The late Cormac McCarthy was no stranger to the cinema. Several of the writer’s novels, plays, and screenplays—No Country for Old Men, All The Pretty Horses, The Sunset Limited—were adapted into buzzy films, though your mileage may vary re: success-of-translation. Now, it looks like we’ll finally be getting a Big Picture of the author’s epic Western and arguable masterpiece, Blood Meridian, care of the fine folks at New Regency Productions. And there’s reason to get hyped about it. Blood Meridian has proved a notoriously difficult story to put on film. (Ridley Scott, James Franco/Russell Crow ..read more

Out of over a thousand entrants, The American Academy in Rome has selected 31 artists and academics to receive their Rome Prize, a residency fellowship that provides a stipend as well as a place to live and work on the Academy’s campus in Rome. The prize is awarded to practitioners in 11 fields: ancient studies, architecture, design, historic preservation and conservation, landscape architecture, medieval studies, modern Italian studies, music composition, Renaissance and early modern studies, visual art, and literature. This year’s Rome Prize winners in Literature are Selby Wynn Schwartz and ..read more

Our treasure trove of terrific reviews this week includes Ariel Dorfman on Gabriel García Márquez’s Until August, Casey Cep on Russell Banks’ American Spirits, Joshua Ferris on Justin Taylor’s Reboot, Mia Levitin on Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test, and the late Helen Vendler on Herman Melville: Complete Poems. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * “Many years later, as I faced the deadline for writing this review, I was to remember that distant afternoon when Gabriel García Márquez showed me the Spanish manuscript of Chronicle of a Death Foretold and then ..read more

TODAY: In 1938, George Orwell’s book Homage to Catalonia is published.   Which books are on Danielle Dutton’s nightstand? Diana Arterian takes a look. | Lit Hub Criticism Earl Swift on what a series of killings in rural Georgia reveals about the continuing regime of racial terror in the post-Civil War American South. | Lit Hub History “There are two kinds of novels about American life in the digital age: panoramas and selfies.” 5 book reviews you need to read this week. | Book Marks  “And so the beleaguered St. Lawrence beluga had a new enemy: the American showman.” On P ..read more

This one goes out to any author who’s ever felt bad about not making it onto a list of most anticipated books of the season. And to their publicists. The book preview list is a highly imperfect form of coverage that seems to be, along with best-of the year lists, the most widely used kind of book reportage in media. With overall book coverage being pared down at most outlets, such lists have grown widely outsized in importance for authors and publishers and readers, as well as the writers who contribute punchy blurbs to them. Yes, we know that people like to read internet lists and I’ve alrea ..read more

As the vast glaciers of the last ice age retreated toward the poles some hundred centuries ago, most of the small, playful white whales that had foraged at the southern edge of the glacial mass migrated northward to the Arctic seas. Several thousand stayed behind, having found a bit of stable habitat at the mouth of what would eventually be called the St. Lawrence River, a deep channel of cold, fresh water flowing northeast from the Great Lakes basin to the Gulf of St. Lawrence off the Labrador coast. Here, the mixing of massive liquid volumes causes an upwelling of micronutrients, supporting ..read more

They moved Route 36 in the years after the killings. Now the road runs straight where it used to dogleg through Newton County, an hour’s drive southeast of Atlanta, and most travelers don’t see that it was ever otherwise. Orphaned stretches of the old highway linger here and there, most of them dwindled to rough trails—hardwoods and high weeds pressing their flanks, yearling pines braving their unpaved crowns, thick weaves of vine plunging their remote twists into midday dusk. Leave anything for long in the Georgia heat and rain and, sure as the sunrise, nature will reclaim it. It does not ta ..read more

Wunder, Old English “A marvelous thing, miracle, object of astonishment.” * In 1303 CE, a monstrous earthquake ripped through the Eastern Mediterranean. The trauma shook glittering casing stones loose from the Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt—the most ancient of our Seven Wonders—and brought the remains of the youngest, the towering Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria, crashing to the ground. The Great Pyramid embodied enormous effort for the sake of one, virtually omnipotent man. Alexandria’s Pharos Lighthouse had been a public beacon to keep travelers from four continents safe, and to announce a ..read more

Danielle Dutton, as co-publisher of Dorothy, a publishing project and the author of SPRAWL and Margaret the First, has made it her business to break genres. Her newest book, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, continues to do just that. Within the slim volume is everything from plot-fighting, loosely connected short stories, to a long essay, to a play, to a collage of literary quotations about dresses. In the starred Kirkus review, they state, “Her work is highbrow while remaining mischievously playful, reminiscent of the form-smashing thrills of writers like Lydia Davis and Anne Carson.” Prairie ..read more

She called me up and said the boy pushed his sister. You don’t hit girls. Certainly not my little girl. So I get in my station wagon and drive from Edgewood to Garfield to spank my son. Because I do the spankings. Pam has no stomach for it, and we agree that discipline is a father’s job. When it comes to teaching a lesson, you need a man’s physicality to make it stick, and Teddy stands near eye-to-eye with his mother these days. Filthy rain pours almost horizontally under spiteful winds. I ascend deep-treed hills through Highland Park and then Garfield, former enclaves for mill hunkies with t ..read more