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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
One Battle After Another Wins Big at the Oscars
The 98th annual Academy Awards were held last night and an adaptation won some of the night’s biggest prizes, including Best Picture. One Battle After Another, the action comedy directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and inspired by the novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, also won Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Directing, Best Supporting Actor (Sean Penn), Best Editing, and the inaugural Best Casting award for a total of six prizes. In more 2026 Oscar’s adaptation news, Jessie Buckley won Best Actress for Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet adaptation, becoming the first Irishwoman to ever win the prize, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein took home three wins. If you’ve got One Battle After Another and Pynchon on the brain, I highly recommend giving this Zero to Well-Read podcast episode on Vineland a listen.
Jane Eyre Isn’t #1 On This Ranking of Brontë Books
Neither is Wuthering Heights. The Guardian stoked the flames of recent Brontë discourse with a ranking of sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne’s novels. I devoured most of these books in my early 20s and my only strong disagreement is with the placement of Wuthering Heights above Jane Eyre, but this is a subjective exercise and it is, above all, fun to explore the stories behind the books. In fact, it made me want to go back and re-read the top-ranked book, Villette by Charlotte Brontë. I remember enjoying it but many of the details are lost among or conflated with the countless Victorian governess tales I read one after the other.
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Idris Elba’s Thriller Series: Coming to a Shelf Near You
Idris Elba is taking his penchant for thrillers from the screen, where he stars in the series H/JACK, to the page in a thriller series he’ll co-author with Adam Hamdy, who often writes with James Patterson. Describing it as “the starriest book deal” of last week’s annual London book fair, The Guardian writes about the series following an MI6 field op investigating an attempted murder in Mauritius. Publishers Weekly details the U.S. acquisition of Elba and Hamdy’s three-book deal and a May 2027 planned release. In less fun news, The Guardian also covered the book fair discussions around the possible spread of bans from the U.S. to the UK. Read the full London book fair recap here.
Utah Bans 28th Book for All Public School Students
Whelp. It turns out Utah wasn’t content with banning four more books from public school systems when we learned about the March 2nd additions. A surprise fifth title was banned but brought to official documentation weeks after the four-book announcement. Read all about how John Green’s Looking for Alaska became Utah’s 28th state-sanctioned book.
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