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Hannah Lucinda Smith Considers the Pivotal Role of Small and Unrecognized States in Shaping Geopolitics

I work in the Art Department at HarperCollins, where I have a front-row seat to the conversations that shape how books appear in the world. What kind of cover art reads as “literary” versus “commercial,” what signals a “book club book,” what feels “serious” versus “friendly,” and increasingly, how to make a cover socially legible online. Covers today are expected not only to attract readers in bookstores, but to circulate fluidly through Instagram posts, TikToks, Substack photos, and carefully curated apartment interiors. Books are now asked to function simultaneously as texts and as lifestyle objects, and designers are now tasked with imagining multiple scales of reach simultaneously, from the bookstore table to the phone screen.

Mythologies across the world abound with stories that center heroes. Be it Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Mahabharata or the Shahnameh, great epics highlight the exploits and adventures of men, the women in their lives often relegated to the sidelines, their roles limited to that of dutiful wives, villains, or victims.

If New York City has 8 million stories, Toronto has just as many—but they’re all about some crazy raccoon.

In the early 1970s, the producer Albert R. Broccoli commissioned the artist Salvador Dalí to make a tarot deck for the upcoming James Bond film Live and Let Die. Based on Ian Fleming’s 1954 novel of the same name, Live and Let Die was released in 1973—the eighth 007 film and the first to star Roger Moore. It a strange, mystical Bond movie, that’s part an attempt at Blacksploitation and part about Harlem gangsters, Caribbean drug farming, and voodoo-practicing witch doctors. In one scene, a psychic named Solitaire (Jane Seymour), reads a tarot deck. This was to be Dalí’s contribution to the film.

Matthew Wolfe Profiles Two Oregon Activists Radicalized By Environmental Destruction

Because monastic life depended on books, it was natural that monks and nuns came to produce them. Many monasteries included a scriptorium, a dedicated writing room where books were meticulously copied by hand. In Northern Europe, the scriptorium was often located next to the calefactorium (warming room), where a fire was kept alive, allowing scribes to step in and warm themselves when needed. Most of these books were for the monastery’s own use, though some monasteries produced codices for sale.

It’s pride month! What better time to go spelunking in the archive, so as to situate the current moment, or thank an ancestor? I’ve been on a research kick, personally. Thanks to round-ups like this one from Lindsy Van Gelder—and the robust free public archives available on JSTOR and Internet Archive—it’s never been easier to sift through the stacks.

It’s spring in Prague and as I write my desk is covered in pollen. Morning bees browse around my window, foraging for materials. I was recently translating some verses of Virgil, Book IV of the Georgics, which is dedicated almost entirely to bees, the myth of Aristaeus (the minor, beekeeper deity) and the role they play in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Virgil recognized that bees had what we might call social being–co-dependent, organized, enterprising–and he praised them for having all the virtues of a Roman citizen: industrious, hardworking, loyal, and a willingness to die to defend the colony.

Now, as my old essay goes on to describe, I may have been scared back into the closet by the combined pressures of scary transgender literature and the punishing demands of Alabama’s healthcare system (it is left to the reader to guess which of those exerted greater pressure), but I did, of course, eventually transition.

Woodcock, who spoke to librarians in Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, and western New York, has observed a rise in requests for DVDs, Blu-rays, video games, and 4K Ultra Discs at ‘braries all around the country.

Was there ever a time before we read the stars? From astronomy to astrology, humankind has been turning to heavenly bodies to make meaning for as long as we’ve been in existence. For Melissa Anderson, lead film critic at 4Columns and former senior film critic at the Village Voice, reading the stars has a different, though still crucial, valence. Her celestial bodies don’t inhabit the night sky, but rather the silver screen—and yet, reading them has become as necessary in 2026 as observing the Milky Way was to Galileo in the 1600s.

“I cannot overstate how much knowledge is housed in this library about literally our entire universe,” she told me. “The most expansive understanding of human knowledge about space is being packed up.”

“I cannot overstate how much knowledge is housed in this library about literally our entire universe,” she told me. “The most expansive understanding of human knowledge about space is being packed up.”

A lot of these are fantastic. Did they miss anything? Do you have a favorite?

AI tools like Sudowrite, Novelcrafter, and Squibler promise full-length books in minutes—or seconds. AI-produced books have begun to flood Amazon, and range from kids and coloring books to derivative novels and faux biographies repurposed from Wikipedia pages. It’s a mess, and it is only going to get worse.

What motivates a seemingly once-brilliant person who appeared to share my values (as an artist, a writer, a thinker), to double, triple down on intolerance? Then of course there are the likeminded so-called leaders who build brands off of persecuting trans kids (and adults), amongst other vulnerable minorities. That some bigoted “leaders” will literally sacrifice certain groups of seemingly less-powerful people for their own benefit isn’t itself surprising, if one has read history (or Harry Potter).

Two Palestinians are gathering donations to create a public library in Gaza, after Israel’s war and genocide destroyed nearly all existing libraries, schools, and universities. The two men, Omar Hamad and Ibrahim, are avid readers who have spent years trying to save books as they struggled to survive in Gaza.

cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/26713003

In Hitler’s eyes, the time had come to settle the struggle between the right and the left once and for all.

The idea of 100 Notable Small Press Books was born November 2024, after The New York Times’s annual 100 Notable Books list featured eighty-two books from the Big Five publishing houses (Penguin-Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan) and their imprints. Many of these books had the marketing might of these publishers behind them and had already made their way onto the front tables of chain bookstores and the front pages of dwindling book review sections in print and online. The Notable list then, with all its esteem and future marketing power, served largely as a retrospective of the year’s biggest literary books.

It would’ve been funny if it hadn’t been official—if it hadn’t come with flags and checkpoints and new textbooks for children. And the more official the rules became, the more an underground language—humorous, grotesque, barbed—rose up in protest.

[…]does having interstellar technology automatically mean they must be scientific? Could there be technological but nonscientific aliens out there, capable of crossing the vast emptiness of space without understanding the physics of their amazing leaps?

I’m not sure how I landed here, so apologies if this is a repost. It’s quite worth the read. If anyone still believes the NYT is worth the paper it’s printed on, this is a great example of why it isn’t.

Last Sunday I spent hours at the Brooklyn Book Festival, a too rare occasion for me to pull myself away from the internet for an entire afternoon. As I looked around at the crowd on their way to panels or checking out indie press booths, I was reminded that, even if it doesn’t always seem apparent from looking at news headlines, there are many, many of us out there: people who care about books and culture and their community in general.

August 12th marks the 65th anniversary of Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham, a book whose orange cover fills me with delicious nostalgia. Svetlana Boym defines nostalgia as “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.” What imaginary home do I miss so much? And why do so many of us miss this same place?

Like many teachers at every level of education, I have spent the past two years trying to wrap my head around the question of generative AI in my English classroom. To my thinking, this is a question that ought to concern all people who like to read and write, not just teachers and their students. Today’s English students are tomorrow’s writers and readers of literature. If you enjoy thoughtful, consequential, human-generated writing—or hope for your own human writing to be read by a wide human audience—you should want young people to learn to read and write. College is not the only place where this can happen, of course, but large public universities like UVA, where I teach, are institutions that reliably turn tax dollars into new readers and writers, among other public services. I see it happen all the time.

The stores I’ve stopped in are all different, with their own stock and their own personalities. There are stores on tree-lined streets, and in urban centers, strip malls, old homes, and refurbished warehouses. Once, I pulled into a dirt parking area convinced I was lost, until I saw a bright awning confirming there was indeed a bookstore there. Yet no matter where I went or how far from home I traveled, I felt welcomed every time I stepped inside. I was reminded that I’m part of a community that transcends geography and countless divisions—a community of people who read. Regardless of our favorite books or chosen genres, we believe in the value of language, creativity, and communication.

Another win for freedom to read legislation on the West Coast this week, as Oregon’s state House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 1098 on Monday, a bill that will protect access to books in school libraries. It’s great news: books can no longer be banned solely because they discuss sexuality, religion, or other topics, nor can books be removed because they are written by someone from a protected class. SB 1098 now goes to the governor, who is expected to sign it into law.

Nowadays we associate the word “prodigy” with precocious children, but in centuries past the word was used to describe anything monstrous. Victor Stott clearly qualifies as a prodigy in the modern sense, but he qualifies in the older sense too: Not only does he frighten the ignorant and superstitious, he induces a profound terror in the educated and intellectual. Seen in this light, the first novel about superintelligence is actually a work of horror SF, a cautionary tale about the dangers of knowing too much.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/22938325

Josh Billings' book was a flop until he rewrote it phonetically (more or less)

I'm curious what people think of this article with regard to the solarpunk literary movement, past present and future.

In the August 6, 1945 edition, under the blaring headline: FIRST ATOMIC BOMB DROPPED ON JAPAN; TRUMAN WARNS FOE OF A ‘RAIN OF RUIN,’” the New York Times traced the simultaneously terrifying and wondrous development of the atomic bomb, its scientific history, and the race between the Allies and the Germans to build it and use it first.