Although the literary novel remains the touchstone for what “elite” cultural status might mean, its former midcentury monopoly on prestige, Brier claims, has been shattered. - LA Review of Books
Literature and mathematics have these strong connections because mathematics is all about structure and pattern. It's the language we use to describe those things. - CBC
Barnes & Noble is experiencing a revival. It opened 60 new stores last year and plans to do the same this year. It is reportedly soliciting banks to handle an IPO. - The Atlantic
“These days the air has a keen edge. A desperate edge. What forms can the imagination take when power seems nonsensical and cruelty deliberate? These questions haunt—and should haunt—our fiction.” - Electric Lit
Jane Austen card decks (themed by book), collaborations with London publishers, old imprints reabsorbed or renamed, and audio - some indie publishers are finding ways to stay alive and even, ina few cases, grow. - Publishers Weekly
A donor “gave $150,000 to the library in honor of her late husband, ... who had been a math professor,” with one catch: the library had to take his library of 1,000 mathematics books. - Oregon ArtsWatch
“Like all big chains, when you shop there, more of your money leaves the community than when you shop at something locally owned. … anything that takes market share from Amazon is positive.” - The Atlantic
It’s not just because of the intensity of the competitors, though that counts for a lot. Stefan Fatsis recounts a contested play at last year’s North American championship and the confusion arising from — let’s call it a breakdown of lexical authority. - Unabridged
By some measures, there are as many as 1 million books published annually in the US, and it’s a number that doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. The result is that there is intense competition for the small slice of the review landscape that remains. - Book Work
“A lost page from the Archimedes Palimpsest, among the oldest sources for the Greek mathematician in existence, has been discovered … at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois. The page in question contains geometric diagrams and a passage from Archimedes’s treatise on the sphere and the cylinder, hidden beneath a layer of later religious writings.” - Artnet
The literary breaches, while trivial, highlight a reality that has become all too clear: There’s an inverse correlation between power and proper punctuation. - The Wall Street Journal
The choice of Greg Greeley marks the first time in memory that Simon & Schuster had hired a CEO from outside the company. The 62-year-old Greeley succeeds Jonathan Karp, who announced last year that he was stepping down to found his own imprint. - AP
Independent bookshops are dangerous because they interrupt us. They do not optimise our curiosity. They derail it. Is that the reason why Germany’s culture commissioner, Wolfram Weimer, is now consulting the domestic intelligence agency before approving funds to bookshops? - The Guardian
Sales of nonfiction books in the UK and Ireland in 2025 were down 6% from the previous year, with revenue at its lowest since 2014. For quiz books, however, it was the best year since recordkeeping began in 1998; sales in 2025 were up by almost a quarter from 2024. - The Guardian
