It’s just about the middle of summer in a summer characterized by utter chaos, but I come bearing something rare in this era: good tidings. That is, the good news that new books are out today. Below, you’ll find twenty-three Read more >
The week after a long weekend always feels a tad longer than usual, but here it is: Friday. We’ve arrived. Whether the week crawled by or flew by for you, here are a few Venns to remind you what happened, Read more >
At a ceremony on Thursday night, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars was awarded the second annual Inside Literary Prize, the first-ever US-based literary award to be judged by currently incarcerated people. Readers from 15 prisons across 6 states and territories Read more >
This was a week for escapist coping. We lived off indie pop and indie movies. We dreamed of a throwback internet and healthier lungs. Molly Odintz has music to thank for making it to Friday. Specifically The Marías, who she Read more >
Image from South China Morning Post on YouTube Late in June, an entire city block in Shanghai stood up and walked back home. 8,270-tons of Shikumen style, brick row houses built in the 1920s, all 43,380 square feet from the Read more >
A recent Vulture piece considered the appeal of Substack. “Part promotional platform, part social-media site, part venue for rambling journal entries, Substack is attracting an increasing number of people who write literature for a living,” wrote Emma Alpern, before going Read more >
Photo from The Samuels Public Library After being targeted by anti-LGBTQ book banners and having their funding pulled, a local library in Virginia successfully stopped a threatened takeover by a private equity group. The local community rallied around The Samuels Read more >
Famously, Jane Austen disliked Bath, both when she visited it in 1799 and when she moved there with her family in 1801. But Bath loves Jane Austen: the city is now home to the Jane Austen Center, an annual Jane Read more >
Amongst all of the terrible and regressive decisions and shadow docket orders the Supreme Court spewed forth this term, there was a rare, small win for libraries and schools. The story got a little buried, but the Supreme Court ruled Read more >
It’s been a weird time for the papers of record. The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post have all made compromising to catastrophic judgment errors. Most recently, the former hyped a eugenicist to smear an elected candidate in the Read more >
George R.R. Martin has been famously stuck on his follow-up to A Song of Ice and Fire for…ever. The Winds of Winter was meant to be the sixth in a seven book series. But Martin has been working on the Read more >
July 4th has passed, and, as we enter the post-holiday rush, it’s worth remembering that, as always, there are new books to look forwards to, despite the difficult chaos of the world. Below, you’ll find twenty new options to consider Read more >
Happy July 4th eve! Even if you’re not feeling so rah-rah on the American experiment these days, there’s still a lot to celebrate tomorrow. In addition to the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, the fourth is also when New Read more >
This week, our happiness came in a binary. We took pleasure indoors and outdoors. Some of us got jollies in nature, beholding birds and helming summer picnics. While the vampires among us took solace inside, where we listened to moody Read more >
Canadian poetry—not actually written in maple syrup! Not entirely about beavers! (Although I have certainly written about beavers.) Canada is a complicated place, living in the shadow of the U.S., proudly multicultural but aware of its assimilationist history, reckoning with Read more >
I hope you’re all safe and well, Dear Readers, as safe and well as anyone can be in this unsettling moment in a seemingly unending frieze of unsettling moments. No matter what happens, art remains important, both art that helps Read more >
On the last day of its term, America’s highest court gave legal backing to bigoted attempts to ban books and to erase queer people from public life. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court ruled that Montgomery County in Maryland must Read more >
Big highs and big lows this week. I started the week feeling great after Zohran’s big, exciting win in the NYC mayoral primary, and I’m ending the week feeling awful in the wake of the Supreme Court crushing everything. And Read more >
A mixed bag over here. The Eastern Seaboard was way too hot, but New Yorkers got a blast of fresh air on election day, when the progressive candidate Zohran Mamdani swept the mayoral primary. All of us have neighbors who Read more >
This week, a scrappy San Francisco bookstore announced that they’ll be removing a certain seven book fantasy series set at a dangerous boarding school from their shelves indefinitely. The decision is motivated by the author’s hateful politics. Booksellers at Booksmith, Read more >
