Pop culture news for readers: August 12, 2026

Here's how pop culture and literature have been intersecting lately ... 

• Sophia Stallone and her father, Sylvester, are partnering to adapt Victoria Wilder’s romantic suspense novel Bourbon & Lies into a TV series (Deadline). 

• Rachel Reid, author of the Game Changer novels that have become the basis for HBO's Heated Rivalry series, threw some attitude towards criticism of season two's casting (Variety).

• Actress Bel Powley, who plays Petunia Dursley in the upcoming Harry Potter TV series, said in an interview that she strongly disagrees with author J.K. Rowling's views on gender (The Hollywood Reporter).

• Apple TV has acquired the rights to Colson Whitehead's Harlem crime novel trilogy, comprising the three novels Harlem Shuffle, Crook Manifesto, and the recently released Cool Machine (Variety).

• Catch up on all the screen adaptations of Carley Fortune's novels, including the already released Prime Video series Every Year After, based on Every Summer After (Deadline).

• The title novella from the collection Stag Dance: A Quartet has been picked up for an adaptation; the book by Torrey Peters was a 2026 Pulitzer Prize finalist (Deadline).

• Julianne Moore will star in the world premiere of Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl's play Faydra, which puts a modern spin on the Greek myth of Phaedra (The Hollywood Reporter).

• Actress and singer Julie Andrews just released another children's book; Shy, like the thirty-something books before it, was co-written with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton (The Hollywood Reporter).

• Andrea Gibson: Love Letter From the Afterlife — a multimedia event that includes the documentary about the late poet, among other musical and poetic performances — will go on tour this fall (The Hollywood Reporter).