Blog

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...
Lost in Translation
Lost in Translation
Why translated literature remains marginalized in America Walk into almost any American bookstore and you'll find shelves that seem to span the globe—covers evoking Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Warsaw, Lagos. Look... Read more...
The Constitution
America at 250: Tested, Not Trumped
America turns 250 today, but the mood is not very celebratory. The Trump administration has not honored the Constitution so much as pushed against it. That shows how fragile American... Read more...
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann and the Seductions of Decadence
He was the high priest of European culture who chronicled its decline with such elegance that the end often looked more beautiful than the beginning. In 1933, Thomas Mann was... Read more...
Gideon Levy
Gideon Levy: The Man Who Won’t Let the Occupation Be Occupied Territory
He was supposed to cover “the territories.” Somewhere along the way, the territories started covering him. Every week, while most Israelis encountered the West Bank through security briefings and blurred... Read more...
Penguin Books
The Sixpence That Changed Publishing Forever
In 1935, a man stood on an English railway platform with nothing to read. The newsstand offered the usual fare: newspapers, magazines, pulp. Good books existed, but they were expensive,... Read more...
James Joyce with his publisher Sylvia Beach in her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, in Paris, 1922.
The Book That Had to Go on Trial
How Ulysses transformed censorship law and redefined what publishers could print In December 1933, a federal judge in New York was asked to rule on a question that courts had... Read more...