No assigned reading. No forced discussion. Just you, your book and a roomful of fellow book lovers, quietly reading. Read more
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Year: 2025
‘The History of Money’ by David McWilliams
Religion, technology, power, and the rise and fall of entire empires are tied up with economics and commerce in McWilliams’ excellent whistle-stop tour of the way money has shaped world history. Covering centuries of innovations—from an ancient baboon femur called the Ishango Bone, possibly used for accounting, to digital-age solutions like M-Pesa, a service in Africa that turns mobile-phone credit into money—it’s a blast of a book. Read more
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‘Flesh’ Wins 2025 Booker Prize
Szalay is a Hungarian-British author. Flesh is his sixth novel. In 2016, he was shortlisted for the Booker prize for his book All That Man Is. He told the Booker Prize that he was inspired to write Flesh after his own time living between Hungary and England, and noticing the cultural and economic divides that exist within contemporary Europe. “I also wanted to write about life as a physical experience, about what it’s like to be a living body in the world.” Read more
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‘There Is No Antimemetics Division’ by qntm
Speculative fiction and the funkier corners of digital culture go together like chocolate and peanut butter—see Ryan North’s crowdsourced Machine of Death series or the novels based on the podcast Welcome to Night Vale for prime examples. Here, qntm (aka British author Sam Hughes) offers a legally sanitized but fantastically composed take on the SCP Foundation, a collaborative online fiction project that blends horror and SF tropes with satire and literary experimentation. Read more
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‘Destiny of the Republic’ Adaptation is Streaming Now
Death by Lightning dramatizes the stranger-than-fiction true story of 20th U.S. President James Garfield, and admirer Charles Guiteau, who assassinated him. Watch trailer
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Helen Garner’s Diaries Win 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction
The Baillie Gifford is widely regarded as the UK’s most prestigious prize for nonfiction. It is the first major literary award Garner has won in the UK, though she is one of Australia’s most celebrated authors, where her honours include the 2023 Australian Society of Authors medal, the 2019 Australia Council award for lifetime achievement in literature, and the 2006 Melbourne prize for literature. She also won the 2016 Windham-Campbell literature prize administered by Yale University. Read more
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Anne Rice Fans Flock to New Orleans for a Memorial Tribute to the Horror Literature Legend
Fans lined up from Orpheum Theater’s entrance all the way down the block to the VooDoo Mart liquor store on Canal Street Saturday, awaiting an opportunity to finally bid farewell to the late Anne Rice, the New Orleans-born queen of Goth literature. No one since Marie Laveau contributed more to New Orleans’ supernatural mystique than she. Read more
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‘A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now’
James Delbourgo’s “A Noble Madness” is a brilliant, droll study in the shifting profile and consistent obsession of the stop-at-nothing, buy-or-die collector. Mr. Delbourgo, a history professor at Rutgers University, finds that the collecting mentality, like most things, divides into ancient and modern. The ancients believed that those who loved too much were possessed by gods; Suetonius wrote that Caligula, who believed he was a god, once ordered his troops to fill their helmets with seashells, the “spoils of the ocean.” We moderns, Mr. Delbourgo argues, have gone from theories of “demonic possession to accusations of superstition, obsession, sexual neurosis, and pathological greed down to the recent invention of the medical term ‘hoarding disorder.’” Read more
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Historic Libraries Bring Modern Comfort To Book Lovers and History Buffs in New England
The more than 200-year-old institution [the Boston Athenaeum] is one of only about 20 member-supported private libraries in the U.S. dating back to the 18th- and 19th-centuries. Called athenaeums, a Greek word meaning “temple of Athena,” the concept predates the traditional public library most Americans recognize today. The institutions were built by merchants, doctors, writers, lawyers and ministers who wanted to not only create institutions for reading — then an expensive and difficult-to-access hobby — but also space to explore culture and debate. Many of these athenaeums still play a vibrant role in their communities. Read more
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Horror Writers on the Scariest Stories They’ve Ever Read
Bloodthirsty ghosts, sadistic supercomputers, creepy childhood games … Mariana Enríquez, Paul Tremblay, Daisy Johnson and others on the tales that kept them up at night. Read more
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