Library of America
@libraryofamerica.bsky.social
Library of America is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to preserving America's best and most significant writing.
www.loa.org
www.loa.org
John Updike’s newly published correspondence reveals a fascinating exchange with his LOA editor: “I am weak and growing weaker,” wrote the ailing Rabbit author a few months before his death in 2009, “but want to confide a few thoughts before fading away.” Read the essay on loa.org.
New Collection of Letters Highlights John Updike’s LOA Legacy - Library of America
John Updike was among the most prolific writers of his generation, producing, novelist Orhan Pamuk wrote in The New York Times, an “encyclopedic array of the thousands of facets of human experience.” ...
www.loa.org
November 17, 2025 at 7:07 PM
John Updike’s newly published correspondence reveals a fascinating exchange with his LOA editor: “I am weak and growing weaker,” wrote the ailing Rabbit author a few months before his death in 2009, “but want to confide a few thoughts before fading away.” Read the essay on loa.org.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats makes the @publisherswkly.bsky.social Holiday Gift Guide for 2025! “This volume collects feline-centric poetry, comics, and other works by the much-lauded author better known for her speculative fiction, who also harbored an affection for cats.” She certainly did!
Holiday Gift Guide 2025: Illustrated & Art Books
We’ve got books for everyone from art enthusiasts and Austenites to architecture admirers and animal lovers.
www.publishersweekly.com
November 14, 2025 at 7:31 PM
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats makes the @publisherswkly.bsky.social Holiday Gift Guide for 2025! “This volume collects feline-centric poetry, comics, and other works by the much-lauded author better known for her speculative fiction, who also harbored an affection for cats.” She certainly did!
Explore giants of American literature during our annual holiday boxed set sale. Collected works, complete editions, sagas, trilogies, compendiums, and more. See all boxed sets at loa.org/boxedsets. Sale ends Tuesday, 11/25
November 13, 2025 at 7:35 PM
Explore giants of American literature during our annual holiday boxed set sale. Collected works, complete editions, sagas, trilogies, compendiums, and more. See all boxed sets at loa.org/boxedsets. Sale ends Tuesday, 11/25
The first volume of Emily Dickinson’s Poems was published posthumously 135 years ago, on November 12, 1890. After discovering the manuscripts in which Dickinson had collected her writing, her sister, Lavinia, worked to have the poems edited and published—igniting a bitter family feud in the process.
November 12, 2025 at 11:05 PM
The first volume of Emily Dickinson’s Poems was published posthumously 135 years ago, on November 12, 1890. After discovering the manuscripts in which Dickinson had collected her writing, her sister, Lavinia, worked to have the poems edited and published—igniting a bitter family feud in the process.
On Monday, 11/24, join @imaniperry.bsky.social and @tananarivedue.bsky.social for an online program on Octavia E. Butler, speculative fiction trailblazer and author of Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy, just out from Library of America. RSVP for free: www.eventbrite.com/e/the-radica...
November 11, 2025 at 5:43 PM
On Monday, 11/24, join @imaniperry.bsky.social and @tananarivedue.bsky.social for an online program on Octavia E. Butler, speculative fiction trailblazer and author of Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy, just out from Library of America. RSVP for free: www.eventbrite.com/e/the-radica...
Spotted in The Diplomat on Netflix: a row of Library of America books behind White House Chief of Staff Billie Appiah (played by Nana Mensah). Hard to see the individual volumes, though pretty sure that’s Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle Part One on the left. S3 E7 for the curious.
November 10, 2025 at 6:59 PM
Spotted in The Diplomat on Netflix: a row of Library of America books behind White House Chief of Staff Billie Appiah (played by Nana Mensah). Hard to see the individual volumes, though pretty sure that’s Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle Part One on the left. S3 E7 for the curious.
Playwright John Guare declared war on the kitchen sink, aiming instead for “a theatrical world three or four (or nine or ten) sizes larger than realism.” On our website, dramaturg and co-editor of the new LOA edition of Guare’s plays Michael Paller reflects on the Six Degrees of Separation author.
“War on the Kitchen Sink”: Michael Paller on the Larger-Than-Life Plays of John Guare - Library of America
In the plays of John Guare, the fourth wall dissolves to disclose a thrilling truth: anything can happen here. In a career extending from the 1960s to the present day, this “uncannily prophetic” playw...
www.loa.org
November 7, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Playwright John Guare declared war on the kitchen sink, aiming instead for “a theatrical world three or four (or nine or ten) sizes larger than realism.” On our website, dramaturg and co-editor of the new LOA edition of Guare’s plays Michael Paller reflects on the Six Degrees of Separation author.
“Just as she claimed New York for herself without seeking approval or permission, Swenson followed her poetic muse unapologetically, immune to negative criticism.” In @theartsfuse.bsky.social, a look at Margaret A. Brucia’s revelatory new biography of the ahead-of-her-time poet May Swenson.
Book Review: Putting Words into Dreams - Poet May Swenson - The Arts Fuse
Optimistic, a canny survivor, relentless, genderfluid—poet May Swenson described herself as “I am one of those to whom miracles happen."
artsfuse.org
November 6, 2025 at 4:38 PM
“Just as she claimed New York for herself without seeking approval or permission, Swenson followed her poetic muse unapologetically, immune to negative criticism.” In @theartsfuse.bsky.social, a look at Margaret A. Brucia’s revelatory new biography of the ahead-of-her-time poet May Swenson.
In @clereviewbooks.bsky.social, a deeply original dive into Don DeLillo’s JFK assassination epic Libra in the form of “twelve bullets, four appendices, and six exhibits.” “DeLillo’s Libra is a book about the entanglement of reading, writing, and living,” Nicole Kaack explains.
Twelve Bullets, Four Appendices, and Six Exhibits: On Don DeLillo’s “Libra” - Cleveland Review of Books
Writers, like lone gunmen, are compulsive worldbuilders. They write their own past, present, and future. DeLillo has described himself as a man in a small room.
clereviewofbooks.com
November 5, 2025 at 9:30 PM
In @clereviewbooks.bsky.social, a deeply original dive into Don DeLillo’s JFK assassination epic Libra in the form of “twelve bullets, four appendices, and six exhibits.” “DeLillo’s Libra is a book about the entanglement of reading, writing, and living,” Nicole Kaack explains.
Two weeks after casting her ballot in the 1872 Presidential election on November 5, Susan B. Anthony was arrested and charged with “knowingly voting without having a lawful right to vote.” Convicted and fined $100, Anthony called the verdict “the greatest judicial outrage history has ever recorded.”
November 5, 2025 at 2:45 PM
Two weeks after casting her ballot in the 1872 Presidential election on November 5, Susan B. Anthony was arrested and charged with “knowingly voting without having a lawful right to vote.” Convicted and fined $100, Anthony called the verdict “the greatest judicial outrage history has ever recorded.”
“One imagines Chester Himes as a species of cactus lurking along the edges of the literary landscape,” writes Gene Seymour in @thenation.com. Best known for his Harlem noirs, Himes inspired the beleaguered Black American writer at the center of John A. Williams’s 1967 novel, The Man Who Cried I Am.
Chester Himes’s Harlem Noirs
Himes helped reinvent the idea of the detective novel. He also transformed it into a powerful vehicle for social criticism.
www.thenation.com
November 4, 2025 at 2:54 PM
“One imagines Chester Himes as a species of cactus lurking along the edges of the literary landscape,” writes Gene Seymour in @thenation.com. Best known for his Harlem noirs, Himes inspired the beleaguered Black American writer at the center of John A. Williams’s 1967 novel, The Man Who Cried I Am.
Reposted by Library of America
Stephen Crane, The Upturned Face (via @libraryofamerica.bsky.social; #skystorians; drawing of a dead soldier, mid-nineteenth century; black, white chalk, graphite on gray-green paper by Ange-Louis Janet Lange [1815–1872], courtesy of Cooper Hewitt): storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/10/the-...
November 1, 2025 at 12:58 PM
Stephen Crane, The Upturned Face (via @libraryofamerica.bsky.social; #skystorians; drawing of a dead soldier, mid-nineteenth century; black, white chalk, graphite on gray-green paper by Ange-Louis Janet Lange [1815–1872], courtesy of Cooper Hewitt): storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/10/the-...
For Halloween, a reappraisal of Shirley Jackson’s “definitive American horror novel” in City Journal: “Jackson infuses The Haunting of Hill House not only with a requisite number of shivers but also with a human factor missing in so much of the subsequent novels indebted to her vision.”
Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House: The Definitive American Horror Novel
It’s a unique mix of gothic terror, black humor, and psychological suspense.
www.city-journal.org
October 31, 2025 at 8:54 PM
For Halloween, a reappraisal of Shirley Jackson’s “definitive American horror novel” in City Journal: “Jackson infuses The Haunting of Hill House not only with a requisite number of shivers but also with a human factor missing in so much of the subsequent novels indebted to her vision.”
Helen Vendler read and wrote about poetry with an unmatched eye for the “person behind, or inside, or alongside, the poem, assembling language so that it fits how they have lived and how they feel.” On loa.org, scholar and poet Stephanie Burt, who studied with Vendler, reflects on her influence.
“Putting the Poem First”: Stephanie Burt on the Towering Literary Legacy of Helen Vendler - Library of America
Helen Vendler, the leading poetry critic of her generation, sought the electrifying moment when all the parts of a work of verse click into place, “relating all to each, as a sudden shaft of light ill...
www.loa.org
October 31, 2025 at 3:12 PM
Helen Vendler read and wrote about poetry with an unmatched eye for the “person behind, or inside, or alongside, the poem, assembling language so that it fits how they have lived and how they feel.” On loa.org, scholar and poet Stephanie Burt, who studied with Vendler, reflects on her influence.
“[John] Adams wears his heart on his sleeve and reveals all of his ambitions, doubts, and insecurities, especially in his diary, which is one of the greatest and most readable in all of American literature,” writes Gordon S. Wood. The Founding Father and second president was born 290 years ago OTD.
Against American exceptionalism: Gordon S. Wood on John Adams - Library of America
John Adams, c. 1800/1815, by Gilbert Stuart. (National Gallery of Art) This spring Library of America releases John Adams: Writings from the New Nation 1784–1826, the third and final volume of Gordon ...
www.loa.org
October 30, 2025 at 3:21 PM
“[John] Adams wears his heart on his sleeve and reveals all of his ambitions, doubts, and insecurities, especially in his diary, which is one of the greatest and most readable in all of American literature,” writes Gordon S. Wood. The Founding Father and second president was born 290 years ago OTD.
In bookstores now: the LOA edition of John Guare’s plays, praised by Tony Kushner as “an original combination of realism, dream state, psychopathology, vision, delusion, humor, compassion, grief, and terror.” Discover the writer of Six Degrees of Separation and order your copy: loa.org/books/plays/
October 29, 2025 at 1:38 PM
In bookstores now: the LOA edition of John Guare’s plays, praised by Tony Kushner as “an original combination of realism, dream state, psychopathology, vision, delusion, humor, compassion, grief, and terror.” Discover the writer of Six Degrees of Separation and order your copy: loa.org/books/plays/
“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in his acceptance speech for the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in the author’s absence on Oct. 28 (Hemingway was recuperating from a series of plane crashes at the time). (1/2)
October 28, 2025 at 4:50 PM
“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in his acceptance speech for the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in the author’s absence on Oct. 28 (Hemingway was recuperating from a series of plane crashes at the time). (1/2)
Happy birthday to the brilliant Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior, her “memoirs of a childhood among ghosts,” the genre-defying China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, “a Great American Novel, but also a Great Asian American novel,” according to @vietthanhnguyen.bsky.social.
Maxine Hong Kingston - Library of America
www.loa.org
October 27, 2025 at 2:54 PM
Happy birthday to the brilliant Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior, her “memoirs of a childhood among ghosts,” the genre-defying China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, “a Great American Novel, but also a Great Asian American novel,” according to @vietthanhnguyen.bsky.social.
A big thanks to @theredshoes.bsky.social for sharing a correction to this post (with citations)! Read the thread for the true origin of this quote.
If you sourced this from the Guardian article, this is a mistake. "The feminine readers who control the destinies of so many novels" is a phrase from Harper and Row's rejection of Sister Carrie by Dreiser. The Wiki article on the cover artist is also rather dismissive and sexist.
Ernest Hemingway’s first novel The Sun Also Rises was published 99 years ago this week, with a “respectably sexy” Hellenistic cover that Hemingway’s editor thought would appeal to “the feminine readers who control the destinies of so many novels.” A touch ironic for the he-man of American letters...
October 23, 2025 at 4:02 PM
A big thanks to @theredshoes.bsky.social for sharing a correction to this post (with citations)! Read the thread for the true origin of this quote.
Ernest Hemingway’s first novel The Sun Also Rises was published 99 years ago this week, with a “respectably sexy” Hellenistic cover that Hemingway’s editor thought would appeal to “the feminine readers who control the destinies of so many novels.” A touch ironic for the he-man of American letters...
October 23, 2025 at 2:52 PM
Ernest Hemingway’s first novel The Sun Also Rises was published 99 years ago this week, with a “respectably sexy” Hellenistic cover that Hemingway’s editor thought would appeal to “the feminine readers who control the destinies of so many novels.” A touch ironic for the he-man of American letters...
The literary cartography of Ursula K. Le Guin is on display at the AA Gallery in London through 12/6. “Le Guin began her writing process by drawing a map,” writes Mike Duggan in The Conversation. “This was as much a way for her to imagine a world as it was a technique to structure a story about it.”
The maps of Ursula K Le Guin reveal a fascinating insight into world-building in fantasy fiction
This fascinating show offers visitors a deeper sense of Le Guin’s maps as world-making and storytelling devices.
theconversation.com
October 22, 2025 at 2:06 PM
The literary cartography of Ursula K. Le Guin is on display at the AA Gallery in London through 12/6. “Le Guin began her writing process by drawing a map,” writes Mike Duggan in The Conversation. “This was as much a way for her to imagine a world as it was a technique to structure a story about it.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, the inimitable author of SFF classics, a poet who won the admiration of Harold Bloom, and companion throughout her life to nearly two dozen cats, would have turned 96 years old today. Uncover her astonishing legacy, from the peaceful planet Haim to the wild shores of Klatsand.
Ursula K. Le Guin - Library of America
www.loa.org
October 21, 2025 at 1:44 PM
Ursula K. Le Guin, the inimitable author of SFF classics, a poet who won the admiration of Harold Bloom, and companion throughout her life to nearly two dozen cats, would have turned 96 years old today. Uncover her astonishing legacy, from the peaceful planet Haim to the wild shores of Klatsand.
“Rediscovering Rachel Carson reminds you that books can make the world a better place to live in,” writes the Irish Independent of LOA’s recent boxed set of the pioneering environmental writer’s collected works.
The Rachel Carson Collection salutes a brave pioneer of ecological awareness who died too soon
Rediscovering Rachel Carson reminds you that books can make the world a better place to live in, with her collected works, now republished by Library of America, having become touchstones for the mode...
www.independent.ie
October 20, 2025 at 3:28 PM
“Rediscovering Rachel Carson reminds you that books can make the world a better place to live in,” writes the Irish Independent of LOA’s recent boxed set of the pioneering environmental writer’s collected works.
May Swenson moved from Utah to the heart of Depression-era NYC with a single mission: to become a poet. On our website, biographer Margaret A. Brucia, author of the The Key to Everything: May Swenson, a Writer’s Life (@princetonupress.bsky.social), discusses this daring, ahead-of-her-time writer.
“She Put into Words Her Dreams”: A Revelatory New Biography of May Swenson, Far-Seeing Poet & LGBTQ Icon - Library of America
Born in 1913 to Swedish immigrant parents living in Logan, Utah, May Swenson was raised in an observant Mormon household, the oldest daughter of ten, before moving to Depression-era New York City to e...
www.loa.org
October 17, 2025 at 3:12 PM
May Swenson moved from Utah to the heart of Depression-era NYC with a single mission: to become a poet. On our website, biographer Margaret A. Brucia, author of the The Key to Everything: May Swenson, a Writer’s Life (@princetonupress.bsky.social), discusses this daring, ahead-of-her-time writer.
“If you riff hard enough, you end up in the bedrock of shared humanity,” writes @girinathan.bsky.social in Defector. “At least if you’re as potent a riffer as Charles Portis.” A reader enters the hilarious and turbulent world of Portis’s 1979 gem The Dog of the South: defector.com/charles-port...
Charles Portis Can Make You Love A Loser | Defector
I am more likely to laugh at a movie than a book. I’m sure this is true of many people, and I’m sure there are a host of social-emotional reasons for this disparity, but I can think of at least one cr...
defector.com
October 16, 2025 at 2:28 PM
“If you riff hard enough, you end up in the bedrock of shared humanity,” writes @girinathan.bsky.social in Defector. “At least if you’re as potent a riffer as Charles Portis.” A reader enters the hilarious and turbulent world of Portis’s 1979 gem The Dog of the South: defector.com/charles-port...