Award-winning Scottish historian Pettegree offers an abundantly detailed history of bookselling, spanning the past 600 years. As far back as Greek and Roman times, there was a market for handwritten texts, and, even before the invention of printing, doctors, lawyers, and clergymen collected relevant tomes. Gutenberg’s invention, though, fueled the start of a book industry that involved printers, typefounders, binders, publishers, and sellers. Read more
Month: October 2026
The First Major Biography of Cormac McCarthy Is Published
Daughterty…approaches Cormac McCarthy with the patience of a historian and the instincts of a novelist. Rather than reducing McCarthy to the familiar mythology of the reclusive genius wandering the American Southwest, Daugherty reveals the complicated, contradictory man behind the legend … Daugherty illuminates this enigmatic figure, navigating the tension between the ‘hermit of Santa Fe’ and the reality of a man drawn to the theoretical research at the Sante Fe Institute, all while exploring the cost of genius and the enduring, stark brilliance of a singular American voice. Read more
Love Noir? Try Iyamisu and Dark Japanese Crime Novels
If you’re looking for a crime novel on the darker side of the spectrum, translated from Japanese, here are four criminally good reads. Read more
Why Audiobook Walking Clubs Are Taking Off
Audiobook walking clubs are now emerging around the country, turning an activity typically enjoyed solo into a low-pressure social event. For about an hour, everyone listens to a book of their choosing as they walk, then gathers afterward to compare notes, trade recommendations, and—in many cases—make plans to see each other again. It’s a book club without assigned reading, a walking group without racing, and a social activity that allows you to stop socializing whenever you’d like. Read more
Winners of the 2026 Kirkus Prize Revealed
Tayari Jones, Pamela Colloff, and Elizabeth Acevedo are the winners of this year’s Kirkus Prizes, given annually by Kirkus Reviews to works of exceptional merit in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature. Read more
Canadian Poet Anne Carson Wins 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature
Canadian poet and writer Anne Carson, whose work often blends verse, prose, dialogue and translation in a genre-defying mix, won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for what the Swedish Academy called her “bold and inventive oeuvre”. “Crazy, I think they’re all crazy,” Carson told Icelandic broadcaster RUV when asked how she was feeling after learning she had won while on the Arctic island. Read more
Jeffrey Archer, Novelist Whose Real Life Rivaled His Thrillers, Dies at 86
Jeffrey Archer, a best-selling British author, politician, philanthropist, athlete and one-time jailbird whose résumé seesawed between achievement and disgrace, and who inspired abiding public fascination with headline-grabbing accounts, both fictional and personal, of ambition, self-promotion, misbehavior and scandal, died on Monday at his home in London. Read more
Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up
In academic literature, a “sleeping beauty” is a research paper that was neglected when it was first published but found relevance later. Pop icon and author Byrne (How Music Works, 2012, etc.) expands the concept by looking for examples not just in science but in literature, music, technology, economics, and more. Read more
The Final Masterpiece by James Sallis, Author of the Cult Classic ‘Drive’
Reading James Sallis is like reading poetry, or having a dream that is vivid and tactile but yet somehow elusive. That’s the feeling evoked in his last, posthumous novel, Backwater. Though it is ostensibly a police procedural set in a small southern community – a backwater – it is really a series of ruminations about life, death, and music from the perspective of the narrator, a retired cop turned jazz musician named Bishop. Read more
On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe
He was a deeply disturbed man who, Ogden argues, made art not to teach or shape the reader, but to connect with all that was disturbing in us, too. Poe lurched toward the “darkness” and perversity the rest of us shrink from, for no other reason than to bring us within reach of the sublime. Read more
