Blog

Madame Boavary
A Book Worth Knowing: Why We’re Still Reading “Madame Bovary”
A Book Worth Knowing continues with a thirteenth title: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, a novel that got its author put on trial for obscenity and changed what fiction was allowed... Read more...
Jason Bourne
The Thriller Writer Who Became a Franchise After Death
Robert Ludlum died on March 12, 2001. Jason Bourne kept running. Behind the new books was a plan—and a succession of writers asked to keep a dead man’s most famous... Read more...
Crime and Punishment
A Book Worth Knowing: Why We’re Still Reading “Crime and Punishment”
A Book Worth Knowing continues with a twelfth title: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a novel that spends far less time on the murder than on what happens inside a... Read more...
“The Sun Also Rises” at 100: The Summer Party That Made Hemingway Famous
“The Sun Also Rises” at 100: The Summer Party That Made Hemingway Famous
A hundred years ago, a young unknown writer turned one wild week in Spain, and the friends he fell out with, into the novel that defined a generation In July... Read more...
Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels at 300: The Dangerous Book We Gave to Children
Three centuries on, Jonathan Swift’s masterpiece is still mocking the powerful, and the readers who laugh at them If you want to make a dangerous book harmless, turn it into... Read more...
The Fake Hitler Diaries That Fooled the Experts
The Fake Hitler Diaries That Fooled the Experts
A huge scoop, millions of dollars, a world-famous historian, and a forgery so clumsy it had the wrong initials on the cover On April 25, 1983, hundreds of reporters crowded... Read more...
Anna Karenina
A Book Worth Knowing: Why We’re Still Reading “Anna Karenina”
A Book Worth Knowing continues with an eleventh title: Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a novel that follows one woman’s ruin and one man’s quiet search for meaning side by side,... Read more...
Spycatcher
The Book Britain Tried to Ban
An ex-spy, a furious government, a global publishing battle, and the spectacular failure of censorship. In November 1986, in a Sydney courtroom, the most powerful civil servant in Britain took... Read more...
Pride and Prejudice
A Book Worth Knowing: Why We’re Still Reading “Pride and Prejudice”
A Book Worth Knowing continues with a tenth title: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a comedy of manners that turned two people’s bad first impression of each other into one... Read more...
Anne Carson
The Writers Who Never Won the Nobel Prize
Tolstoy, Joyce, Proust, and Woolf all missed out. Then this year, the prize went to a poet many readers had never heard of. On Thursday morning, Anne Carson was in... Read more...
Amazon China
How Amazon Lost China
The world's most powerful online retailer bet on the world’s biggest market and walked away with almost nothing In the summer of 2004, Amazon was hungry for China. More than... Read more...
Hamlet
A Book Worth Knowing: Why We’re Still Reading “Hamlet”
A Book Worth Knowing continues with a ninth title, and its first play: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the most quoted piece of writing in the English language after the Bible. A... Read more...