One of the world’s most highly regarded authors, Saunders has now been welcomed into an elevated — and most dignified — pantheon. The National Book Foundation announced Friday that it has named him this year’s winner of a National Book Award for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters, a lifetime achievement medal given to Toni Morrison, Robert Caro and Edmund White among others. Read more
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Author Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, 82, died August 31, 2025. She was a prolific author who wrote more than 80 books, most in the horror, SF, and mystery genres, and was best known for her sprawling Saint-Germain historical vampire series. Read more
Aishe, a Uyghur woman trained by her military father, migrates to New York City where she finds herself laboring in Chinatown’s underground kitchens. She fatefully encounters Skinner, a young American soldier who has just returned from three tours in the Middle East. While falling in love, they discover the possibility of a better life together than the ones they believed they were destined to live alone. Watch trailer
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There’s a certain flavor of advice that is dominating the self-help best-seller list. These books have titles like “The Courage to Be Disliked” and “Set Boundaries, Find Peace.” They tell readers not to worry so much about letting people down, not to answer those calls from aggravating friends, not to be afraid of being the villain. This all becomes more alarming when you think of the best-seller list as a mirror of the social moment, which some historians say it may be. Read more
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Alongside H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and Nikola Tesla’s claim to have intercepted an extraterrestrial communication, Lowell’s fantastical lectures depicting “the pathos and heroism of this great civilization fighting to survive” sparked a Mars craze, which included comics, a new dance (“A Signal from Mars”), and claims from some individuals to have visited the Red Planet as “disembodied souls.” Baron astutely examines the societal shifts that account for the Martian fixation, among them the rise of a yellow press that craved sensationalistic stories, a new wave of exploration and invention (the Wright brothers’ flights; expeditions to the North Pole), and divisive earthbound struggles like the Spanish-American War that rendered Mars—an imagined “Planet of Peace”—as a symbol of hope. While Baron points to the dangers of conspiracy theories and bunk science, he also presents the saga as one of infectious optimism that inspired subsequent generations of science fiction writers and scientists. It’s an enthrallingly bizarre and surprisingly poignant account of humankind’s limitless willingness to believe. Read more
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Interested in espionage fiction, but don’t know where to start? Let our expert guide you. Read more
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Inequity is the largest constant in this emerging genre. Almost every female literary cannibal resorts to cooking and eating people because of trauma in her past, and in each case the trauma is indexed to a larger political concern. Read more
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Developer neoludic games celebrates the release of Tiny Bookshop, a new sim that sees you running a small seaside secondhand bookshop. You’ll collect books across different genres in an attempt to satisfy the reading habits of your customers, accumulate decorations for your shop that also affect the mood and purchasing tendencies of your customers, and more. Watch trailer
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The book, originally titled De Re Coquinaria, is attributed to Apicius and may date to the 1st century A.C.E., though the oldest surviving copy comes from the end of the Empire, sometime in the 5th century. As with most ancient texts, copied over centuries, redacted, amended, and edited, the original cookbook is shrouded in mystery. Read more
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On Saturday, the 2025 Hugo Awards were presented at Seattle WorldCon, the 83rd World Science Fiction Convention. Read more
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