As a New York City resident, I don’t really have any good governments at the moment. Federally I’m being governed by mendacious and grubbing hogmen, statewide I’m being represented by uninspired and fiddling centrists, and at the local city-level, I’m Read more >
Starting next Wednesday, February 26th, Amazon isn’t going to let users download the ebooks they’ve purchased, forcing users to keep everything within the corporation’s proprietary ecosystem. As covered in The Verge, the mega-corporation is removing a feature that lets ebook Read more >
“Many of Edward Gorey’s most fervent devotees,” Stephen Schiff wrote in a profile of the artist in The New Yorker in 1992, “think he’s (a) English and (b) dead. Actually, he has never so much as visited either place.” Alas, he Read more >
This Black History Month is the fraughtest. Maybe even apex fraught. As many hard-won minority group commemorations are being actively scrubbed from government websites, we the recognized are asked to consider what those commemorations have come to mean under elite Read more >
As February unfurls, there is no shortage to the chaos and carnage that have come to define 2025 thus far, particularly in the United States, where it has become the norm to bemoan yet another constitutional crisis unfolding with little Read more >
The great F. Scott Fitzgerald has been stolen. Lifted. Carried away. I should clarify; not the man himself. For all we know, the novelist’s cremains are still safe and sound at his final resting place in a Rockville cemetery. It’s Read more >
The Palestine Festival of Literature has launched a curated subscription service, the PalFest Bookshelf, which will deliver the best new books on Palestine, along with bespoke extras, straight to your door each month. Subscribers will receive six key books a Read more >
Out of 1,100 submissions, writer Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child has won the 2024 Novel Prize, and will be published early next year. The Novel Prize is awarded biennially to an unpublished work of literary fiction and “rewards novels that explore Ruins, Child has won the 2024 Novel Prize.">Read more >
If you’ve been following the right wing’s obsessive book-banning over the last few years, you’ve probably heard of Authors Against Book Bans, a coalition of writers, illustrators, and other book people who are working to fight censorship and protect access Read more >
You’ve tried chocolates, you’ve tried cards, you’ve even tried getting your valentine a copy of your favorite book, but they got stressed out because you were constantly watching them read like a hawk, to make sure they were reacting to Read more >
Attention fellow travelers, would-be radicals, curious culture vultures, and ABD English scholars! Our friends at Verso Books—the publishing imprint behind such titans of theory as Edward Said, Mike Davis, Judith Butler, Norman Finkelstein, and Tariq Ali—have launched a new virtual Read more >
It’s another week in a year that feels, already, like multiple years have passed, a year of head-scratching and head-spinning tumult. In times like this, it can be worthwhile—self-salvific, even—to take a break from all the news, to pause your Read more >
Though it’s by no means the worst of our worries at this moment, the evil empire has made its first moves on the culture. As Laura Grimes of Oregon ArtsWatch reported last Thursday, the Trump administration canceled a National Endowment Read more >
Photograph by Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian Israel’s genocidal aggression against Palestinians continues despite a ceasefire in Gaza, as police stormed two locations of the Palestinian-owned Educational Bookshop locations in occupied Jerusalem last night, and arrested two of the owners, Mahmoud Muna and Read more >
In the immortal words of Blink 182, “Work sucks, I know.” It always has. But it’s only recently that we in the mainstream have begun to state this truth as plainly as Tom DeLonge. Why should that be? For one Read more >
Beloved (and bestselling) novelist Tom Robbins—arguably most famous for his 1976 novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, adapted into a film by Gus Van Sant, and 1980’s Still Life with Woodpecker—died on Sunday at the age of 92. Robbins was Read more >
This week marks the anniversary of the first issue of Reader’s Digest—for the unacquainted, there’s a great overview of the history of the magazine in this week’s Literary History newsletter. I got curious and decided to reread this first issue, Read more >
This week, the 43rd John Dos Passos Prize was awarded to novelist and editor Angie Cruz (How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water; Dominicana; Let it Rain Coffee) by Longwood University. The Dos Passos Prize is the oldest Read more >
In her new book, Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, scholar Elyse Graham explores the secret history of U.S. intelligence and lays out yet another reason why you should thank a Read more >
This week, 404 Media, which is publishing some really essential writing these days and is well worth your support, featured an excellent piece on the problem librarians are facing as their ebook collections start to fill up with AI slop. Read more >
