Earlier this month, the fashion house Miu Miu staged a marketing event at an unlikely catwalk: Casa Magazines. This was part and parcel of a recurring pop-up called ‘Summer Reads,’ at which fans of the brand can line up to receive a Miu Miu-approved book (or in their words: piece of “feminist literature”) and a snack. ‘Summer Reads’ is slated to hit eight countries this season. And handpicked titles included Sibilla Aleramo’s A Woman, Alba De Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook and Jane Austen’s Persuasion.  It’s not exactly new to package books as accessories. Or more specifica ..read more

Screenshots from TikTok If you spend any time on BookTok or Bookstagram or book-adjacent Reddit (Bookit? Booddit? Boot?), you’ve probably come across the “book husband.” Since encountering the phrase, I haven’t been able to shake it. I’ve been muttering things around my apartment like “I am, as always, your humble book husband” and “What did you say about my book husband?!” Other than one of those sticky internet phrases that gets stuck in your brain, what is a book husband? What are their lives like? Should I… become one? Online, a book husband is one of two types: a hot fictional character ..read more

Another day, another literary scandal. Such is BookX in 2024. Buckle up, for today brings news of an especially strange case of dissembling, involving a fantasy author writing under a few different racial identities and a handful of pseudonyms. I’m sorry in advance if you were using your brain today for other things. The trouble began back in June of 2020, when a queer fantasy and science fiction writer known as Taylor B. Barton was accused of racist bullying by several of their fellow authors. Barton, a self-identifying trans person who also wrote and published under the name Taylor Brooke ..read more

Today is the anniversary of Geoffrey Chaucer’s first reading of  The Canterbury Tales in 1387, when he performed the epic at the court of King Richard II. It’s the perfect day to reread a tale or two, rewatch A Knight’s Tale with Paul Bettany as Chaucer, or wonder what it would be like if The Canterbury Tales came out today, instead of 600 years ago. Chaucer reads the first draft at King Richard II’s Court, a very hip reading series hosted by the King to showcase up-and-coming writers and jesters. Photos of the reading flood social media, as do stories of the killer afterparty. * Chaucer ..read more

Everyone loves a good meet cute. It’s the reason we wait with bated breath in the movies, exhale a sigh of relief when we reach a certain page in a book. Because there are so few moments in life when you can tell this is something important. This is the start of everything. The term “meet cute” appears to have first originated in the 1938 movie Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, where the two main characters and love interests meet shopping for pajamas and end up having a “cute” conversation. (Some rom com movie fans may recognize the reference from Nancy Meyers’ 2006 film The Holiday, where the charac ..read more

In the olden days, the popular crowd were devouring Pamela, and watching Marianne Dashwood getting teary over a sonnet (sense before sensibility)—the beginning of what became known as the “sentimental” novel, especially popular for and by among females in the 18th and 19th centuries, though traceable to 17th century poets. T.S. Eliot argued that 16th and 17th century poets differed in that the latter were defined by a “dissociation of sensibility,” in the manner that their predecessors simply totted down the smells and sights of a given moment while “the (newer) poets revolted against the rat ..read more

For hundreds of years, stories were constrained by the limited fire power of someone reading a text then offering a measured appreciation that could make or break sales of said book. Now, there is a new way: 1) Pile BookTok creators in a house and feed new titles in through the mail slot, 2) let them post a stirring GIF-level critique like “this fucking book” to TikTok’s “mirror ball girlies,” and 3) watch the money roll in. That’s the approach Simon & Schuster UK are taking in a collaboration with the marketing agency Rocket this summer in Brighton, per The Bookseller, who reported:  ..read more

Lloyd Devereux Richards’ debut thriller Stone Maidens was published in 2012, received by a largely indifferent world until Devereux Richards’ daughter Margueritte posted a TikTok about her dad, aged 74, last year. Nearly overnight, the mystery novel about an FBI forensic anthropologist, a serial killer, and some mysterious tribal artifacts, became a bestseller. People were charmed; the story went viral and he wound up on the Today show. It was honestly the best dad TikTok since this one. There Lloyd was, hunched over his typewriter in suspenders, slaving away on a masterpiece having devoted e ..read more

Shallow, fake, showy, and performative—these are a few of the adjectives used to describe BookTok, the corner of TikTok where young women share and discuss books on camera, by drive-by tourists to a culture they don’t understand. I’m no BookTok tourist. I’ve lived here for nine months. As a chronically online millennial, I’ve become a translator between the readers on BookTok and the literary community that looks down upon them. On TikTok, I post a video about Mary Ruefle that gets forty thousand views and yields comments like: “this just gave a whole new perspective on my entire existence ..read more

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… All right, it was mostly still the worst of times. Looks like we’re stuck in the dark timeline, guys. Sorry about that. Still, things happened this year, and some of them happened to books, or book people, or book Twitter (RIP?). For the sake of posterity, and probably because we’re masochists, this week we’ve been counting down the 50 biggest literary stories of the year, so you can remember the good, the bad, and all the literary non-hotties we met along the way. But you’ve made it to the end, almost. So with no further ado, these are the ..read more