Random House announced today that a brand new novel by George Saunders will be landing on bookshelves this winter, on January 27, 2026. Vigil takes “place at the bedside of an oil company CEO, in the twilight hours of his Read more >
Thirty years ago this week, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless hit theaters and brought us all one of cinema’s most perfect creations—Cher Horowitz. Based on Emma Wodehouse, of Jane Austen’s Emma, Cher was as vibrant as she was delulu. Not to be Clueless is still the best Austen adaptation to ever do it.">Read more >
Another wild week for the makers of the popular predictive chatbots and large, generative pretrained transformer software. Here are just a couple stories about AI that came across my desk this week. Baldacci Burns Businesses The fallout around the discovery Read more >
Photo by Esraa Abo Qamar A small bookstall in the central Gaza Strip is keeping reading alive amidst Israel’s unrelenting chaos and violence, The Electronic Intifada reports. The stall, called Eqraa Ketabak (Read Your Book), is run by Salah and Read more >
The Writers Guild of America issued a strongly worded statement Friday about Colbert’s cancellation. Given Paramount’s recent capitulation to President Trump in the CBS News lawsuit, the Writers Guild of America has significant concerns that The Late Show’s cancellation is a Read more >
Today, the DAG Foundation announced the winners of its inaugural DAG Prizes, which award $20,000 each to a visual artist, a writer, and a musician “whose work expands the possibilities for American art.” According to the Foundation, the DAG Prize Read more >
The wheel of the year continues its slow, strange turn, a turning at once painfully glacial and precipitously swift. At the moment, the wheel has landed upon a morass of MAGA conspiracies, lurid revelations about the President’s relationship with an Read more >
There have been a few great covers for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. There have also been a lot of bad ones. It makes sense: it’s a difficult book to represent—which means that when it’s done right, there’s a special kind of Read more >
This week, we’re fulfilling prophecies, and pledges to past selves. We bought the tickets and took the rides. Some of us into the archive. Some of us into the dungeon. And some of us out to greener pastures. Calvin Kasulke this week.">Read more >
Kylie Cheung’s forthcoming book Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans is a searing investigation into the intersecting structures that control the lives of women and pregnant people. In her introduction, Cheung writes that the book “is my best attempt to Read more >
I’ve updated this article to include Lander’s sonnet co-writer Chloe Chik, and links to previous sonnets Lander has performed. Brad Lander’s having a great summer. From bravely standing up to ICE thugs, to becoming best buddies with mayoral candidate Zohran Read more >
The Trump administration has moved to ban 596 books from schools that serve military children. This is in addition to all their ongoing support for state book bans. Though it’s uniquely upsetting because military schools can be seen as arms Read more >
In a recent report for The Guardian, the author Nneka M. Okona described the pull of historic literary sites. “I wanted to see more homes of the Black literary forefathers and foremothers, the ones I draw inspiration from in order Read more >
Last week a Silicon Valley startup announced a new kind of e-reader that you can wear on your face. The company Sol Reader, is creating books that are glasses, described as “a wearable e-reading device that resembles a pair of Read more >
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 this week.">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 >
