When author Rabih Alameddine accepted his National Book Award for Fiction on Wednesday night, he thanked his agent, his editor and early readers of his work. He also thanked his psychiatrist, his drug dealers and “all gastrointestinal doctors.”
“I guarantee you that I wouldn’t have been able to write a single word in the last 10 years without their help,” he said. “There would have been no movement.” Read more
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Souvankham Thammavongsa has won the 2025 Giller Prize for her novel “Pick a Colour,” an intimate story that follows a boxer-turned-manicurist over the course of a single summer day at her nail salon. The Laotian-Canadian writer claimed the $100,000 prize for literary fiction on Monday night, at a gala ceremony hosted at the Park Hyatt Toronto. This is Thammavongsa’s second Giller and comes after she previously won the prize in 2020 for the novel “How to Pronounce Knife.” She joins a small group of writers who have won the Giller twice, including Alice Munro and Esi Edugyan. Read more
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No assigned reading. No forced discussion. Just you, your book and a roomful of fellow book lovers, quietly reading. Read more
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Religion, technology, power, and the rise and fall of entire empires are tied up with economics and commerce in McWilliams’ excellent whistle-stop tour of the way money has shaped world history. Covering centuries of innovations—from an ancient baboon femur called the Ishango Bone, possibly used for accounting, to digital-age solutions like M-Pesa, a service in Africa that turns mobile-phone credit into money—it’s a blast of a book. Read more
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Szalay is a Hungarian-British author. Flesh is his sixth novel. In 2016, he was shortlisted for the Booker prize for his book All That Man Is. He told the Booker Prize that he was inspired to write Flesh after his own time living between Hungary and England, and noticing the cultural and economic divides that exist within contemporary Europe. “I also wanted to write about life as a physical experience, about what it’s like to be a living body in the world.” Read more
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Speculative fiction and the funkier corners of digital culture go together like chocolate and peanut butter—see Ryan North’s crowdsourced Machine of Death series or the novels based on the podcast Welcome to Night Vale for prime examples. Here, qntm (aka British author Sam Hughes) offers a legally sanitized but fantastically composed take on the SCP Foundation, a collaborative online fiction project that blends horror and SF tropes with satire and literary experimentation. Read more
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Death by Lightning dramatizes the stranger-than-fiction true story of 20th U.S. President James Garfield, and admirer Charles Guiteau, who assassinated him. Watch trailer
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The Baillie Gifford is widely regarded as the UK’s most prestigious prize for nonfiction. It is the first major literary award Garner has won in the UK, though she is one of Australia’s most celebrated authors, where her honours include the 2023 Australian Society of Authors medal, the 2019 Australia Council award for lifetime achievement in literature, and the 2006 Melbourne prize for literature. She also won the 2016 Windham-Campbell literature prize administered by Yale University. Read more
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Fans lined up from Orpheum Theater’s entrance all the way down the block to the VooDoo Mart liquor store on Canal Street Saturday, awaiting an opportunity to finally bid farewell to the late Anne Rice, the New Orleans-born queen of Goth literature. No one since Marie Laveau contributed more to New Orleans’ supernatural mystique than she. Read more
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James Delbourgo’s “A Noble Madness” is a brilliant, droll study in the shifting profile and consistent obsession of the stop-at-nothing, buy-or-die collector. Mr. Delbourgo, a history professor at Rutgers University, finds that the collecting mentality, like most things, divides into ancient and modern. The ancients believed that those who loved too much were possessed by gods; Suetonius wrote that Caligula, who believed he was a god, once ordered his troops to fill their helmets with seashells, the “spoils of the ocean.” We moderns, Mr. Delbourgo argues, have gone from theories of “demonic possession to accusations of superstition, obsession, sexual neurosis, and pathological greed down to the recent invention of the medical term ‘hoarding disorder.’” Read more
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