books
-
What are you reading at the moment, and is it behaving itself? Come pull up a chair in the Moorland & Mayfair Reading Room.
-
Geryon began as a monster in somebody else’s heroic story. Anne Carson gave him enough of a life to become far harder to explain away.
-
Forty years after Diana Wynne Jones gave us a vain, cowardly, beautiful wizard with catastrophic hair, fantasy romance keeps producing the same six-foot-five shadow prince. What did Howl understand about desire that romantasy has forgotten?
-
You return for Elizabeth and Darcy, perhaps, or for Emma’s meddling, Anne’s patience, Marianne’s storms of feeling; but the curious thing about Austen is how quickly the old certainties begin to loosen. Characters you once adored become exasperating, compromises you dismissed begin to make sense, and jokes you scarcely noticed acquire a little sting. The…
-
From The Love Hypothesis to Alchemised: A story begins under a username, gathers thousands of devoted readers, sheds its borrowed names, lands on a bestseller list and, before long, has a film deal. Fanfiction was once treated as something literary culture could politely ignore. Publishing has now discovered that ignoring millions of readers is rather…
-
Ann Patchett’s Whistler is a novel of disappearance and return, of the things we keep when people themselves cannot be kept, and of literature’s small, stubborn refusal to let loss have quite the final word.
-
Somewhere between reading goals, impossible TBRs, BookTok wrap-ups and yearly totals, one of our loveliest private pleasures acquired the manners of a performance review. What might happen if we simply stopped keeping score?
-
Summerween is bringing ghosts, Gothic novels and dark academia into the sunshine. But when did Gothic reading become an autumn pleasure in the first place?
-
Victorian fiction asks something increasingly rare of its readers: patience, memory, and the willingness to remain with a thought. In returning to its unhurried pages, we may also rediscover the quieter pleasure of giving our attention wholly to one thing.
-
Once a niche internet aesthetic, Dark Academia has become a cultural obsession built from old libraries, ancient universities and an enduring hunger for intellectual romance. But its appeal tells us as much about modern readers as it does about the books they love.
