At her family’s home on a Finnish island, young Sophia explores the natural world with her father and grandmother. Adapted from Tove Jansson’s beloved novel, The Summer Book is a delicate account of growing up and growing old. Watch trailer
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[Frances] Wilson is not any old biographer. Her books are intense, eclectic and wildly diversionary, her intelligence rising from their pages like steam – and in Spark, the cleverest and the weirdest of them all, she may have found her ultimate subject … A brilliant book … There is an uncanny closeness between biographer and subject at play here, and I find myself wondering whether Wilson didn’t feel at times as if her manuscript wasn’t a form of automatic writing. Read more
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As interactive, technology-based artworks go, Dial-A-Poem is closer to Alexander Graham Bell than it is to ChatGPT. The brainchild of the artist and poet John Giorno (1936-2019), the project officially kicked off in early 1969, with six jury-rigged phones and answering machines housed at the Architectural League of New York, all connected to the same phone number and each set up with an audiotape that would play once a call came in. Anyone could call the 212 number and hear a randomly assigned poem — though sometimes the recording was a piece of music, a song or a speech — usually introduced by Giorno himself and then read aloud by writers and other cultural luminaries like John Ashbery, William S. Burroughs and Anne Waldman. Read more
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Rosson, who put a fresh spin on the zombie apocalypse trope in the Fever House duology, is equally creative with vampires in this brilliant horror novel set in 1970s Oregon … Rosson expertly balances action and character development to craft an edge of the seat thrill ride. Readers will be hooked. Read more
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Samanta Schweblin is the master of dread. Her stories are part of the growing literary movement that mixes psychological and social realism with touches of horror and suspense; releases such as 2014’s Fever Dream have enchanted and haunted readers. This new collection, Good and Evil and Other Stories, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell, will pull in readers and leave them, shivering, in the dark. Read more
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Damrosch is one of the preeminent literary biographers of our time, and this magnificent biography of Robert Louis Stevenson reveals much about a writer that we think we knew. Read more
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The Library of Congress has announced Arthur Sze as the 25th U.S. poet laureate. Sze has had a decades-long career as a poet, with his work often drawing inspiration from philosophy, science and nature. He’s also an editor and translator of poetry. Sze will start on Oct. 9, taking over from Ada Limón. Read more
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Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare (Canongate Books) has been named the 2025 Wainwright Prize Book of the Year, the world’s leading literary award for nature and conservation writing. Read more
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Morally ambiguous killers, social outcasts, bumbling misfits and misunderstood monsters take center stage in these thrilling, and deeply human, books. Read more
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From a diabolical Bible to a mournful Japanese war poem, here are eight texts that have been blamed for madness, misfortune, and death. Read more
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