The Unexpected Benefits of Reading at Random “Elspeth Wilson on Becoming a Literary Omnivore” Scottish writer Elspeth Wilson, author of These Mortal Bodies (July 2025), concludes “reading at random won’t solve all the issues with unequal advances, difficulties in sustaining a career, and lack of diversity in publishing. But it has helped me encounter the […]
Notable Literary Deaths in 2025 Dreaming of writing your novel this year? Rip up all the rules! If your New Year’s resolutions involve getting to work on that novel you’ve been meaning to write, novelist Elizabeth McCracken has some general advice to offer. Books That Open the Mind Writers for The Atlantic offer “recommendations for
The cultural works becoming public domain in 2026 NPR informs us of the works entering the public domain this new year. There are some big names here, including the first four books of the Nancy Drew series, Dashiel Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and Agatha Christie’s first Miss Marple mystery, The Murder at the Vicarage. Can
Record everything! “Our memories are precious to us and constitute our sense of self. Why not enhance them by recording all of your life?” Yannic Kappes is a philosopher and a postdoc at the University of Vienna in Austria. In this article he takes the proposition that “[c]urrent technology allows for radical memory enhancement” to
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The dawn of the post-literate society If the reading revolution [of the middle of the eighteenth century] represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the [current] screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history. James Marriott laments the “draining away of culture, critical thinking
The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait The powers that be at Oxford University Press have chosen rage bait as their word of the year for 2025. Rage bait is defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to
The Essential Kate Atkinson “Surprising, versatile, dark and funny, the British writer has something for (almost) everyone.” Kate Atkinson’s 1995 novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum stands atop my list of Books to Reread, and I swear that some September (my traditional rereading month) I’m going to get to it. Just about everyone in
How the Union Lost the Remembrance War “The victors of the American Civil War failed to write their story into the history books, leaving a gap for the mythologizing of the Confederacy.” “After the American Civil War, there was what historian Robert J. Cook calls a ‘robust and purposeful narrative’ of the Union’s defeat of
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What’s Real and What’s Not: Gish Jen on Writing Between the Factual Lines “Finding the sweet spot between memoir and fiction” Writer Gish Jen considers writing situations that fall somewhere between memoir—or nonfiction—and fiction: “Might the author hope that his or her account, to whatever genre it belongs, will move the reader in a way
How to Be a Good Literary Citizen (in Seven Easy Steps) Maris Kreizman writes about “literary citizenship . . . an amorphous kind of concept, often changing with the moment, but needed more than ever today when corporate interests have a stranglehold on the arts, literary institutions are being devastated by the cancellation of NEA
