1. Pitchfork reviews the Beatles reissues. A Hard Day’s Night scores a 9.7, but With the Beatles doesn’t fare so well — an 8.8. [via Pitchfork]
2. Charles Burnett will direct a feature-length documentary about Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. [via THR]
3. The shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize includes previous winners A.S. Byatt and J.M. Coetzee, and big sellers Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel. [via Publishers Weekly]
4. Theater critic John Heilpern has left the New York Observer after 17 years, stating, “I don’t want to be too negative about the 12-year-old owner, Jared Kushner, but as my ma and pa from Manchester, England, used to say, ‘That boy couldn’t run a chip shop.’” [via NYP]
5. Nick Cave has released a soundtrack for his new novel The Death Of Bunny Munro that is reportedly a mix of “a film soundtrack, a radio play, and an hallucination.” [via NME]

Bernard Schwartz directs the 92Y Poetry Center, and chief among his vocational duties is putting together 92Y‘s legendary lineup of literary readings and events each year. Just as diehard Harry Potter fans lined up for midnight showings of Half-Blood Prince earlier this summer, 92Y tickets are coveted and eagerly awaited among lit nerds. This year’s agenda includes poet Charles Simic, novelist A.S. Byatt, Sam Shepard, John Irving, and other assorted writerly heavy-hitters.  Tickets go on sale today, August 3, and cost $10 for those age 35 and younger. After the jump, Bernard Schwartz recalls some of the center’s highlights, invokes a maritime metaphor, and tells us what we can expect this season. Read More »

For fiction writers, the Man Booker Prize is like the Academy Awards — actually, since this prize is only open to citizens of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland, make that the BAFTA’s. Once summertime roles around, anyone whose novel was published that year eagerly sits by their phone in anticipation of the call letting them know they’ve been nominated for the prestigious literary accolade. Being nominated is good for publicity, but that extra £50,000 ($82,000) prize isn’t something to shake a stick at. Just ask last year’s winner Aravind Adiga whose novel The White Tiger has currently sold over half a million copies.

For those of you who may enjoy a few new additions to your summer reading list, here’s a cheat sheet to help you navigate the thirteen nominees. Read More »