Round-Up: Ancient Egyptian Stories, Tom Hanks, and Walt Whitman

From newly translated ancient Egyptian stories to Walt Whitman’s lost novel, here’s the latest literary news:

• Published in January by Penguin Classics, Writings from Ancient Egypt contains the first English-language translations of stories that originated thousands of years ago. Toby Wilkinson, the Egyptologist who translated the stories, commented on the collection’s ability to further the public understanding of ancient Egyptian life: “What will surprise people are the insights behind the well-known facade of ancient Egypt, behind the image everyone has of the pharaohs, Tutankhamun’s mask and the pyramids.”
• Tom Hanks has announced his plan to publish a collection of stories this October. Titled Uncommon Type: Some Stories, the book will be published by Alfred A. Knopf and feature seventeen stories. Hanks will also narrative the audiobook version of the collection.
• Walt Whitman’s lost novel, The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, has been discovered in the Library of Congress’ Whitman archives. Originally serialized in the Sunday Dispatch of New York in 1852, the novel was found by University of Houston doctoral candidate Zachary Turpin, who described it as “a fun, rollicking, creative, twisty, bizarre little book.” The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review has made the novel available for free online.