“Szalay’s sixth work of fiction traces the life of one man, István, from his youth to midlife. The judges ‘had never read anything quite like it’, said panel chair Roddy Doyle, who won the prize in 1993. ‘It is, in many ways, a dark book, but it is a joy to read.’” - The Guardian
Academic critics read closely this year's Booker Prize finalists: Each novel has emotional temperature and structural ambition: domestic quietudes stretched into myth, migration histories turned intimate, masculinity stripped to bone, love sagas operating as cultural x-rays. A list that prizes atmosphere over spectacle. - The Conversation
We learn from stories. Our ancestors were raised on myths about their ancestors, tales about their saviours, emperors and lawgivers, and, eventually, novels about any number of times and places, most of them named. - Equator
“For years we’ve been grappling with the collapse of the creative middle class due to corporate greed. … We have more content than ever, but fewer opportunities for art and artists to thrive.” - LitHub
“I want to know: I want to watch writers grow from book to book, to follow the way their interests shift and their style adapts as they do more and more work. I want to be aware of the through-lines—sometimes overt, sometimes understated.” - Reactor
“Each of these devices requires time, patience, and ideally, a solid internet connection. You need to predownload language pairs to ensure offline capability. You have to have the wherewithal to gesture to a conversation partner what the device is.” - The Verge (Archive Today)
“Publishers have faced a difficult dilemma: stop offering books that the Kremlin dislikes, clandestinely cut the risky parts or openly redact them to show readers that something was censored. … ‘Right now we’re all playing Minesweeper, (said one literary critic,) when you don’t understand what is forbidden and what is not.’” - The New York Times
“’Vibe coding,’ an emerging software development that turns natural language into computer code using artificial intelligence, … was coined ... to describe how artificial intelligence can enable someone to create a new app while being able to ‘forget that the code even exists’.” - The Guardian
2024’s total figure of 836,199 was its biggest volume performance since 2009 and, so far in 2025, we have seen 628,431 books pass through the tills, an increase of 6.7% against the first 42 weeks of last year. - The Bookseller
The librarian is a seeker and keeper of truth, and that makes her a dangerous figure in the eyes of those who fear the fullest, most comprehensive, and most uncomfortable truths emerging. - LitHub
“How to End a Story: Collected Diaries by Helen Garner charts the Australian writer's life from her early career in bohemian Melbourne to raising her daughter in the 1970s and her disintegrating marriage in the 1990s.” The jury’s vote was unanimous, with one judge calling it “a remarkable, addictive book.” - BBC (Yahoo!)
“Laurent Mauvignier Tuesday won France's top literary award, the Goncourt, for his family saga spanning the 20th century and recounting the story of his grandmother accused of collaborating during World War II. Just one round of voting sufficed for the jury to select La Maison Vide.” - AFP (Yahoo!)
Editor Roger Angell called the three stories “interesting and wholly original” but said “they seem to work in very different ways on different readers.” At least he allowed that “I’m not at all sure that we aren’t making a mistake.” That must have stung Sexton, always unsure of herself when writing prose. - Literary Hub
Let this be painfully clear: The future will only remember what is preserved today, and the choice is between standing by as stories are diluted or destroyed—or fighting for the record, for the archive, and for the truth with steady, everyday work that anyone can participate in. - Common Dreams
Orlean allows that if there’s anything anyone should be jealous of, it’s that she had been encouraged to pursue ideas most magazine editors would dismiss as small. - New York Magazine
