Open Thread: Your Summer Reading?
What’s on Your List for the Sultry Months? Here’s a Look at Mine
Culture
Miller's Book Review.
Celebrating All Things Literary
Recent essays
30 of 63Second Best? The MBR List of 101–200 Greatest Novels
What About the Books that Didn’t Make the Top 100? Here’s the MBR Shadow Canon
The Wrong Fight over AI and Writing
The Binary Debate Misses the Only Question That Really Matters
3 Ways to Make New Stuff Happen
Lessons in Innovation from Buckminster Fuller, Martin Luther King Jr., Milton Friedman, and Sonny Rollins
100 Novels MBR Readers Would Die on a Hill For
A Reader-Curated Canon
Ground Zero in the Reading Crisis
#CanonChat Founder and Educator Matt Ryan on Inspiring a New Generation of Readers
Open Thread: 100 Best Novels, Seriously?
Let’s Create Our Own List of the 100 Best Novels in English
Dickens, Doubled: The Hidden Architecture of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’
One Crime, Two Survivors, and the Three Pairs Holding the Story Together
David Copperfield: A Hero Beside the Point
Reviewing Charles Dickens’s Beloved Classic and Risking My Own Hide in the Process
Bookish Diversions: How the Pros Do It
John Grisham, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Wilfred Sheed, Joan Didion, and Edgar Allan Poe
Serious Reading Was Always a Minority Sport
Rumors of the Book’s Demise Misunderstand Who Really Reads to Begin With
’A Small Rebellion Against the Machine’
Poet Seth Wieck on Writing in the Margins, Memorizing Verse Behind the Wheel, and His Debut Collection ‘Call Out Coyote’
Books: Everybody’s Favorite Magical Machine
An Interview You’ll Love, or so I Suspect
Who Really Wrote Philip K. Dick’s Best Novel?
A 3,000-Year-Old Algorithm, ‘The Man in the High Castle,’ and the Question That Won’t Go Away
Who Killed the Book Review?
Newspaper Book Coverage Is Dying, but Don’t Hold a Funeral for Literary Culture
The Best Novel You’ll Ever Read About Cockfighting
Probably the Only One, Too. But Don’t Miss Charles Willeford’s 1972 Underground Classic, ‘Cockfighter’
Bookish Diversions: Why Read Shakespeare?
First Folio, Universal Appeal, Teaching Shakespeare in School, but Shakespeare Wasn’t Even Shakespeare, Right?
No, Books Are Not Remotely Too Expensive
Let’s Explore a Little Math
Bookish Diversions: Anything Better than a Bookshop?
Just a Great Big Post About the Wonderful World of Bookstores: Big Ones, Little Ones, Running One, and Why They Matter. Plus, I Introduce You to the Fantastic Mr. Barton
Unpredictable Futures: Bonhoeffer and Bots
With Poets Training Generative AI, It’s Worth Asking: What Makes Us Human?
I Finally Finished ‘The Brothers Karamazov’
Then I Picked a Fight with Myself About What It Means
Bookish Diversions: The Point of Poetry? Slow Down
Out of Fashion, Lyrical Labor, Phillis Wheatley, Poetry’s Psychology, Smoking Dante, More
No One Utters Fopdoodle with Their Dignity Intact
English Is a Circus: 109 Words too Goofy for the Machines, Helpfully Compiled with the Aid of Those Machines
Getting Lost Where You Live
Noticing the World Around Us: A Conversation with Novelist Denise S. Robbins
Orwell, Lewis, and Us: What Contemporaries Share Without Seeing
Why Our Fiercest Opponents Are Often Our Closest Relatives
Bookish Diversions: Use AI, Lose Your Book Deal—and Maybe More
‘Shy Girl’ Canceled; AI Everywhere, or Is It? Can AI Write?
Solving This Mystery Might Destroy You
Reviewing Paul Auster’s Modern Classic ‘The New York Trilogy’
Publishing’s Little Secret: It’s All Gambling
Inside the Literary Casino That Publishes What You Read
Women Saints and Scientists You Should Know
The Inspiring Lives of Maria Skobtsova, Henrietta Leavitt, and Hildegard of Bingen
‘Feminine Hands’: The Hidden History of Women in Medieval Book Culture
Monks Get the Credit. Nuns Deserve Some Too. Evidence from Their Manuscripts—and One Sister’s Teeth