Literary highlights include William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the full version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Watty Piper’s The Little Engine that Could, the first four books of the Nancy Drew detective series and The Murder at the Vicarage, Agatha Christie’s first Miss Marple mystery. Read more
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People stop reading in adulthood for lots of reasons. But it’s never too late to turn the page on old habits and start again. Curling up with a good book can reduce stress, increase creativity and boost empathy. A recent analysis of U.S. government data found that the percentage of Americans who read for pleasure during an average day has fallen to 16% in 2023 from 28% in 2004. That includes not just books but audiobooks, e-books and periodicals like magazines. Read more
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The print edition of Merriam-Webster was once a touchstone of authority and stability. Then the internet brought about a revolution. Read more
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So Long, See You Tomorrow has been tipped as the new Stoner – but how did an ‘experiment in empathy’ from 1980 go viral in 2025? Read more
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Tom Wolfe was a fast talker. Eudora Welty had a musical Southern drawl. Kurt Vonnegut’s jokes got belly laughs. Each of these authors once spoke to audiences at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City, which has hosted some of the most celebrated writers of the past several generations, from Isaac Asimov to Anaïs Nin and Kazuo Ishiguro to Margaret Atwood. Now, the Poetry Center has digitized audio recordings of its literary events stretching back to 1949 — hundreds of which have never been released before — in a collection that offers a glimpse into history and a taste of what the writers themselves were like in public. Read more
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Pans, glorious pans. No end-of-year roundup would be complete without them. Read more
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Yes, the category is nebulous, but maybe it’s just a matter of mood and great writing. Read more
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Trollope published more than 30 novels during a writing career that began in 1980. Her early works, written under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey, were historical romances, but from the mid-1980s onward, she turned to contemporary fiction, a shift that would define her reputation. Read more
The decision made this winter by ReaderLink to stop distributing mass market paperback books at the end of 2025 was the latest blow to a format that has seen its popularity decline for years. According to Circana BookScan, mass market unit sales plunged from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million in 2024, a drop of about 84%, and sales this year through October were about 15 million units. But for many years, the mass market paperback was “the most popular reading format,” notes Stuart Applebaum, former Penguin Random House EVP of corporate communications. Read more
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Madeleine Wickham, known for writing the bestselling novel Confessions of a Shopaholic under her pen name Sophie Kinsella, has died aged 55. Wickham, dubbed “the queen of romantic comedy” by novelist Jojo Moyes, wrote more than 30 books for adults, children and teenagers, which have sold more than 45m copies. Read more
