Author: GR

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Did You Know Mapmakers Used to Make Up Fake Towns in Order to Catch Plagiarists?

Incidentally, this concept where creators add subtle little incorrect details to protect their copyright isn’t just limited to maps. You can (or, if they’re doing it right, you can’t) find made-up words in dictionaries, fictional entries in encyclopedias, fake phone numbers in phone books, non-existent businesses in business directories, meaningless strings in software code, extra screws in architectural plans, bad advice in medical textbooks and glaring factual errors in light-hearted books about maps. Read more

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‘The Pornographic Delicatessen’ Wins Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year

The Pornographic Delicatessen edged early bookies’ favourite Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder by a mere two votes – and it finished only four ahead of Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences. Read more

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‘Languages of Home’ by John Edgar Wideman

Novelist, essayist, and critic Wideman delivers a profound, career-spanning collection of essays on literature, sports, and culture … Incisive and enthralling, the collection puts Wideman’s keen critical eye and cultural awareness on full display. The result is an essential chronicle of the American experience. Read more

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Here Are the Winners of the 2025 National Book Awards

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 Wins the 2025 Giller Prize

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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‘The History of Money’ by David McWilliams

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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‘Flesh’ Wins 2025 Booker Prize

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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‘There Is No Antimemetics Division’ by qntm

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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