Some names will be familiar, others new. Of course, no reading list is ever complete, no list ever able to capture the range of our collective experiences as a people. But I chose these, a mix of conventional and unorthodox narratives, to illustrate the scope of our literary capabilities. Read more
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If you believe the headlines, there’s not all that much sex happening right now. We are living, apparently, through a “sex recession”, with young people especially having less. The blame has been pinned on everything from the housing crisis and the pandemic to a backlash to the hook-up culture of the past decade. But there is one place where sex is resolutely on the agenda – in literature. Particularly that written by women. In a new slew of fiction and non-fiction books by female writers exploring the messy intricacies of desire, sex isn’t just a subtext or a brief encounter; but front and centre. Read more
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At the NecronomiCon revelers danced to murder ballads and celebrated all things weird. They even found time to reckon with the writer’s racism. Read more
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With big-budget TV series about to hit streaming services, publishers hope a string of cult novels will find a new audience. Read more
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Curious Cures is a two-year project to conserve more than 180 manuscripts, revealing the ‘precarity of medieval life’ and strangeness of pre-scientific medicine. Read more
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Hey, nerds. Do you have more books than you do friends? Do you ever find yourself explaining the plot of the novel you’re reading to your dog? Are you looking for that special someone to lie next to you in bed in the morning while you ignore each other and read your own books? Turns out there’s an app for that (or there will be—it’s still in early beta). Yep, it’s “Tinder for bookworms“—though to be fair, it isn’t actually a book dating app, but rather a “book meetup app.” It’s called Klerb. Read more
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I asked nine writers to share a photo of a favorite bookshelf (or what social media might refer to as a “shelfie”), explain the organizing principle (if there is one) and tell me a bit about what’s on that shelf. Here’s what they said. Read more
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White sands, blue skies… and lots of books. Applications have opened for what might just be the best job in the world: running a bookshop on a luxury island in the Maldives. Read more
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Whatever you need to do to reestablish a reading habit is a net benefit, and that should extend to what you read, too. That might require divorcing yourself from the notion that books have to be important or educational to be legitimate. “Just give yourself permission to read whatever you’re interested in reading.” Read more
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A project of Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and Oxford University Press, the dictionary will not just collect spellings and definitions. It will also create a historical record and serve as a tribute to the people behind the words, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., the project’s editor in chief and the Hutchins Center’s director. Read more
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