We were less interested in works that are supposedly influential and more in ones that have endured, with ideas that are still relevant today, stories that have captured something essential about technology, and writing that’s made us stand up in our seats. These books don’t project a single vision of what tech is but continue to challenge what it can be. Read more
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The website Goodreads has become an essential avenue for building readership, but the same features that help generate excitement can also backfire. Read more
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Let’s be honest: What passes for funny in book marketing falls beneath the standard just about everywhere else. The number of published works that say “Hilarious!” on their cover but turn out to be merely quirky—or the dreaded wacky—is enough to make a reader cynical. Read more
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The poet and novelist Luis Alberto Urrea thinks the borderlands are the most interesting book in the world, being rewritten every day. These are his recommendations. Read more
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The writing, in Spanish and Portuguese, is radical and idiosyncratic, teeming with technoshamans and futuristic Indigenous aesthetics while also influenced by the region’s European and African heritages. Troubled histories and the urgency of the present inspire it, too, with themes of colonization, the climate crisis and migration. Read more
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Here, in no particular order, are just a few of history’s most influential tomes—and how they made humanity look at things in a new light. Read more
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The Mexican American’s new poem will be engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper mission spacecraft and travel 1.8 billion miles — and the public can send their names along. Read more
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Over the last five years, I’ve read or reread 1,001 books of fiction in my project to create a literary map of this country. The idea for this “library of America” was born in 2016, when the news and the elections told of a country being irrevocably divided by politics, by ideas of red and blue, by arguments over who is American and who is not. For me, those arguments ignored the vast geography of our stories and novels, the ways people search for belonging, leave home or stay, and how every state is really many places. Read more
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A Northern California man returned a book to his local library this month — an astounding 96 years after the book was originally due. The book, “A History of the United States” by Benson Lossing, was checked out in 1927 and is not in perfect shape, but the St. Helena Public Library was happy to receive it and spared the man what otherwise could have been about $1,700 in late fees. Read more
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Héctor Tobar is a son of Los Angeles, a city of “perpetual cultural mixing.” Here, he guides readers through the books and writers that cut through the city’s layers. Read more
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