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Coming this fall from Library of America: a celebration of one of our greatest living playwrights, the epochal diary of a 19th-century New Yorker, the next volume in our edition of an undisputed SF genius, and more. Scroll down to see all the books, and check out the complete list on our website.

submitted 16 hours ago • 7 comments

In our Story of the Week, an American Revolutionary War veteran and his wife endure increasingly violent and blatantly illegal attempts to enslave them in the Northwest Territory. Read the harrowing piece and an accompanying essay: storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/02/conc...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Margaret Fuller was friends with Emerson, wrote the first work of American feminism, traveled to revolution-torn Italy as a war correspondent, and died at 40 in a shipwreck. On our website, three leading scholars discuss her Hollywood-worthy life and the definitive new LOA edition of her writing.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

On 3/11, join scholars David Bromwich, Seyla Benhabib, Roger Berkowitz, and Thomas Wild for a virtual panel on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. How does this monumental book take on new relevance in today’s political landscape? RSVP for free: www.eventbrite.com/e/what-is-to...

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Our recently released The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, edited by @andrecarrington.bsky.social, is “essential reading” according to a starred review in @publisherswkly.bsky.social. www.publishersweekly.com/9781598538113 Link to book: loa.org/books/809

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Transcendentalist, journalist, feminist, war correspondent, and poet—Margaret Fuller was both ahead of her time and a defining voice of her era. The most comprehensive edition of her works ever published arrives in bookstores today. Find out more and order your copy: www.loa.org/books/collec...

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

In @nytimes.com, A. O. Scott gives a close reading of Gwendolyn Brooks’s great sonnet “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell”: “It’s as wild a piece of verse as you’ll ever read, seething and unruly in spite of its ostensibly sensible theme and painstakingly precise decorum.”

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

#booksky for #classicfiction #booklovers On Melville’s Moby Dick: A truly wonderful, clever and funny speech, available on YouTube - thanks to @libraryofamerica.bsky.social - given by E. L. Doctorow, the multi-award-winning novelist and short story writer. 🖋️📚💙 youtu.be/rzFr5PNE5pE?...

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

“Likely to stand as the definitive text of A Farewell to Arms. . . . The reader opting to buy this edition of Hemingway’s works is unlikely to regret it.” In @wsj.com, praise for our recently published edition of Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms & Other Writings 1927–1932.

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

Whether in sprawling fiction or best-in-class sports writing, David Foster Wallace—born on this day in 1962—combined searing self-scrutiny with intellectual heft and singular prose. “We gratefully seized on each new dispatch from that farthest-away island which was David,” wrote Jonathan Franzen.

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

Thank you to everyone who came out for the @libraryofamerica.bsky.social LOA Live event yesterday for The Black Fantastic! I am so grateful to be in dialogue with the best & brightest & Blackest of this moment. I love that people are reading cool shit! www.loa.org/books/the-bl...

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Manny Farber, who Susan Sontag called “the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country ever produced,” was born on this day, February 20, 1917. In this interview, poet and biographer Robert Polito discusses the “film investigations” of this singular cinematic interpreter.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Sixty-two years ago, Betty Friedan’s monumental The Feminine Mystique was published, setting off a seismic shift in American culture. In this video conversation, authors Honor Moore and Clara Bingham reflect on Friedan’s achievement and her influence on the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s.

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

“Her gin-drinking, smoking, bisexual persona was heady stuff for a 19-year-old” the singer Suzanne Vega recalled of her introduction to Carson McCullers, the brilliant southern writer born 108 years ago on this day, February 19, 1917. Read Vega’s tribute, in prose and song, on our website.

submitted 12 days ago • 2 comments

“the tiniest kiss / at the world’s end / ends the world.”—A. R. Ammons, “All’s All” The poet A. R. Ammons, born 99 years ago, on Feb. 18, 1926, was celebrated for his “wisdom, pathos, humor, mortal longing, and intimations of immortality,” drawing on the tradition of Emerson, Whitman, and Frost.

submitted 13 days ago • 2 comments

The Black Fantastic, LOA's new anthology of Afrofuturist fiction edited by @andrecarrington.bsky.social, makes Andrew Liptak’s list of SF/F books to check out this February! transfer-orbit.ghost.io/february-202...

submitted 17 days ago • 2 comments

In a letter to an artist working on a painting of the Lincoln family, the former First Lady recalls an outing with President Lincoln on the last day of his life. “Those fiends, had too long contemplated, this inhuman murder, to have allowed, him, to escape.” storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/02/lett...

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

Today's book mail a copy of The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories edited by André M. Carrington published by @libraryofamerica.bsky.social!

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

Poet and scholar Jay Parini examines a newly discovered poem by Robert Frost in The New Yorker: “When I heard that a previously unpublished poem by Robert Frost had been discovered, I was skeptical.”

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

“Melvilleans were aghast. Several members of the Melville Society Facebook page asked if anyone had seen the head.” Searching for the missing (bronze) head of Herman Melville in his hometown of New York City: allvisibleobjects.substack.com/p/hermans-head

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

Abraham Lincoln, the greatest writer ever to occupy the White House, was born 216 years ago, on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin. His speeches and writings, extending from the epochal Lincoln-Douglas debates to his immortal Civil War addresses, are gathered in this LOA set: loa.org/books/571

submitted 19 days ago • 1 comment

#BookSky 💙📚 #poetry #MaySwenson #CollectedPoems #LibraryOfAmerica @libraryofamerica.bsky.social #ValentinesDay #love ♥️

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

“If a picture tells a thousand words, the poems in this anthology conjure thousands of pictures.” On Culture Vulture, a look inside LOA’s groundbreaking anthology of Latino Poetry, edited by Rigoberto González. Link to book: www.loa.org/books/latino...

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

Joan Didion kept a journal recording her sessions with a psychiatrist following the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Now that diary is set to be published as Notes to John, coming from Knopf in April. people.com/new-joan-did...

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

In innovative Louisiana author Kate Chopin’s “A Respectable Woman,” one Mrs. Baroda experiences conflicted feelings when her husband’s friend—“a lovable, inoffensive fellow” who quotes Walt Whitman—comes to visit. Read more on Story of the Week: storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/02/a-re...

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

“Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass condemned those weaponizations of politeness. Slaveholders are ‘models of taste,’ Douglass scathingly observes in his 1857 speech ‘West India Emancipation.’” On @publicbooks.bsky.social, a critical look at the limits of civility in the face of grave injustice.

submitted 25 days ago • 1 comment

On 2/19, join authors @tananarivedue.bsky.social, Victor LaValle, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, along with Black Fantastic editor @andrecarrington.bsky.social, for an online conversation about the new wave of science fiction and fantasy by Black writers. RSVP here: www.eventbrite.com/e/the-black-...

submitted 26 days ago • 1 comment

An emerging generation of Black writers at the frontiers of science fiction and fantasy takes center stage in The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, a groundbreaking new collection edited by SF expert @andrecarrington.bsky.social landing in bookstores today! www.loa.org/books/the-bl...

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

“Fruit of the Dead is a retelling of the Persephone myth, an addiction narrative, a coming-of-age story, a love story, a seduction.” Author Rachel Lyon shares the far-ranging works that influenced her sophomore novel (it’s out today in paperback from @scribnerbooks.bsky.social!).

submitted 27 days ago • 1 comment

Ernest J. Gaines conjured the world of rural Louisiana in acclaimed novels like A Lesson Before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Read an excerpt from scholar John Wharton Lowe’s unpublished biography of this major writer, whose explorations of race and place in America still stun.

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

W.E.B. Du Bois was a groundbreaking sociologist, civil rights advocate, and writer—with a remarkable knack, it turns out, for data visualization. In this video presentation, @columbiauniversity.bsky.social professor Allen Hillery gives a tour of this often-overlooked side of Du Bois’s genius.

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

In "After Holbein" by Edith Wharton, Anson Warley and Evelina Jasper—aging relics of New York high society—recollect the triumphs of past dinners and dances and, quite unexpectedly, end up reuniting for one final gathering. Read it on Story of the Week: storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/01/afte...

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

BOTD Norman Mailer! From Us: Essential @libraryofamerica.bsky.social Mailer in the 60s set via @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social: lareviewofbooks.org/article/conf... Via Cineaste: Getting trounced at "Town Bloody Hall": www.cineaste.com/winter2020/t... Great new doc: midcenturycinema.org/wp-content/u...

submitted 31 days ago • 4 comments