Gracie Jin

The Big Bang Theory is a complete television anomaly. In this golden age of television, of streaming and Netflix and DVR, a very traditional laugh-tracked TV sitcom about a group of dorky guys and their friends managed to become the most popular…

The e-book is not going away — and that's not a bad thing for books.  Ever since the advent of the Kindle, a doomsday cloud has hovered over the world of book publishing, a portent that the rise of the e-book will mean the fall of the print book,…

Still snacking on post-Valentine's Day sale candy that you bought for yourself? Don't worry — there are plenty of reasons to be happy about being single: You don't have to buy candy for anyone else in a false display of monetized affection, you can…

In 2010, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts published statistics about the rates of publication of men vs. women in respected literary outlets. The results, now widely known as the VIDA Count, were appalling: only 10-35% of authors covered in major book…

Great American Readers, may I have your attention please? If you haven't yet heard of Chang-rae Lee, there'll be no escaping his name now.  Lee has just published his fifth novel, On Such a Full Sea, a dystopian story of a post-climate change and…

There's no denying that the world of books is changing. But literature lovers are keeping up. Six years after the birth of the e-book reader Amazon Kindle, we're no longer groaning about the death of traditional books. Even the most die-hard…

Imagine this: Jay Z, Michael Phelps, Alec Baldwin, Ben Affleck, and Justin Timberlake are stuck on an island together, with nothing but ... their kids. (Also imagine that they all have young children, aged 4-5.) That's the premise for the new…

Forget clichéd assertions that all Asians look the same. Many Americans look at China and see a rising economic monolith set against a cultural monotone: After all, the harsh censorship of China's government must suppress individual expression and…

The holiday season has officially begun, and with it comes the head-scratching over what to get all your friends for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Thanksgivukkah, or just for the sake of secular winter cheer. How about a book? Books make the best…

The literary world has been exploding with talk about writers of color. Roxane Gay's 2012 article "We Are Many. We Are Everywhere." reignited the conversation surrounding their under-recognized voices, and was followed by an exciting Nation column…

Literary fiction has a reputation among millennials as being neither urgent nor relevant. Looking for a spot-on representation of reality? Watch Girls. A searing discussion of today's social issues? Read the New York Times Op-ed page (or PolicyMic's…

… can our dreamsever blur the intransigent lines which drawthe shape that shuts us in?— Sylvia Plath, "Tale of a Tub" (1956) The newest book of Sylvia Plath's work showcases not her poetry, but her artwork. Sylvia Plath: Drawings is a slim and…

Last Friday night at a celebratory banquet at the University of Oklahoma, Palestinian American poet and young adult author Naomi Shihab Nye was awarded the prestigious NSK Neustadt Prize in Children's Literature. The NSK Neustadt Prize is unique in…

António Emílio Leite Couto (Mia Couto) has just been announced as the 2014 Neustadt Prize Laureate at the culminating banquet of the 2013 Neustadt Festival for International Literature and Culture. He is the first writer from Mozambique ever to be…

Literature lovers will be surprised to learn that one of America's most prestigious international literary prizes is given every year in the sleepy college town of Norman, Oklahoma, home of the University of Oklahoma Sooners. The Neustadt…

There are novels that strive to imitate life, novels that sometimes succeed strikingly — even heartbreakingly — at imitating life. Then there are novels that seem to be the very stuff from which life is woven. Daniel Alarcón's third book, At Night…

Jhumpa Lahiri's books are both widely popular and critically acclaimed for their simple yet searing accounts of the lives of Asian, usually Indian, immigrants. Her debut short story collection, The Interpreter of Maladies, focuses on the stories of…

This year's season of literary prizes kicked off last week with Canadian short story writer Alice Munro's Nobel Prize win in Literature. The announcement has been widely hailed as a triumph for the short story, an often overlooked literary form that…