Browsing: Books & Fiction
Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine leads with 14 raves. Claire Vaye Watkins, Keith Ridgway, and two nonfiction titles round out a strong week.
A bookseller’s brother gets 30 years for moving zines, AI companies mine old books for clean data, and the Harlem Renaissance writers got there first.
July 20 in books: O. Henry’s prison release, Margaret Avison’s unpublishable biography, Foer’s soccer book revisited, and a strange story from Michigan Quarterly Review.
Booksellers fill the criticism void, Doubleday launches Outsider Editions, and AI theft hits writers where it hurts. The week in books, July 13–17, 2026.
Bret Easton Ellis’s 2023 novel The Shards becomes an FX series produced by Ryan Murphy, starring Kaia Gerber and set in 1980s Los Angeles.
From a 1616 translation to an AI voice reading it aloud, every major Odyssey adaptation ranked — and Nolan’s new film with Matt Damon arrives into that history.
From AI authorship scandals to Stalinist censorship parallels, the week of July 6-10, 2026 produced some of the year’s sharpest literary arguments.
A new Kino Lorber documentary on Mary Oliver reveals the poet as a teenage runaway, lifelong smoker, and partner to photographer Molly Malone Cook.
Nella Larsen’s 1923 graduation, Dewey’s sermon epiphany, AI manuscript fraud, and new fiction from Jason Stone and Victoria Chang fill July 8’s reading list.
A UK crafter gifted children paper hedgehogs folded from Nicholson Baker’s erotic novel The Fermata. Police were called. He said he was mortified.