“A history of an “unruly appendage”, a look at the sadly neglected post-war Montreal erotic art scene and a scientific tome tackling whether fish can recognise themselves in a mirror are among the six shortlistees in The Bookseller’s Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year 2025.” - The Bookseller (UK)
“The Children’s Booker Prize, offering £50,000 (roughly $67,000) for the best fiction written for readers aged eight to 12, … will launch in 2026, with the first winner announced in early 2027. It will be decided by a mixed panel of adult and child judges, a first for a Booker award.” - The Guardian
“Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems, 1936–1995, to be published on 6 November, brings together decades of work that Murdoch largely kept private, stored for years in a chest in her Oxford home.” - The Guardian
“It would be hard to find another nation as serious about its language. In Lithuania, one misspelled word can turn a politician into a clown; a misplaced comma can be enough to cancel a date. … Yet people often say, ‘If only that book/song/movie were in English, it would be a hit.’” - Literary Hub
The most common qualms, BISG reports involve “inadequate controls around the use of copyrighted material (86 percent), hallucinations (84 percent), AI-generated books flooding platforms (81 percent), and in accurate, false, or biased training data (79 percent). -Publishing Perspectives
“Drafted in the decade before To Kill a Mockingbird, after Lee had first moved to New York City in 1949, the stories feature some of the characters and settings she would soon make famous and reveal some of the contradictions and conflicts she would spend her life trying to resolve.” - The Guardian
The founder: “I had friends who wrote award-winning books and couldn't get their books into D.C. bookstores because they were smaller presses, or they didn't have a mass appeal. … And that always seemed wrong to me.” - NPR
Most observers knew that Saul Bellow was no saint, especially after reading his greatest novel, the quasi-autobiographical Herzog. Bellow’s portrait of his protagonist’s wife, a stand-in for his soon-to-be-ex, is very unflattering, but evidence now shows that Bellow himself was far more cruel and violent toward her in real life. - Slate (Yahoo!)
Nowadays, we can unearth bones, extract DNA, even map ancient migrations, but only in myths can we glimpse the inner lives of our forebears—their fears and longings, their sense of wonder and dread. Linguists have reconstructed dead languages. Why not try to do the same for lost stories? - The New Yorker
“The business made a loss from operations of $41.8m in the year ending 29 December 2024 and a total net loss before taxes of $48.1m. This followed a reported loss of more than $30m in 2023. In the (first half of) this year, the (newspaper) made a further $17.3m loss from operations.” - Press Gazette (UK)
A recent study published by the Urban Libraries Council explores the idea that libraries can draw people to city centers that have been suffering from the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. - Bloomberg
“In 2006, when I came home all enthusiastic about his work, he still had no UK publisher. ... The view in London was that he was too difficult; no publisher could take the risk.” (The ill-chosen question was at the Edinburgh Book Festival five years later.) - The Guardian
For many ordinary readers, the idea of entering a fictional world constantly teetering on the edge of a revelation that is always imminent but concealed, in which words pace ceaselessly around reference, and whose favored tool is the long, unstopped sentence, one that takes, say, four hundred pages to... - The New Yorker
“Devotees of her cult professed to find her restoring a pristine freshness and rhythm to language. Medical authorities compared her effusions to the rantings of the insane.” - BookForum
Fiona Benson, an editor of Exeter University’s Ukrainian Wartime Poetry Project, was invited to BookForum in Lviv by Arthur Dron’, a poet and war hero. On the second day, a siren sounded, everyone went down into a bomb shelter, and Russian missiles struck. - The Guardian
