Vivre Vite, an autobiographical novel about the death of her husband, wins France’s most prestigious literary award. Read more
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Year: 2022
The Dreariness of Book Club Discussions
We enjoy each other’s company. We drink coffee, we eat crackers, we get reacquainted with each other’s love lives, and we have an excuse to read the books that’ll appear on The New York Times’s notable list this year. And of course, reading the books is the point. The whole book club is predicated on the notion that reading these books will improve our minds in some way, and that it’ll contribute measurably to our intellectual lives. And yet, month after month, I leave each meeting feeling as if we’ve engaged in an empty, meaningless exercise. Read more
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Judge Blocks a Merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster
The government’s case blocked the merger of two of the United States’ largest publishers and reflected a more aggressive approach to curbing consolidation. It was closely watched by the publishing industry. Read more
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Read the Short Stories Behind Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities
If you, like me, spent the weekend squirming while watching Guillermo del Toro’s new anthology horror series, Cabinet of Curiosities, on Netflix, you might also have noticed that all the episodes but one start with a hat tip toward the author of the short story that inspired it. Read more
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Joan Didion’s Life in Objects
Hundreds of the writer’s furnishings and personal items will be sold at auction next month, offering fans the opportunity to acquire a piece of her legacy. Read more
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A Cookbook for Surviving the End of the World
This cookbook of ideas rethinks our eating habits and traditions, challenges our food taboos, and proposes new recipes for humanity’s survival. These more than sixty projects propose new ways to think and make food, offering tools for creative action rather than traditional recipes. They imagine modifying the human body to digest cellulose, turning plastic into food, tasting smog, extracting spices and medicines from sewage, and growing meat in the lab. Read more
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‘The Singularities’ by John Banville
The Irish novelist John Banville writes prose of such luscious elegance that it’s all too easy to view his work as an aesthetic project, an exercise in pleasure giving … But what drives Banville — and his relentless hunt for the ideal adjective and simile and cadence — is a desire to touch something elusive and not quite nameable while providing a parallel or overlapping commentary on that doomed but never pointless effort. Read more
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10 Best-Selling Horror Novels That Will Scare You to the Bone
Some novels are straight-up horror while others are more subtle in their fright. One thing is for sure, all will create an atmosphere that is right at home during the spookiest time of year. Read more
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The Essential Philip K. Dick
Perhaps you’ve nurtured a suspicion that you have the makings of a Dick fan. The writer’s influence is everywhere, though mainstream acknowledgment of his talents arrived belatedly. (His obituary in this newspaper is under 200 words and lists his age of death incorrectly. He was 53, not 54.) The question is where to start. Dick’s published output — at least 35 novels and countless short stories — ranges from sublime to inscrutable, which is partly a result of volume. His book advances were skimpy and there was a family to support, so he wrote quickly, often fueled by amphetamine tablets. (Dick’s typing speed: 120 words per minute.) If you’re a stickler for prose style and hold a zero-tolerance policy toward the word “boobies,” this is not your fellow. Read more
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Is It Wrong to Not Finish a Book?
Do you give a book a certain amount of time, or a certain number of pages, before giving up? Do you never give up? How do you decide? Read more
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