Forty years ago in October 1986 I attended my first Frankfurt Book Fair. On the first day of meetings my friend and colleague Gary Fisketjon and I were introduced to Heinrich Maria Ledig Rowohlt, an elegant, charismatic 78-year-old German publisher

Extra, extra. You’ve seen the headlines. Men—particularly straight men—have stopped reading fiction. This year saw the rise and fall of the performative lit-bro. And though history, crime, and self-help books still persuade a certain type, the most recent NEA survey found

When Whitney Houston appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show in the early weeks of 1991, Arsenio’s other guest was Roseanne Barr, who had notoriously sung “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a San Diego Padres game the previous year. The host asked Barr if

In September 1942, Army Chief Librarian Ray Trautman was on the final leg of a world tour of US installations when he arrived in Australia. Here, his mission was twofold: take the temperature of the reading needs in this corner

Hannah Arendt’s homeland was populated with friends, most of them men—at least that is what her published correspondence would lead you to believe. The published letters between Arendt and her friends include books with Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Heinrich Blücher,

Hello again! Welcome back to the finest (and drunkest) corner of the internet, home of the darling and daring sensation known as Am I the Literary Asshole? If you’re a first time reader, we’re a bimonthly advice column that tackles

Today, the Swedish Academy awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature to Canadian author Anne Carson, for “her bold and inventive oeuvre that in playful dialogue with the classical tradition has created new forms for contemporary literature.” The Academy’s permanent

We don’t usually understand literature as a dialogue. Typically, when publishing professionals think of readers, they think they need to entice them to buy the book so they may have hours of pleasant or enriching cultural entertainment. The author’s name

I came of age as a writer reading N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, House Made of Dawn, and Angle of Geese (his creative nonfiction memoir, novel, and collection of poems). Momaday, like Louise Erdrich, Leslie Silko, Joy

Award-winning fiction writer T. Geronimo Johnson joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to talk about his new novel, The Occidental Book of the Dead. He discusses how the book addresses white supremacy and the United States’ deep-seated and racist

Tonight, at a ceremony in New York City, Kirkus Reviews announced the winners of the 13th annual Kirkus Prize, which awards $50,000 to “books of exceptional merit” in three categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, and Young Readers’ Literature. The winners were chosen

In a new People Interview, Michael Douglas gets real about writing about his past relationships in his new memoir, One Helluva Ride, including the one where there were "acts of indiscretion" on both their parts.

How to build a reading habit when you hate reading: diagnose if your problem is selection or friction, pick books by mood, not should-read lists, engineer quick wins with short books, give yourself permission to quit, use audiobooks as a bridge, and track daily streaks instead of yearly counts.

Photographing notes is not digitising them. This guide shows how to use your phone's built-in text recognition to turn handwriting into searchable, editable text on iPhone and Android, with no extra app and no upload.

Flash fiction is not a shortened long story. It is a different form built on one character, one problem, and one moment. This guide covers structure, titles, endings, and the editing process that makes a 500-word story work.

Natural dialogue is not a transcript of real speech — it is real speech edited for character, tension, and subtext. These techniques will help your characters sound like people instead of mouthpieces.

A clear structure keeps a true story moving. This guide shows a simple framework for shaping scenes, reflection, and research into an essay that holds together.

Showing means giving readers evidence instead of labels. These five short exercises train you to replace emotion words with action, detail, and dialogue.

A reading journal only helps if you still use it in March. This guide sets up a low-effort system for tracking books, quotes, and ideas worth returning to.

A memoir opening must earn the reader's attention in the first page. This guide shows how to choose a scene, enter it late, and set up the question the book answers.

Character voice is more than accent or slang. This guide shows how sentence length, vocabulary, and what a character notices can make a voice unmistakable.

Revision feels overwhelming when you try to fix everything at once. This guide breaks it into passes: structure, scenes, sentences, and a final read-aloud check.

Sensory detail works when it reveals character or changes a scene. This guide shows how to choose details that mean something instead of listing all five senses.