Benjamin Wood is one of the finest British novelists of his generation, but you’ve probably never heard of him. The 44-year-old author from Stockport has written five psychologically suspenseful books with stories that are so unique and specific, it feels like they must come directly from real life. Read more
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Today, when “subversive” is the standard accolade for a campus poet, English’s book is a bracing reminder that, not so long ago, forbidden literature really could help tip the balance of history. He persuasively argues that the ferment in Poland, fueled in part by Minden’s cultural contraband, was a catalyst for the chain reaction that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of other Eastern Bloc governments. “Soft power” wasn’t so soft. Read more
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At the heart of Bookish is Gabriel Book, played with trademark wit and warmth by [Mark] Gatiss himself. Gabriel isn’t your average sleuth. He’s an antiquarian bookshop owner in post-war London, 1946 to be exact, whose life is as layered as the tomes lining his shelves. Imagine Sherlock Holmes with a love of first editions and a penchant for quoting obscure poets, and you’re halfway there. Gabriel’s shop on Archangel Lane is more than a business, it’s a haven for the lost, the curious, and, as it turns out, those with a knack for trouble. Read more Watch trailer
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Annie Bot by Sierra Greer is “a tightly focused first-person account of a robot designed to be the perfect companion, who struggles to become free,” said chair of judges, the academic Andrew M Butler. Read more
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Victoria Amelina wins with her unfinished book Looking at Women Looking at War while Donal Ryan takes the award for political fiction with an intimate portrait of an Irish town. Read more
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Federal judge William Alsup ruled that it was legal for Anthropic to train its AI models on published books without the authors’ permission. This marks the first time that the courts have given credence to AI companies’ claim that fair use doctrine can absolve AI companies from fault when they use copyrighted materials to train large language models (LLMs) … In this particular case, Bartz v. Anthropic, the group of plaintiff authors also brought into question the manner in which Anthropic attained and stored their works. According to the lawsuit, Anthropic sought to create a “central library” of “all the books in the world” to keep “forever.” But millions of these copyrighted books were downloaded for free from pirate sites, which is unambiguously illegal. While the judge granted that Anthropic’s training of these materials was a fair use, the court will hold a trial about the nature of the “central library.” Read more
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This month, THE PALM-WINE DRINKARD returns to life in a striking new edition, along with Tutuola’s 1954 follow-up, “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” with introductions by Wole Soyinka and Kaveh Akbar. Originally published under the Evergreen imprint of Grove Press, the books appeared alongside the storied house’s rogues’ gallery of midcentury American and European avant-garde authors like William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. Read more
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The novel follows the story of an office worker in her early thirties who one day stumbles upon all of her colleagues’ private emails and decides to use their gossip to help save her job. Read more
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The Locus Science Fiction Foundation announced the winners in each category of the 2025 Locus Awards on June 21, 2025, during the Locus Awards Weekend. Read more
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Megan Greenwell was the editor in chief of Deadspin when it was acquired in 2019 by a Boston-based private equity firm. After three months of watching her new bosses make what seemed to her to be boneheaded decisions, she quit. Two months later, the staff followed her out the door. Within five years, the once popular online sports magazine known for its irreverent reporting had been sold to an obscure Maltese website.
Stunned by what she witnessed, the veteran journalist was determined to get to the bottom of a little understood, lightly regulated industry that owns hospitals, day care centers, supermarket chains, newspapers, commercial and residential real estate, and much more. The big names are Blackstone, the Carlyle Group, Apollo Global Management, KKR and Cerberus Capital Management. But what, she wondered, do they actually do?
The result of her inquiry is “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream,” a deeply reported, briskly paced and highly disturbing account of how the private equity industry has “reshaped the American economy to serve its own interests, creating a new class of billionaires while stripping ordinary people of their livelihoods, their health care, their homes, and their sense of security.” Read more
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