No assigned reading. No forced discussion. Just you, your book and a roomful of fellow book lovers, quietly reading. Read more
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Category: Miscellaneous
‘A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now’
James Delbourgo’s “A Noble Madness” is a brilliant, droll study in the shifting profile and consistent obsession of the stop-at-nothing, buy-or-die collector. Mr. Delbourgo, a history professor at Rutgers University, finds that the collecting mentality, like most things, divides into ancient and modern. The ancients believed that those who loved too much were possessed by gods; Suetonius wrote that Caligula, who believed he was a god, once ordered his troops to fill their helmets with seashells, the “spoils of the ocean.” We moderns, Mr. Delbourgo argues, have gone from theories of “demonic possession to accusations of superstition, obsession, sexual neurosis, and pathological greed down to the recent invention of the medical term ‘hoarding disorder.’” Read more
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Horror Writers on the Scariest Stories They’ve Ever Read
Bloodthirsty ghosts, sadistic supercomputers, creepy childhood games … Mariana Enríquez, Paul Tremblay, Daisy Johnson and others on the tales that kept them up at night. Read more
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A Smuggled Book Changed His Life. Now He’s Built 500 Prison Libraries.
Reginald Dwayne Betts carjacked a man who was asleep in his car in a parking lot in Fairfax County, Virginia. Betts, who was 16 at the time, was tried as an adult and spent nearly a decade in state prison, much of that time in solitary confinement. Books weren’t allowed in “the hole.” But the men in the prison devised a pulley system using torn sheets and pillowcases to pass books from the general population to people in solitary. “Imagine yourself as a teenager, 17 years old, in solitary confinement, and you’re just calling out, ‘Yo, somebody send me a book,’” Betts said. “Somebody sent me Dudley Randall’s “The Black Poets,” and it radically changed my life.” Betts started writing every day and reading anything he could get his hands on. Books transformed him, he says, revealing that other ways of living were possible. When Betts got out, he earned his bachelor’s degree, then a law degree from Yale Law School. He became a poet and an advocate for prison reform, as well as a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient for his work with his nonprofit Freedom Reads, which installs libraries in prisons across the country. Read more
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Virginia Woolf’s Lost Book is Coming Soon
More than 80 years after her death, a new book by Virginia Woolf will be published next month after the manuscript was discovered in a stately home. Scholars say the book, a collection of three comic stories about a giantess named Violet, is the first significant literary experiment that Woolf completed, at the age of 25, eight years before the publication for her first novel, The Voyage Out. Read more
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Great Fantasy Novels With Unlikely Heroes
Morally ambiguous killers, social outcasts, bumbling misfits and misunderstood monsters take center stage in these thrilling, and deeply human, books. Read more
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Eight (Supposedly) Cursed Books
From a diabolical Bible to a mournful Japanese war poem, here are eight texts that have been blamed for madness, misfortune, and death. Read more
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Is Today’s Self-Help Teaching Everyone to Be a Jerk?
There’s a certain flavor of advice that is dominating the self-help best-seller list. These books have titles like “The Courage to Be Disliked” and “Set Boundaries, Find Peace.” They tell readers not to worry so much about letting people down, not to answer those calls from aggravating friends, not to be afraid of being the villain. This all becomes more alarming when you think of the best-seller list as a mirror of the social moment, which some historians say it may be. Read more
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Spy Novels: A Starter Pack
Interested in espionage fiction, but don’t know where to start? Let our expert guide you. Read more
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It-Girl Literary Heroines Are All Cannibals Now
Inequity is the largest constant in this emerging genre. Almost every female literary cannibal resorts to cooking and eating people because of trauma in her past, and in each case the trauma is indexed to a larger political concern. Read more
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