Year: 2026

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On the Booming Field of Biographies of Characters From Literature

Following Turner’s study of the Wife of Bath, similar books have hit shelves covering the lives and afterlives of Juliet (from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), Bigger Thomas (from Richard Wright’s Native Son), Jim (from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn), Haman (from the biblical book of Esther), Hannibal Lecter (from a series of Thomas Harris novels and films, most famously The Silence of the Lambs), and finally Margaret of Anjou (our own contribution to the burgeoning genre). Still others are forthcoming—the scholar James Shapiro is apparently at work on a biography of Shakespeare’s Othello. Read more

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Winner of Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Revealed

The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths, which follows a detective working for a time-travelling police cold case team, has been named crime novel of the year. The book is the first in a new series and sees investigator Ali Dawson travel to Victorian London in 1850 to explore a series of killings that have 21st century consequences for politicians and her own family. Read more

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‘Catch the Devil’ by Pamela Colloff

Paul Skalnik, writes journalist and debut author Colloff, “had an instinct for what people wanted to hear,” an essential talent for a successful con man. And successful Skalnik was: He married nine times, sometimes simultaneously, and bilked his wives and countless other people out of money, cars, jewelry, real estate, whatever he could steal. He did so while claiming to be many things that he was not: an ace Marine Corps fighter pilot who had been shot down over Vietnam, a wealthy lawyer temporarily short of cash thanks to big investments, a University of Texas star football player grounded by injury, a C-suite captain of industry. Somehow people fell for it, right and left. But more than that, and at a more depraved level of pathology, Skalnik sexually assaulted numerous women and girls, including a “slight and freckled seventh grader.” All these crimes added up to a constant series of jail and prison terms, and there, Colloff chronicles, Skalnik found his truest métier as an informant, pinning murders, drug trafficking charges, and countless other crimes on fellow inmates whom he swore under testimony had confessed to him. Read more

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‘It Will Come Back to You’ by Sigrid Nunez

One of our best, smartest, funniest authors has just published her first collection of short stories at age seventy-five … The volume mixes tone and content: its easy intimacy and impression of casualness exist in fascinating counterpoint to its philosophical heft, existential probing, and sagacious maturity. These stories can be at once effervescent and weighty, straightforward and unsettling, hilarious and eerie … Nunez’s capacity to startle, surprise, even shock her readers is deployed to extraordinary effect in many of the stories collected here. We never end up where we began with a Nunez story … Nunez’s fiction doesn’t shy away from embittering things or from confronting grief head-on, even as it offers its readers humor, warmth, sweetness — comfort in the wake of the truth. Read more

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