad time, but that that was true across the board,” says author Alana Massey. Back in 2015, her debut essay …
BAGHDAD (AP) — The Iraqis guarding Baghdad’s many checkpoints, on the lookout for car bombs and convoys, don’t know what to make of Ali al-Moussawi when he pulls up in a truck displaying shelves of glossy books. The mobile bookstore is the latest in a series of efforts by the …
NEW YORK (AP) — Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” his celebrated novel about an escaped slave that combined liberating imagination and brutal reality, has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Monday’s announcement confirmed the book as the literary event of 2016, an Oprah Winfrey book club pick and critical favorite …
BOSTON (AP) — Save the light reading for later. In 2017, dystopian fiction is all the rage. Gloomy classics depicting societies gone terribly wrong have shot to the top of best-seller lists like Amazon’s in recent months, including George Orwell’s “1984” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” prompting publishers to …
BEIJING (AP) — The head of the Catholic church in Hong Kong has expressed optimism that the Vatican and Beijing can overcome the controversial issue of bishop appointments lying at the core of a decades-long dispute. Cardinal John Tong said in a lengthy essay published by the Hong Kong diocese …
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Retired Pope Benedict XVI has acknowledged that governing the church wasn’t his strong suit but says he doesn’t see his papacy as a failure and that he succeeded at least in breaking up the Vatican’s so-called “gay lobby.” In a first-ever book by a retired pope …
NEW YORK (AP) — Harper Lee has died, but the conversation about her life and work has only begun. “I think the retrospective will be more useful than what was said during her lifetime, because there are a lot of things we can get down to that were impossible before,” …
Sometimes the act of dying, by itself, represents a type of victory. Such was the case for Richard “Dick” Walters, who was a leader in the effort to get the state of Vermont to pass aid-in-dying legislation. Diagnosed with lung cancer, Walters ultimately used the law to end his own …
ALEXANDER CITY, Ala. (AP) — Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Harper Lee politely knocked on truck driver Robert Louis Burns’ door in rural Alabama one day more than three decades ago and asked him about the preacher he killed. The plainly dressed writer wanted to meet the man who had stood up …
Reading about their last cinematic gasps in two new books aimed at movie buffs is to appreciate their obsession with shooting movies against all odds. Few great movie directors end their careers on a high note. Alfred Hitchcock didn’t. Howard Hawks didn’t. Anyone who has sat through “7 Women” knows …
KATONAH, N.Y. (AP) — The inner circle of founders has been set for as long as anyone can remember — Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Hamilton and Madison. Almost never mentioned is John Jay. “Most people know something about him. … But very few know the full breadth of his accomplishments. …
The story of a great Victorian statesman and his rich, vulgar wife offers clues to the world’s strangest romances It’s not exactly a love story, “Mr. And Mrs. Disraeli: A Strange Romance,” the new dual biography by British writer Daisy Hay, or at least not in any conventional sense of the word. …