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 >
The Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP) has announced the winners for its eleventh annual Firecracker Awards, which celebrate “the best independently published books of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry and the best literary magazines in the categories of Read more >
July is here! And, amongst other things, that means another month of excellent paperbacks to consider, which I hope will provide a few brief antidotes to the toxicity of the political landscape. Below, you’ll find twenty-five intriguing options in fiction Read more >
The “friends in the city” yarn has a long lineage, spanning every time-bound medium I can think of. Its classic structure follows three to five pals out of a fiercely bonded adolescence into floppier, fractured adult life. Between the covers, Read more >
Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramondo Publishing, and New Directions are teaming up to launch The Poetry in Translation Prize, a new biennial award for a poetry collection translated into English. The inaugural round of submissions opens on July 15th, and any living Read more >
If you suspect that ChatGPT power users may be getting dumber—looking at you, Cuomo and RFK Jr.—the data seems to indicate that you’re right. A new study by scholars from MIT and Wellesley, titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Read more >
The books world has been full of labor action in the last few years, most recently with Quirk Books voting to form a union with the NewsGuild and Abrams Books winning their vote to form a union with the UAW. Read more >
June is nearing its end, and though I come bearing no good news about the fate of the world—it remains as destructively chaotic as last week, if not more so—I do come bearing some good tidings: that new books are here. Read more >
