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A Booklover’s Guide to Texas

The written word is on a hot streak, despite the naysayers who claim people don’t read anymore, who insist print media is dead, and who want us to believe AI is better at telling our stories than we are. As generations young and old begin to reject the digital realm for the analog world, the wholesome pleasure of diving into a good book is trending upward.

This is especially true in Texas, where a friendly small business economy has spawned an influx of independent bookstores. According to the American Booksellers Association, U.S. independent bookstores have increased 70% since 2020, from 1,916 to 3,218, and Texas remains a driver of this growth. In 2024, the ABA recorded 323 store openings, including 21 in Texas, and the positive trend continued in 2025. It’s not just about the books; it’s the community these spaces cultivate. Read more

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Banned Books From Ireland’s Room of ‘Evil Literature’ Finally See the Light of Day

For almost a century, an Irish government building in the heart of Dublin has hosted a secret sanctum: the banned books room. The department of justice, on St Stephen’s Green, did not grant public access, because the shelves contained 12,000 books deemed indecent or obscene. It was a graveyard for titles condemned by the Censorship of Publications Board, a guardian of public morals which guillotined anything that smelled of sex or other corruptions …

Banned titles included classics such as Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Behan’s Borstal Boy and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as well as pulpy paperbacks with titles such as The Baby Doll Murders, A Doctor and his Mistress and Torrid Tale of a Wicked Town. Scholarly tomes such as Sexual Life in England Past and Present and arcane works such as The Collected Works of Pierre Louÿs, a Belgian poet of the early 20th century, also ended up in what was informally called the banned books room. Read more

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Was One of the Great Novels of the Enlightenment Written by a Man Who Thought He Was a Werewolf?

A young Walloon officer called Alphonse van Worden travels through the Sierra Morena on his way to Madrid to join the Spanish army. Along the way he has an erotic encounter with two demonic Moorish sisters, falls foul of shape-shifting apparitions and is tested by a Jewish Kabbalist attempting to use mystical formulas to control spirits and decipher the universe. All these things happen in what might be one of the least-known great novels of the European canon, an encyclopedic roman-monde written more than 200 years ago called The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Structured like a Chinese box, with narratives nested within narratives, the book spans a period from the birth of Jesus Christ up to the beginning of the 19th century, and evokes places ranging from the Mediterranean and north Africa to Mexico, Peru and the Philippines. Salman Rushdie once described it in the Guardian as redolent of “the most brilliant modern novels, as if it were written yesterday”, while the curators of a new exhibition in Switzerland hail it as “a western version of One Thousand and One Nights”. Read more

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Simon Winchester, Author of ‘The Professor and the Madman,’ Has Died

Simon Winchester, a British-American journalist, author and broadcaster, who traded an early career as a geologist exploring East Africa for an even more peripatetic résumé covering stories from Northern Ireland’s bloodstained Troubles to Watergate-era Washington, the Falklands war and China, died on Tuesday on his farm in Sandisfield, Mass., according to his wife, Setsuko Sato. Read more

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‘Blockbuster’ History of Alexander the Great Wins £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize

The book traces Alexander’s life from 336BC, when at 20 he took charge of a near-bankrupt kingdom and a barely controllable army, through his conquest of the Persian empire, to his death in Babylon aged 32. Richardson drew on more than a decade of research across four continents, and translated sources from 12 ancient languages himself. He also folds in recent archaeological finds, including newly decoded records kept by Babylonian astronomers of Alexander’s time. Read more

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A History of Bookselling from the Dawn of Print to the Twenty-First Century

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