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NEW YORK (AP) — For decades, Robert Lecker has read, taught and written about Alice Munro, the Nobel laureate from Canada renowned for her short stories. A professor of English at McGill University in Montreal, and author of numerous critical studies of Canadian fiction, he has thought of Munro as the "jewel" in the crown of her country's literature and source of some of the richest material for classroom discussion. But since learning that Munro declined to leave her husband after he had sexually assaulted and harassed her daughter, Lecker n...
TORONTO (AP) — The daughter of the late Nobel laureate Alice Munro has accused the author's second husband, Gerard Fremlin, of sexual abuse, writing that her mother remained with him because she "loved him too much" to leave. Munro, who died in May at age 92, was one of the world's most celebrated and beloved writers and a source of ongoing pride for her native Canada, where a reckoning with the author's legacy is now concentrated. Andrea Robin Skinner, Munro's daughter with her first husband, James Munro, wrote in an essay published in the T...
NEW YORK (AP) — Five high school students from Florida to Utah have been selected as this year's National Student Poets, a program founded more than a decade ago. Each winner represents a different region in the country, and brings their own distinctive background and perspective. The student poets, each of whom receive $5,000, will help oversee workshops, readings and other activities. Previous poets have appeared at the White House and Lincoln Center among other venues. Kallan McKinney is a queer and trans poet from Norman, Oklahoma, who u...
NEW YORK (AP) — Tina Turner, the unstoppable singer and stage performer who teamed with husband Ike Turner for a dynamic run of hit records and live shows in the 1960s and '70s and survived her horrifying marriage to triumph in middle age with the chart-topping "What's Love Got to Do With It," has died at 83. Turner died Tuesday, after a long illness in her home in Küsnacht near Zurich, according to her manager. She became a Swiss citizen a decade ago. Few stars traveled so far — she was born Anna Mae Bullock in a segregated Tennessee hosp...
NEW YORK (AP) — Harry Belafonte, the civil rights and entertainment giant who began as a groundbreaking actor and singer and became an activist, humanitarian and conscience of the world, has died. He was 96. Belafonte died Tuesday of congestive heart failure at his New York home, his wife Pamela by his side, said publicist Ken Sunshine. With his glowing, handsome face and silky-husky voice, Belafonte was one of the first Black performers to gain a wide following on film and to sell a million records as a singer; many still know him for his s...
NEW YORK (AP) — Attempted book bans and restrictions at school and public libraries continue to surge, setting a record in 2022, according to a new report from the American Library Association released Thursday. More than 1,200 challenges were compiled by the association in 2022, nearly double the then-record total from 2021 and by far the most since the ALA began keeping data 20 years ago. "I've never seen anything like this," says Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom. "The last two years have been exha...
Jerry Lee Lewis, the untamable rock 'n' roll pioneer whose outrageous talent, energy and ego collided on such definitive records as "Great Balls of Fire" and "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and sustained a career otherwise upended by personal scandal, died Friday morning at 87. The last survivor of a generation of groundbreaking performers that included Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, Lewis died at his Mississippi home, south of Memphis, Tennessee, representative Zach Farnum said in a release. The news came two days after the publ...
Thais Perkins is the owner of Reverie Books in Austin, Texas, and the parent of a middle school student and high school student. Among the books she is eager to have in her store, and in the schools, is an expanded edition of "The 1619 Project" that comes out this week. "My store is a social-justice oriented bookstore, and this book fits very well within that mission," she says. "I am promoting community sponsorships of the book, where people can purchase a copy and have it donated to one of the schools." That is assuming, of course, the...
NEW YORK (AP) — Illustrator Michaela Goade became the first Native American to win the prestigious Randolph Caldecott Medal for best children's picture story, cited for "We Are Water Protectors," a celebration of nature and condemnation of the "black snake" Dakota Access Pipeline. "I am really honored and proud," the 30-year-old Goade told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "I think it's really important for young people and aspiring book makers and other creative people to see this." Tae Keller's chapter book "When You Trap a T...
PARIS (AP) — Olivia de Havilland, the doe-eyed actress beloved to millions as the sainted Melanie Wilkes of "Gone With the Wind," but also a two-time Oscar winner and an off-screen fighter who challenged and unchained Hollywood's contract system, died Sunday at her home in Paris. She was 104. Havilland, the sister of fellow Oscar winner Joan Fontaine, died peacefully of natural causes, said New York-based publicist Lisa Goldberg. De Havilland was among the last of the top screen performers from the studio era, and the last surviving lead f...
NEW YORK (AP) — A new literary award with a $50,000 cash prize will honor those best at telling a New York story. The Gotham Literary Prize, announced Thursday, came out of a conversation between businessman-philathropist Bradley Tusk and political strategist Howard Wolfson, who told The Associated Press that they first thought of the award last year and saw a renewed urgency for it after the spread of the coronavirus. "It occurred to us that this would be an opportune moment to do something like this, to support writers writing about New York,...
Charles Webb, a lifelong non-conformist whose debut novel "The Graduate" was a deadpan satire of his college education and wealthy background adapted into the classic film of the same name, has died. He was 81. Webb died June 16 in Eastbourne, England, of a blood condition, said his friend Jack Malvern, a Times of London journalist to whom Webb's final book was dedicated. Webb was only 24 when his most famous book was published, in 1963. The sparely written narrative was based closely on his years growing up comfortably in Southern California,...
NEW YORK (AP) — The next "Hunger Games" book is coming out next month, and a movie version is now being planned. Lionsgate is working on an adaptation of Suzanne Collins' "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes," a prequel to her three "Hunger Games" novels that will be released May 19. Collins' Dystopian series, which includes "The Hunger Games," "Catching Fire" and "Mockingjay," has sold tens of millions copies worldwide and is the basis for four Lionsgate movies that earned nearly $3 billion and starred Jennifer Lawrence as the heroine K...
NEW YORK (AP) — Former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, the career diplomat who during the impeachment hearings of President Donald Trump offered a chilling account of alleged threats from Trump and his allies, has a book deal. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt confirmed Friday to The Associated Press that it had acquired Yovanovitch's planned memoir, currently untitled. According to the publisher, the book will trace her long career, from Mogadishu, Somalia, to Kyiv and "finally back to Washington, D.C. — where, to her dismay, she found a pol...
A.E. Hotchner, a well-traveled author, playwright and gadabout whose street smarts and famous pals led to a loving, but litigated memoir of Ernest Hemingway, business adventures with Paul Newman and a book about his Depression-era childhood that became a Steven Soderbergh film, died Saturday at age 102. He died at his home in Westport, Connecticut, according to his son, Timothy Hotchner, who did not immediately know the cause of death. A. E. Hotchner, known to friends as "Ed" or "Hotch," was an impish St. Louis native and ex-marbles champ who...
NEW YORK (AP) — Paul Simon, world famous singer-songwriter, isn't only inspired by fellow musicians. Simon is an admirer of the author-philosopher Peter Singer, the longtime Princeton University professor whose "The Life You Can Save" has been a guide for Simon and others looking for ways to donate money. Singer has completed a new edition of the book, which comes out this week, and Simon is helping with the promotion. He read a chapter for the audio edition and sat with Singer recently for an Associated Press interview. "I'm very c...
NEW YORK (AP) — Laurie Halse Anderson, Jason Reynolds and Kwame Alexander are among the 10 authors on the young people's literature longlist for the National Book Awards. The wide-ranging list, which includes graphic fiction, historical narratives and stories in verse, was announced Monday by the National Book Foundation, which presents the awards. Longlists for translations, poetry, nonfiction and fiction will be unveiled over the following four days Anderson, best known for the million-selling "Speak," was cited for "Shout," a poetic m...
TORONTO (AP) — From a park bench on the Victoria College campus, Margaret Atwood — class of 1961 — can trace her life of the mind. "It was here that I decided to become a Victorian (literature student) at a time when it wasn't at all fashionable. They were considered gauche, kitsch, sentimental, absurd," she says, remembering the times she would dash back and forth across the park to take English classes on one side and history and philosophy on the other. "But the foundations of women's equality — John Stuart Mill, those kinds of thinker...
NEW YORK (AP) — Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, a pioneer and reigning giant of modern literature whose imaginative power in "Beloved," ''Song of Solomon" and other works transformed American letters by dramatizing the pursuit of freedom within the boundaries of race, has died at age 88. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced that Morrison died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. Morrison's family issued a statement through Knopf saying she died after a brief illness. "Toni Morrison passed away peacefully last night surrounded by...
NEW YORK (AP) — When author Angela Flournoy was asked to dress as her favorite literary character for a magazine shoot four years ago, she knew how to look the part: a wide and "severe hat," a fur stole and the kind of stare that dares you to stare back. For a day she could pretend to be Sula Peace, from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's novel "Sula," an ode to female friendship and how it can endure the most shameless betrayals. "The thing that has always drawn me to Sula is that she is extremely complicated," says Flournoy, whose novel "The T...
NEW YORK (AP) — Herman Wouk, the versatile, Pulitzer Prize winning author of such million-selling novels as "The Caine Mutiny" and "The Winds of War" whose steady Jewish faith inspired his stories of religious values and secular success, died on Friday at 103. Wouk was just 10 days shy of his 104th birthday and was working on a book until the end, said his literary agent Amy Rennert. Rennert said Wouk died in his sleep at his home in Palm Springs, California, where he settled after spending many years in Washington, D.C. Among the last of t...
NEW YORK (AP) — Three Saudi women's rights activists whose arrests last year have been condemned worldwide are being honored by PEN America. Nouf Abdulaziz, Loujain al-Hathloul and Eman al-Nafjan have won the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award, the literary and human rights organization announced Thursday. The award was established in 1987 and is given to writers imprisoned for their work, with previous recipients coming from Ukraine, Egypt and Ethiopia among other countries. In custody for working to "undermine the security" of the kingdom, Abd...
NEW YORK (AP) — For crime writer and Oklahoma native Lou Berney, there's something special about the drive out West. "I love that stretch of I-40, what used to be Highway 66, from Oklahoma City to Arizona," he told The Associated Press during a recent interview. "I remember hearing about the painted desert when I was a kid, and thinking, 'Oh my god, there's a painted desert somewhere!' It was so magical. The petrified forest. It had this myth for me." People travel in Berney's books, although not always because they want to do so. "November R...
NEW YORK (AP) — The clarity and the command. The daring and the discipline. The thrill of her voice and the truth of her emotions. Like the best actors and poets, nothing came between how Aretha Franklin felt and what she could express, between what she expressed and how we responded. Blissful on "(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman." Despairing on "Ain't No Way." Up front forever on her feminist and civil rights anthem "Respect." Franklin, the glorious "Queen of Soul" and genius of American song, died Thursday morning at her home in D...
NEW YORK (AP) — In February 2017, weeks into the Trump administration, the National Endowment for the Humanities was reviewing a list of nominees for the National Humanities Medals, one of the top honors for creative and scholarly achievement. The plan, as in previous years, was to submit names to the White House and await final approval. But the NEH chairman at the time, William D. Adams, seemed skeptical. "Interesting to contemplate where the medals might go," he wrote to Larry Myers, director of the NEH Office of Planning and Budget, in an e...
