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The Waste Land
A Book Worth Knowing: Why We’re Still Reading “The Waste Land”
A Book Worth Knowing continues with a fourth title, and its first poem: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, still the most argued-over poem of the twentieth century. A crowd flows... Read more...
A Promised Land
The $10 Million Memoir
Why publishers pay enormous advances to celebrities, and why the economics don't always make sense. In the summer of 2009, Sarah Palin had just resigned as governor of Alaska. Her... Read more...
Mary Shelley and the Problem of Playing God
Mary Shelley and the Problem of Playing God
She turned a ghost story into a warning about invention, abandonment and the human urge to create what it cannot control. In the wet summer of 1816, an eighteen-year-old Mary... Read more...
Mary Shelley
5 Books That Prove Mary Shelley Is a Visionary of Romantic Horror
Mary Shelley has become so synonymous with Frankenstein that it is easy to forget she was, in every sense, a working writer: a professional who produced historical novels, dystopian fiction, travel... Read more...
The Sound and the Fury
A Book Worth Knowing: Why We’re Still Reading “The Sound and the Fury”
A Book Worth Knowing continues with a third title: William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, a novel that makes you work for every page and rewards you for it.... Read more...
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...