The summer afternoon was hot, but no one in the queue seemed bothered. Dozens were patiently waiting to enter Shakespeare and Company, a storied bookshop perched on the left bank of the Seine opposite Notre Dame cathedral. “That’s where Shakespeare wrote for a while,” a passerby informed her friends. No one corrected her—discretion being the better part of valour and all. “The myth-telling is fascinating,” says Sylvia Whitman, who runs the English-language bookshop with her partner. “It adds to the house of stories that a bookshop can be.” She has heard it all: that Shakespeare, who never left England, resided here, or that Sylvia Plath, another poet, founded it. In fact, Shakespeare and Company was launched by Ms Whitman’s father, George, 75 years ago this month (first under the name Le Mistral). It is probably the most famous bookshop in the world, enjoying a halo from its proximity to some of literature’s patron saints. Around 2,000-3,000 people visit each day—nearly 1m a year—spurred by the shop’s hundreds of thousands of social-media followers. It claims more impressive screen credits than many actors, having appeared in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”, Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunset” and a French film, “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life”. A hit TV series, “Emily in Paris”, asked to feature it, but Ms Whitman declined. The bookshop already contends with so many selfie-snappers. Read more
Adaptation of ‘Late Fame’ by Arthur Schnitzler Is in Theaters Now
Ed Saxberger, a forgotten New York poet, works in the post office. After an eager and flattering young admirer appears on his doorstep, Saxberger is beckoned into a coterie of twentysomething admirers who anoint him as a rediscovered genius. Intoxicated by the attention — and by the alluring presence of Gloria, the group’s “tragic heroine” — Saxberger gradually reckons with the authenticity of his newfound poetic circle. This thoughtful, witty film is a wistful yet unromantic look at a lost idea of downtown New York. Watch trailer
Wendell Berry, Writer Who Extolled America’s Agrarian Past, Dies at 92
Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer who plowed his fields behind Belgian draft horses and wrote lyrical poems, novels and essays — mostly in pencil and without electric light — that explored his elegiac visions of the life and death of agrarian America, died on Monday at his home in Port Royal, Ky. Read more
2026 Hugo, Lodestar & Astounding Awards Winners
The winners of the Hugo Awards, the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, and the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book were announced on August 30, 2026 by LAcon V, the 84th World Science Fiction Convention. Read more
Dolly Parton’s Children’s Literacy Legacy
Beloved entertainment icon Dolly Parton, who died at age 80 on August 25 after facing cancer, was a woman of many talents—country music superstar, entrepreneur, and philanthropist among them. But she took particular pride in her role as a fierce children’s literacy advocate and founder of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a program that gifts enrolled children one book per month from birth to age five. The program recently celebrated its 31st year and to date has given away more than 330 million books to more than three million registered children across the U.S., Canada, U.K., Republic of Ireland, and Australia. Read more
How a ’70s Improv Book Became Silicon Valley’s Required Reading
“…It may be true that transforming people’s perceptions of what is possible can help them think more imaginatively. But the tech world’s fascination with improv and theater also reveals a darker philosophy. If all of life is a performance, there are few limits on those willing to take charge of the scene. If nothing is truly real but people’s perceptions — perceptions that a canny actor or founder has the capacity to alter — then misleading investors as to the viability of a start-up, or spreading viral conspiracy theories through social media to affect an election outcome can be reimagined not as lying but as alternate reality-formation, the canny creation of truth by consensus. Distort reality intensely enough, and there’s no such thing as reality at all. And in an era where artificial intelligence can easily conflate collective thought with objective truth, tech founders and those who buy their products are less tethered to the real world. Read more
‘The Whisper Man’ is Coming to Netflix On Aug. 28th
When his eight-year-old son is abducted, a widowed crime writer looks to his estranged father, a retired former police detective, for help, only to discover a connection with the decades-old case of a convicted serial killer known as “The Whisper Man.” Watch trailer
Massachusetts Passes Freedom to Read Law
After years of work by the state legislature and literary advocates, Massachusetts became the 13th state to pass a freedom to read law. Read more
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The Art of the Obituary
…a wry, witty, deeply researched survey of the art and history of the obituary, reflecting on why obituaries matter and what it’s like to be charged with writing them … Roberts ponders the origins of the obituary, muses on the peculiarities of word choice (“In some newspapers, people still ‘pass’ or meet their ‘demise’ or ‘untimely end’ ”), and explores how different publications decide who will be memorialized in their pages and how to address their cause of death. He confides that landing on a succinct description of the latter is often challenging, as illustrated by a list of “actual, incredulous comments from Times obit writers” that includes gems like “Can we say, ‘In a crocodile accident’?” Read more
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Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence
South African journalist de Greef (Poacher), who has spent years reporting on global psychedelic movements, delivers a chilling saga about a former doctor who spearheaded the rise of toad smoking in the 2010s.
Part exposé, part Mexican travelogue, the narrative profiles Octavio Rettig, who claimed that he cured himself of cocaine addiction by smoking the dried secretions from the Sonoran Desert toad in 2012. The author details how Rettig stripped the rituals of the Indigenous Seri peoples for parts, claiming that the Seris had a long history of smoking the secretions. In addition to the trippy high the practice achieved, Rettig claimed the “medicine” could cure suicidal tendencies, PTSD, and alcoholism, drawing huge crowds to Sonora to attend his rituals. But even at the pinnacle of Rettig’s fame, stories circulated about people dying—including Rettig’s girlfriend—during those rituals. As de Greef digs into those deaths and Rettig’s motives, he takes the narrative on intriguing side quests, including a look at the heaps of corporate money being poured into the development of synthetic toad venom. Propulsive and rigorously reported, this wild work of true crime grips from first page to last. Read more
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