Alan Moore is 72 years old now. Since the 1980s, he’s been celebrated as the greatest writer in comics history. But he’s done with all that. Full-time novelist now. Finally. Spends his days at home just writing, reading, and smoking “frightening,” “staggering,” “saturating” amounts of weed.

“I use it to work,” as he told Alex Musson. “Always have done.”

Except these days he does it without the weekly deadlines, the phone always ringing, questions and chitchat with illustrators, coauthors, publishers, press — none of it.

Life of a novelist now. Solitude.

And he’s embarked on something new: a five-novel series called The Long London. It might not seem like a huge venture, given that Book One, The Great When (2024), reads as a fairly straightforward fantasy story, just about 300 pages, self-contained, quick-moving, irreverent.

But it marks a big change for Moore.

There’s no illustrator for this series. No coauthor. No photos to pair with the text. It’s got none of the postmodern hijinks that defined his debut, Voice of the Fire (1996), nor the cosmic 1,200-page sprawl of his follow-up, Jerusalem (2016). Those freshman and sophomore books, in their complexity, were insulated from the general readership. In order to judge them, you first needed the patience and brainpower to read them. You needed, in other words, to be a fan already.

It’s a book-length work of ambitious, conventional, commercial prose. Nothing to show except Alan Moore’s words.

For the first time in his 45-year career, Alan Moore is alone on the page.

He’s picky about biscuits. Amenable to the Nice brand, “which I find admirable in its unassuming stoicism.” Doesn’t care for glam in a biscuit. Party Rings, for instance — shortbread cookies with multicolored neon glaze, squiggles of icing on top — “the upper-class call girl of the biscuit world.”

Opinions about everything, really, but you oughta be careful what you ask, because one thing that’s happened with age is he’s lost his grip on “linear time,” as he puts it. He’ll tell a story, some random thing from 30 or 40 years ago, and the telling, itself, is like brain surgery with chopsticks: effortless, fluent, eloquent, detailed, well-paced. It’s got an arc. Inflections are measured. He remembers every detail. Every bliss and triumph. Every resentment.

Just don’t ask Moore what decade it was. And be ready to step in, too. Folks’ll show up for an interview, ask a question, and if nobody stops him, he’ll just — it’s like a frog across lily pads — start with a word about the weather and then boom. We’re talking about Einstein. Fourth dimension. Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence, which Moore quite likes, though of course, if we’re just playing this out over and over, it means he shall have to endure Margaret Thatcher again. Incidentally, since you’ve brought her up, go watch the original Toho Godzilla movies in chronological order, he says, and you’ll see a subtextual narrative arc about Japan’s nuclear trauma, the way that they go from being terrorized by this giant radioactive lizard (a metaphor for the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima) toward a point, some dozen years later, where they’ve successfully harnessed its energy, via nuclear plants, and that’s when Godzilla becomes a good guy. Hey actually: he wrote a song about Godzilla being depressed. “Trampling Tokyo.” Says that, after a few installments, he could see the lizard’s “heart wasn’t in it anymore.” Good movies, though. Y’know he probably never told you about the time he got approached by Malcolm McLaren, did he? Sex Pistols manager. Yeah: Malcolm McLaren gets in touch with him, mid-1980s, says he’s got a financier, he’s ready to make a film, he just needs a script. What he’s got in mind, he says, is a modern retelling of Beauty and the Beast, except it’s set in the fashion world, and here’s what we call it: Fashion Beast. Based partly on the life of Christian Dior. Alan says, Yeah, I can write that. Especially once he’d got some books together about Dior’s actual life and thought, This is quite gothic, isn’t it? And so he starts working on the screenplay (“which [McLaren] was very approving of”) and then one day McLaren calls and says, “Can you make it a bit more like Chinatown?”

Alan says, “Um . . . yeah.”

McLaren said, “And Flashdance?”

Alan says yeah: “So it’s a kind of Christian Dior-Chinatown-Flashdance-Beauty and the Beast sorta thing?”

Science, philosophy, Godzilla, film. Eventually Moore will pause to re-light his joint. By and by he’ll ask his interviewer what time it is, and the answer lands with audible horror.

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.

Of the eighteen independently published books on the 2024 list, nearly a third were released by Grove/Atlantic, a mid-sized indie that publishes around 100 combined frontlist and paperback books per year, or W.W. Norton, which publishes even more than that. This meant only 11% of the New York Times‘s “notable books” were released by small, independent publishers, which we are defining here as independently owned US publishers with roughly 50 or fewer titles per year, and not imprints of the Big Five publishing houses. A thriving ecosystem of books from publishers taking risks, publishing from the margins, operating on few resources, with small distribution and even smaller marketing budgets, were largely being ignored.

For 2025, The New York Times Notable list tipped slightly toward the indies, featuring 14 books published by small, independent publishers. Hurrah for those publishers and authors! In the meantime, forty reviewers across thirteen genres spent the year reading small press books. Our efforts, like small presses themselves, were low on resources but high on resourcefulness. Reviewers had to search out, request, and read at least nine books across a chosen genre from small publishers before making their recommendations. We limited ourselves to books published in December 2024 through November 2025.

Our guiding principles were “read a lot, recommend a few” and “seek out a diverse array of authors and publishers.” We were especially interested in BIPOC and LGBTQ authors and publishers, who have an even steeper climb to mainstream recognition.

Within these guidelines, our reviewers were free to read any small press books they chose, and as a result you’ll find this list dappled with well-known presses, such as Tin House and Europa Editions. But for every Graywolf, we feature presses that are not household names, like LittlePuss and Publication Studio and Kallisto Gaia.

There were times our definition of “small press” was tested. Was Tin House still a small press after it was acquired by Zando in March? Yes, we decided, since Zando was not a big five publisher. Were university presses that published well over 50 books yearly small presses? We decided they were so long as their creative offerings fell under that number. We tried to stay nimble and responsive, while sticking to the project’s principles.

There are a few important things this list is not: This is not a best of list. This is not a comprehensive survey of all small presses. This is not a juried selection of books. This is instead the product of a group of enthusiastic, committed reviewers reading hundreds of small press books from the past year and choosing the few they heartily recommend.

Ours is not the first list to highlight small press books. One of the joys of this project was finding the many other venues already doing this work. If our list interests you, find more small press books highlighted at CLMP, Foreword Reviews, and Necessary Fiction, to name a few.

Without further ado, 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025:

One of the largest distributors of print books for libraries is winding down operations by the end of the year, a huge disruption to public libraries across the country, some of which are warning their communities the shut down will limit their ability to lend books.

“You might notice some delays as we (and more than 6,000 other libraries) transition to new wholesalers,” the Jacksonville Public Library told its community in a Facebook post. “We're keeping a close eye on things and doing everything we can to minimize any wait times.”

The libraries that do business with the distributor learned about the shut down earlier this month via Reddit.

Baker & Taylor has been in the book business just short of 200 years. Its primary focus was distributing physical copies of books to public libraries. The company also provided librarians with tools that helped them do their jobs more effectively related to collection development and processing.

But the company has spent decades being acquired by and divested from private equity firms, served as a revolving door for senior leadership, and was sued by a competitor earlier this year for alleged data misuse and was almost acquired again in September, this time by a distributor that works with mass-market retailers like Walmart and Target. That deal fell through.

On October 7, Publishers Weekly reported B&T let go of more than 500 employees the day the internal announcement was made. At least one law firm is currently investigating B&T for allegedly violating the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, and it took the company weeks to let account holders know.

Since the internal announcement, Kennedy says customer service staff at B&T have not received guidance on how to respond to inquiries from libraries, leaving them on the frontline and in the dark on issues ranging from whether existing orders would be fulfilled to securing refunds for materials they may have already paid for.

A vending machine in Washington, D.C., is providing nourishment — for the mind. LitBox is filled with books by local authors, just steps from the White House, World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Lauren Woods launched the project in May after growing frustrated with what she saw as some publishers' focus on sensationalism and the lack of bookstores focused on local authors in the area. "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, or the book buyer didn't think they would be profitable," Woods said. "And that always seemed wrong to me."

Inspired by a European book vending machine, she set about planting one in the nation's capital to try to market books more equitably and see how they sell. The hypercompetitive publishing industry makes it challenging for some books to get into stores, and Woods wants those she still finds excellent to get to readers. "Although those bigger books are going to be marketed differently, when they are marketed equally, they sell pretty equally," Woods said.

Her experiment seems to have worked out so far. People are buying from the vending machine almost as many smaller press books as those from the "Big Five" publishers — Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster.

Most e-books have digital rights management software that means, like print books, they can only be checked out by one person at a time. But unlike print books, which can sit on library shelves for decades, e-books are often sold on time-limited contracts — meaning public libraries must buy them again after several years or, in some cases, several months. The costs can add up quickly.

Courtney, a lawyer by trade, believes that the strict contract terms are “undermining every library’s mission across the United States.”

“We can’t own our books. We can’t preserve them. We can’t keep them. We can’t check them out without having to pay for the same book over and over and over,” Courtney said. “And that’s problematic for collection development, for access, for budget, for all sorts of things.”

Courtney leads a nonprofit called the eBook Study Group that lobbies state governments to adapt e-book contract regulations to reflect existing consumer and contract law. Since its 2020 inception, it has successfully lobbied the Connecticut state legislature to prohibit libraries from buying e-books whose contracts limit both time and number of checkouts. The goal is to drive down demand for short-term e-book contracts and force publishers to offer e-books to libraries on better terms.

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.

The previous weekend I had gone to Cleveland to give a talk about literary citizenship. It’s an amorphous kind of concept, often changing with the moment, but needed more than ever today when corporate interests have a stranglehold on the arts, literary institutions are being devastated by the cancellation of NEA grants, and the freedom to read is under attack. As people who care, and if you’ve read this far I suspect you care, I figured we could all use a refresher on how to be a good literary citizen. Below you’ll find my top seven tips on how you can help make a difference.

On Oct. 8, 2010, the New York Times ran a story on its front page: “Picture Books No Longer a Staple for Children.” As we interviewed children’s publishing professionals while compiling this list, several told us they remembered exactly where they were when they read this death knell for their industry. The Times wasn’t wrong: Sales were down, especially of new books. Once upon a time, an adult shopping for a child might have bought a classic they remembered from their own childhood, and also a new book, recommended by a bookseller. More and more, buyers just went for the classic—almost always Seuss or Sendak—and new books languished on the shelves.

But, feared a number of ambitious authors and illustrators, the art form’s struggles couldn’t simply be blamed (as the Times suggested) on achievement-obsessed adults pushing chapter books too early. Picture books were struggling artistically too. The next year, a group of 21 creators issued a picture-book manifesto. “WE BELIEVE,” the manifesto read, “we must cease writing the same book again and again.” Books for children should be “fresh, honest, piquant, and beautiful,” and unafraid to be odd: “Even books meant to put kids to sleep should give them strange dreams.” And, added the document, “WE CONDEMN … the amnesiacs who treasure unruly classics while praising the bland today.”

This call to arms had a ring of truth to it. When we became parents, we too initially gravitated toward the unruly classics we loved as children, while shying away from new picture books. There were just so many of them! The ones we saw on the front tables in bookstores all seemed to be authored by celebrities—or, worse, were branded tie-ins promoting movies and TV shows. How could any of them be as good as the books of our youth, let alone better?

But picture books have undergone a revolution in the past 25 years—one that was already underway before that Times obit, but which that manifesto helped spur along. The art form is now remarkably different from what it was when we were little.

To start with, a dramatically more varied cast of characters both stars in picture books and makes them. The industry, encouraged by activist organizations like We Need Diverse Books, has belatedly come to understand the value of making books that, in the words of the influential academic Rudine Sims Bishop, offer young readers not only “mirrors” of their own experience but “windows” into the lives of others. Stories by and about nonwhite, nonstraight people are now much more likely to appear in libraries and bookstores, become bestsellers, and win awards.

But other, less obvious changes have swept the art form as well. A turn-of-the-millennium boom in animation, led by Pixar, gave rise to more illustrators making a living as storytellers—and, frustrated by the machinations of Hollywood studios, telling their own stories in a simpler, more personal form. Creators, including many signatories to the 2011 manifesto, have become more interested in innovating within, and subverting, the picture-book form: shortening the text, breaking the fourth wall, and fostering reader interaction—encouraged, perhaps, by the success of a certain argumentative pigeon. Picture-book nonfiction has grown in popularity, becoming especially useful in classrooms—where older elementary and middle school students, often fans of now-commonplace graphic novels, find it crucial in accessing difficult historical topics. And, of course, celebrities have flocked to the picture book—with mostly lukewarm results, although at least one TV star has published an unalloyed work of ridiculous genius. You’ll find it on our list.

To make this guide, we surveyed more than a hundred authors, illustrators, librarians, booksellers, academics, and publishing pros. We ended up reading more than 200 books, for which we must fulsomely thank our local libraries. Our goal: to find the books that represent the best of these transformations, and to tell the story of an art form that responded to a front-page crisis with a new wave of inventive stories that respect the intelligence, playfulness, and widely differing experiences of young readers.

Over the course of two generations, from 1984 to 2023, the proportion of 13-year-olds who said they “never or hardly ever” read for fun on their own time has nearly quadrupled, from just 8% to 31%.

During that time, the percentage of middle-schoolers who read for fun “almost every day” has fallen by double digits, according to surveys conducted for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test widely known as “the nation’s report card”: In 1984, 35% of middle school kids read for fun almost every day. By 2023, it was just 14%.

The phenomenon is part of a larger shift away from reading, research suggests. A new study from the University of Florida and University College London found that daily reading for pleasure has dropped more than 40% among all age groups over the last two decades, “a sustained, steady decline” of about 3% per year.

Findings like these have sparked fears that, after more than a century of steadily expanding literacy, reading is devolving into an act relegated to a small group of elites, a “reading class” that enjoys books while the rest of us see them as, in the words of scholar Wendy Griswold, “an increasingly arcane hobby.”

It’s a strange and thorny problem that in some sense seems contradictory: If you followed around a young person for a day, you’d likely see that she is reading constantly, but often in tiny fragments. In addition to school assignments, she’s taking in a ton of atomized content: alerts, text messages, memes and social media posts. All those bits add up for sure — one study found that the typical American reads the equivalent of a slim novel every day — but it isn’t the same as sitting down to read a book.

For many young people, school is what gets in the way of books.

Julia Goggin, 15, grew up reading books and loving them. She consumed the first few Harry Potter books unassisted in second grade and finished the series by fourth grade. She read a lot in middle school.

In high school? Not so much.

Like Baez, she’s heavily scheduled, running cross country in the fall and track and field in the winter. She’s in her school’s theater group, which means after-school rehearsals. Then homework. All of it leaves little time for reading anything aside from school assignments.

“If a school is too overbearing about forcing kids to read a lot, it makes them not want to read for fun because it’s not fun anymore,” she said. “Because school isn’t fun.”

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?

As a children’s librarian who also teaches a graduate course on the History of Children’s Literature, I struggle with the question of how to present Dr. Seuss, aka Theodor Geisel. It is now widely known that Geisel’s political cartoons during WWII and early children’s books contained offensive depictions of Asian, Arctic Indigenous, Middle Eastern and African people.

My students of all ages devour Seuss. In my library in Queens, NY, kindergarteners through second graders clamor for Green Eggs and Ham after binge-watching the 2019 Netflix series of the same title (and all the Grinch and Lorax movies too). I will confess: when Random House offered my school the loan of a free Grinch costume of Broadway production quality, I jumped at the chance to host a holiday event where students could help grow the Grinch’s heart through acts of kindness. Geisel isn’t my students’ role model, but the Grinch is a fun cultural symbol that unites a variety of people. The event stirred up Seussmania, and library checkouts soared.

So while I do continue to read Dr. Seuss, I also reject Geisel as a cultural ambassador for children’s literature. For over two decades, schools have celebrated the National Education Association’s Read Across America Day on Dr. Seuss’s birthday, March 2, with children dressing up in red and white striped hats to represent their commitment to reading—as if Seuss were representative of all children’s books. In 2017, Katie Ishizuka-Stephens, Director of the Conscious Kid Library, asked the NEA to reevaluate their approach.

Ishizuka-Stephens’s report emerged the same year that Cambridge, MA librarian Liz Phipps Soeiro made headlines for rejecting First Lady Melania Trump gift of ten Dr. Seuss books, including Green Eggs and Ham, to her top-performing school in 2017. She described Seuss as a “cliche” and “tired and worn ambassador of children’s literature,” and recommended a list of ten diverse books instead. The ten books Soerio recommends are excellent additions to any library, but I wished for the inclusion of a silly, Mo Willems text or, better yet, a wacky book by a non-white author. Kids need to have belly laughs and almost pee their pants when reading—which is something that few other authors besides Seuss can do without invoking potty humor. I’m eager for more silliness.

I had a strange mood today and started and finished this in one 10 hour sitting. It was excellent, but simultaneously not as excellent as I had hoped. I enjoyed lots of the short stories in Dubliners more, I think. The "avant garde" structure often felt superfluous - although not always. The color symbolism was interesting, but I felt it fell away in the second half of the book. In fact, the entire middle portion (those gigantic sermons, my god!) was a bit rough to get through. But I do appreciate that it really evoked the sensation of being in a washed out, weary, hypnosis sort of state - and it did leave a psychological impression in the following sections, like you really "remembered" that part of Stephen's life. The discussion on Stephen's philosophy of art was the highlight for me, along with a bunch of tiny little fragments of test that felt like beautiful lucid clear thoughts. It did evoke the feeling of going through life in a largely automatic blur, with a few powerful moments sticking out. I especially enjoyed that the powerful moments were often completely mundane events made powerful only via Stephen's feelings in the moment. His struggles with expressing and capturing this elusive sensation were beautifully portrayed. And the switch to first-person at the end felt delightful in its regressive irony (according to Stephen's point of view), as it represented the "lyrical form" in some rough sense.

Anyways, curious if anyone else has thoughts on it to share. I couldn't find any discussion online about the red/white color symbolism. I interpreted it as a representation of cold lifeless religiosity vs hot vivacious "mundanity". But I'm not sure if the York/Lancaster origination of the symbols is meant to lend more to it, etc., or if maybe I've missed that entirely. The green and maroon were clearly political and I found lots of discussion on that. I'd love to hear what anyone else's favorite/least favorite aspects were.

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.

At Bookery Cincy in Ohio, Sierra told me about an annual bookstore crawl across the city, and how what had started with just a few stores now has two dozen places participating. At Joy and Matt’s, also in Cincinnati, Joy and I swapped book recs (she told me to read Amor Towles, I said I couldn’t stop thinking about The Safekeep). At The Novel Neighbor in Webster Grove, Missouri, I discussed with three booksellers who should read Greenwich first, based on the shelves of staff picks (shout out to Haley—I hope the ARC got to you!). I talked horror with Stevie at Foxing in Louisville, and Liz Moore with Jessica at Subterranean Books in St. Louis.

At Skylark in Columbia, Missouri, I got to tell Matthew behind the register that my editor grew up nearby, and then check out her favorite childhood ice cream spot, Sparky’s. (It was eleven AM, raining, and sixty degrees, and no that didn’t stop me. Get the mango if you’re in town.) At Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas, I felt the bookseller’s excitement when I said I was publishing my first novel. “You’re a real author!” Tom at Trident exclaimed once I’d made it to Boulder. Over and over, I had the thrill of hearing that my book was already in stock at some stores, and the excitement of introducing it to others. I took home notecards, T-shirts, novelty socks. I bought a lot of books. When I asked a pink-haired bookseller at Left Bank Books in St. Louis how long the store had been around, they proudly said it had been founded in 1969 by “hippies and queers,” and that today the store is keeping up the legacy. That’s what I kept thinking about after every mile and every new stop. This fight for free speech isn’t new, and independent bookstores have been fighting it for a long time.

Capitalism isn’t going to save us. But supporting independent bookstores isn’t just about personal consumer choice—it’s civic engagement. For every book that’s banned, and every library that loses its autonomy over curation, we’re going to need community action and mutual aid to get books into readers’ hands. Buy books from indie stores, gift books to those who can’t access them, show up at local meetings, and speak against censorship. None of us can afford to look away, even if it isn’t our library, our county, or our book that’s on the chopping block.

I am African Australian—the one is not exclusive from the other. I am a daughter of the Wajita people of Tanzania, and now I live in Melbourne, Australia. I am a daughter of the land that belongs to the Wurundjeri and Boon-Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. The creative space where I tell stories is literary speculative fiction: I write and perform short stories, novels, novellas, prose poetry, creative nonfiction. I write across genres.

The road to publication has, for me, been fraught because I was not always at ease with the self and other—until I realized the power of fiction. Speculative fiction is a safe space that can, like any fiction, help us understand other perspectives. It allows for a different kind of writing with foundations to cultivate inclusive worlds.

Maria Montalvo speaks with emotion, her eyes shining as she recounts her reading experiences. She says she especially enjoys books by Isabel Allende, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Erika L. Sánchez and John Grisham because, in her words, “reading makes you wiser and you learn how people live in other countries. It takes your mind to other places you can’t travel to.”

Montalvo isn’t an ordinary reader. During her incarceration at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, a prison in New Jersey, she has participated in the activities of Freedom Reads, a nonprofit organization that has been promoting reading in U.S. prisons since 2020.

“Freedom Reads has brought books on different topics, and it’s very important to read because it makes you wiser,” Montalvo, 60, said in an interview with Noticias Telemundo. “Books change the prison climate; they change the way people think about themselves. This opens your mind and makes you want to change.”

When I first call Ros Hemmings, I expect her to be surprised. A widow in her 60s living in rural North Wales, she has never received a call from an investigative journalist in London. But instead she tells me: “Oh no, I have a very good idea why you are ringing.” She has been waiting for this call for years.

Hemmings rightly suspected that I wanted to ask her about a woman she knows as Sally Walker. Millions of people around the world know Sally by a different name: Raynor Winn. She is the author and protagonist of one of the most successful British non-fiction books in recent years. The Salt Path traces Raynor and her husband Moth’s 630-mile journey along the sea-swept South West Coast Path.

A heartbreaking “true” story of two people in their early 50s forced out of their rural home in Wales and weighed down by a sudden diagnosis of Moth’s terminal illness, The Salt Path went straight to the top of the bestseller charts, selling more than 2m copies worldwide since its publication in 2018.

Winn has since written two sequels and has a lucrative publishing deal with Penguin to produce at least one more. Five weeks ago The Salt Path reached new audiences when it was released in the UK as a film, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, and Winn is a co-producer.

Standing proudly on the red carpet outside the Lighthouse Cinema in Newquay, Raynor, 60, told TV cameras at the film’s UK premiere that the experience was “almost unbelievable”. In that moment, she and Moth seemed like the ultimate examples of British grit and perseverance.

Back in Wales, Hemmings saw a very different picture. Because she knew something about Winn that almost everyone – her publishers, her agents, the film producers – had missed. She knew that Raynor Winn wasn’t her real name and that several aspects of her story were untrue. She also believed she was a thief.

Barbara Kingsolver points out that Trump’s “so-called Big Beautiful Bill” could be devastating for Appalachia, with its cuts to the National Park Service, the Weather Service and disaster preparedness – just last year the area was hit by the devastating Hurricane Helene – and cuts to Medicaid, which could cause havoc in an already under-served area. “The damage will be unimaginable. Lots of people will die, lots of wild lands will be destroyed. The damage is terrifying.” Does she think her Trump-voting neighbours will change their allegiance if such terrors come to pass? “Will they connect the dots when our hospital closes? I don’t even know the answer to that,” she says, shaking her head, fearing that the TV and radio stations that told them to vote for Trump in the first place will “come up with some other reason why your hospital closed. For those of us who are in the information business, that’s a depressing subject.”

Anybody who ever lighted a fire without matches has probably gained some proper respect for “low” or “primitive” or “simple” technologies; anybody who ever lighted a fire with matches should have the wits to respect that notable hi-tech invention.

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.

We are standing on a precipice.

At its simplest level, our job as artists is to respond to the human experience. But the art we make is a commodity, and our world wants things quickly, cheaply, and on demand. We are rushing toward a future where our novels, our biographies, our poems and our memoirs—our records of the human experience—are “written” by artificial intelligence models that, by definition, cannot know what it is to be human. To bleed, or starve, or love.

AI may give the appearance of understanding our humanity, but the truth is, only a human being can speak to and understand another human being. Every time a prompt is entered into AI, the language that bot uses to respond was created in part through the synthesis of art that we, the undersigned, have spent our careers crafting. Taken without our consent, without payment, without even the courtesy of acknowledgment.

In our writing, we drew on our lives: the losses of our parents, the births of our children, every love affair we’ve lived or imagined. Stories of human heroism and human depravity. These stories were stolen from us and used to train machines that, if short-sighted capitalistic greed wins, could soon be generating the books that fill our bookstores. Is this the end goal—to fully remove us from the equation so that those at the very top of the capitalist structure can profit even further off our labor than they already do? Rather than paying writers a small percentage of the money our work makes for them, someone else will be paid for a technology built on our unpaid labor.

The writing that AI produces feels cheap because it is cheap. It feels simple because it is simple to produce. That is the whole point. AI is an enormously powerful tool, here to stay, with the capacity for real societal benefits—but the replacement of art and artists isn’t one of them.

Like fashion trends, fads in book covers come and go. One year, the backs of women’s heads might be all the rage; the next, soft focus photography. And who can forget the exploding flower craze? Or the proliferation of flames on jackets, from thrillers to science fiction to self-help?

But the look that’s commanding today’s runways — a.k.a. bookshelves — is not so incendiary. It tends to lay blaringly bright type in a sans-serif font atop a painting, usually a few centuries old but not always. Facial expressions are baleful or dyspeptic; an aggressive burst of spray paint can change the tone entirely.

These covers are the new signifiers of stylish literary fiction, telegraphing gravitas, wit and cool. They make a bid for a certain kind of reader — more city than suburb, more pét-nat than chardonnay. They wouldn’t be caught dead alongside a volume decked out in pop art or, god forbid, metallic lettering.

Thomas Haggerty, a senior account manager at Bridgeman Images, which licenses paintings for commercial projects, credits the trend to “the power of juxtaposition.” Gregg Kulick, executive art director at Hachette Book Group, agrees: “Poppy type” reads as fun, he says, while the paintings “hint at the academic.”

So how did this ripped-from-the galleries craze get off the ground? After all, paintings have graced the covers of novels since “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” but it appears that “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” (2019) might be the trailblazer for this century’s spate.

Here’s the story behind that one, plus eight descendants out — or soon to be — this year.

Like the two Naomis [Wolf and Klein], conservatives and progressives become warped mirrors of one another. The progressive campaign for bodily autonomy is co-opted to be the foundation of the anti-vax movement. This is the mirror world, where concerns about real children – in border detention, or living in poverty in America – are reflected back as warped fever-swamp hallucinations about kids in imaginary pizza restaurant basements and Hollywood blood sacrifice rituals. The mirror world replaces RBG with Amy Coney-Barrett and calls it a victory for women. The mirror world defends workers by stoking xenophobic fears about immigrants.

But progressives let it happen. … Progressives cede suspicion of large corporations to conservatives, defending giant, exploitative, monopolistic corporations so long as they arouse conservative ire with some performative DEI key-jingling. Progressives defend the CIA and FBI when they're wrongfooting Trump, and voting machine vendors when they're turned into props for the Big Lie.

This thoughtful, vigorous prose and argumentation deserves its own special callout here: Klein has produced a first-rate literary work just as much as this is a superb philosophical and political tome. In this moment where the mirror world is exploding and the real world is contracting, this is an essential read.

ISBN 9780374610326 (don't buy from Amazon or its subsidiaries)

When UN spokesperson Darren Melvik posts a provocative image in a private Facebook group, he never imagines the storm it will unleash. What begins as an act of personal frustration soon spirals into a global scandal, implicating powerful religious and political leaders in a conspiracy to manipulate international institutions. As Darren navigates the labyrinth of digital surveillance and institutional cover-ups, he is drawn into a web of intrigue linking his own heritage to a Cold War-era research program designed to control minds through religious symbolism.

In a story blending real-world diplomacy with psychological conspiracy, The 13th Apostle and the UN exposes the hidden levers of power and the fragile line between personal conviction and global consequence.

Victor Modström, drawing from over a decade within international institutions, crafts a narrative that delves deep into the complexities of bureaucracy, identity, and the human cost of institutional decisions. This debut novel not only unveils the shadows lurking within the UN but also questions the nature of truth and the price of standing by one's principles.

I just finished Advocate, book 3 of Daniel M. Ford's The Warden series. I've been really enjoying this world. The first two books ended on cliffhangers, and the year wait between entries was killing me. Book 3 ended with a nice wrap up of one arc and a setup for another, both building up the bones of a larger story that's been looming ominously.

The problem is, it looks like Tor has dropped the series. The Warden and Necrobane were available in hardcover, but Advocate only got a TPB release. I can't find anything concrete about book 4, and according to a friend of a friend (and taken with the appropriate grain of salt) sales weren't good enough on the first book (?!?) to warrant re-upping the series.

I'm bummed. I found out about Ford's first series, Paladin, through word of mouth. I thought it was okay - a little tropey in places, but once he found his pace it was entertaining enough. Then he did some detective stuff that I had no interest in, but when I heard that he was doing another fantasy series, and that it got picked up by Tor, my interest was piqued. The result so far has been a marked improvement from Paladin, and one of the few things to poke through my deep depression these past few years. And now it's all in limbo.

Maybe I'm overreacting. I'm not going to pretend the know the machinations of the publishing world, and maybe someone else is going to pick up the series. It's just frustrating to find something nice and get it yanked away.

Anyway, rant over. I enjoyed my time with this series regardless of its future. If anyone else has read it (or has heard any news about continuation), I'd love to hear your thoughts.

In the year in which the groundbreaking activist would have turned 100, a new book looks at the enduring impact of his words and how they resonate today

The Afterlife of Malcolm X is a new book about the great Black leader who was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, 100 years ago; who in the 1950s converted to Islam and dropped his “slave name”; who rose to fame as the militant voice of the civil rights era; and who was assassinated in New York in 1965, aged just 39.

The book is not a biography. As the author, Mark Whitaker, puts it, his book tells “the story of the story of Malcolm, the story that really made him the figure he is today, even more so than what he accomplished while he was living.