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5 Books That Prove Gustave Flaubert Is the Master of Modern Realism
5 Books That Prove Gustave Flaubert Is the Master of Modern Realism
Gustave Flaubert had a cruelly precise eye. He saw how easily people confuse desire with destiny, money with happiness, and respectable language with moral substance, and then he built novels... Read more...
Simon & Schuster
The Merger That Didn’t Happen
What the failed Penguin Random House–Simon & Schuster deal revealed about the publishing business In publishing, mergers are usually presented as matters of scale. Two companies become one. Costs supposedly... Read more...
Émile Zola
Émile Zola and the Fine Art of Airing Dirty Laundry
He made the dirt beneath respectable society impossible to ignore and then used a newspaper to make the French Republic confront its own. On January 13, 1898, Paris awoke to... Read more...
The Metamorphosis
A Book Worth Knowing: Why We’re Still Reading “The Metamorphosis”
A Book Worth Knowing returns with a second title: Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, a book so strange it gave us its own word. Some books are famous for their plot. The... Read more...
Book Publishing
What Publishers Actually Do and Why Readers Misunderstand Them
The complicated business behind the simple act of putting a book on a shelf To most readers, publishing looks deceptively simple. An author writes a book. A publisher prints it.... Read more...
Allan Janik
In Memoriam: Allan Janik (1941–2026)
We lost a dear friend of Casa Carlini this year. Allan Janik died on March 22, 2026, at the age of 84, after a prolonged illness. The philosophical world will... Read more...
Heart of Darkness
A Book Worth Knowing: Why We’re Still Reading “Heart of Darkness”
A Book Worth Knowing is a weekly look at books that have shaped how we read, think, and argue about the world. Each week, we revisit one title and consider... Read more...
Apple Ebook
The E-Book War: How Apple and Amazon Fought Over the Future of Reading
For years, the publishing industry saw digital books coming but had no idea who would end up controlling them. That question exploded into open conflict in January 2010, when Apple... Read more...
Mark Twain
The Measure of Twain
How a Missouri printer’s apprentice sounded the depths of a nation while making it laugh Every country invents the writer it needs. America’s was a riverboat pilot who never finished... Read more...
The Prize That Can Change a Life
The Prize That Can Change a Life
How the Booker Prize reshaped publishing Every autumn, a jury gathers, an envelope is opened, and one novel wins. Within hours, bookstores reorder copies, media outlets cover the announcement, and... Read more...
5 Books That Prove Mark Twain Is the Sharpest Satirist in American Literature
5 Books That Prove Mark Twain Is the Sharpest Satirist in American Literature
Mark Twain wrote as if he were always one eye ahead of the crowd. He could be uproarious and wise, homespun and ruthless, sentimental and deeply skeptical—all in the same... Read more...
Salman Rushdie The Satanic Verses
The Book That Shook the World
When The Satanic Verses became an international political event On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie walked onto a stage in Chautauqua, New York, to give a lecture... Read more...