Set in a stunning location near the Pyrenees mountains, the tiny village of Montolieu is home to roughly 800 people and has no ATMs, but it boasts 15 bookshops. Read more
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James Baldwin would have turned 100 on Aug. 2 this year. His final works were published almost 40 years ago, just two years before his death in 1987. Yet his writing is as imperative as ever. He wrote with the kind of moral vision that was as comforting as it was chastising — almost surely the influence of the pulpit he once occupied as a child preacher in his native Harlem. Read more
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EC Comics, which specialized in tales of horror, crime and suspense, and was shut down in the “moral panic” of the 1950s, is making a comeback. Read more
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…An exhibition at The Grolier Club in New York, though, veers in the opposite direction, countering the monotonous, machine-printed images we’re all too familiar with for bespoke designs. Titled Judging a Book by its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of The Grolier Club, 1470s-2020, the show scans the club’s vast archives to highlight a wide array of elegant, handcrafted designs from the last seven centuries. Read more
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Based on James Clavell’s novel, FX’s Shōgun is set in Japan in the year 1600 at the dawn of a century-defining civil war. Lord Yoshii Toranaga is fighting for his life as his enemies on the Council of Regents unite against him, when a mysterious European ship is found marooned in a nearby fishing village. Watch trailer
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Worries about nuclear Armageddon, on the back burner for decades, seem to be reviving. In early November 2023, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia was revoking its ratification of the 1996 global nuclear test ban treaty. In this astute assessment of the current situation regarding nuclear weapons, Scoles, a contributing writer at Popular Science and author of Making Contact and They Are Already Here, offers a must-read overview of America’s nuclear arsenal, emphasizing the technical details of keeping it up to date in the absence of testing, along with efforts at avoiding catastrophic surprises such as accidental explosions, unwanted actions by other nuclear powers, and simple theft of radioactive material for “trafficking or malicious use,” which has occurred more than 300 times during the past 30 years. Read more
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With any prolific author, readers are likely to have particular favorites, which may not be the same as anyone else’s. Your list is likely to be just as good as mine – but here are the ones I recommend. Read more
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In “The Bishop and the Butterfly,” Michael Wolraich tells the story of the sensational true crime that dominated headlines and helped topple Tammany Hall. Read more
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Acclaimed novelist best known for The Prestige whose large body of work never fitted into any particular literary mould. Read more
TikTok’s popular BookTok channel has been buzzing about a new genre called “romantasy” that is spawning whole sections in bookstores. Read more
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