A Week When Books Refused to Stay Quiet
October 22 marks the birthday of Doris Lessing, born in 1919, a writer whose range – from colonial Africa to speculative dystopia to inner psychological fracture – remains genuinely difficult to categorize even now. That difficulty feels appropriate for a week when the literary conversation kept refusing to settle into comfortable shapes, lurching instead between supply chain chaos, existential questions about reading’s relevance, and the strange persistence of Taiwan’s independent bookstore culture against every economic forecast that should have killed it.
Sally Rooney’s books are selling out across the UK.
That single fact sits oddly against the news that triggered it: the announcement that Rooney’s titles will no longer be sold in the United Kingdom, sending readers to strip shelves that were, apparently, still very well stocked with her work right up until the moment everyone decided they needed it. The Guardian reported the shortage. Whether this is solidarity, scarcity psychology, or simply the market doing what markets do when supply disappears, the result is the same – empty shelves and a novelist who was already inescapable becoming somehow more so.
Fiction That Earns Its Space This Week
K-Ming Chang’s new novel Needlemouth opens with a scene that Lit Hub published as an excerpt this week: “Outside, we play House. My cousin Mandy, my cousin Yangyang, and me.” The simplicity of that entry point – childhood, cousins, a game that is also something else – does a lot of work fast. Chang has built a reputation for prose that operates at the intersection of family mythology and bodily strangeness, and the excerpt suggests Needlemouth continues in that direction without repeating itself.
Tanaïs, whose new book Stellar Smoke arrived this week, spoke with Lit Hub about the writing process and about Mulholland Drive, which is either an odd pairing or a perfectly logical one depending on how you read the book. Tanaïs’s work has always sat at the edge of genre and personal essay, resistant to clean shelving – the kind of writing that makes the fiction/nonfiction divide feel slightly administrative.
Book Marks rounded up five reviews worth reading this week, including coverage of Emily Hanawalt’s work, which one critic described as shifting from Richard Scarry to “Extremely Scary” – a transition the review calls shocking. That’s a specific enough claim to take seriously. Hanawalt’s perspective, the review notes, veers into the horrifying, which puts her picture books in a category that requires a different kind of attention than most illustrated work gets.
The Arguments That Won’t Resolve
Lit Hub’s advice column this week posed the question that most readers have probably asked privately but rarely say aloud: are books over, and are you the asshole if you think so? It’s a better question than it sounds. The defensiveness that attaches to any skepticism about reading – the way suggesting that books might be losing cultural ground can make a person sound philistine or nihilistic – has always worked against honest assessment. The column doesn’t appear to offer a clean answer, which is probably correct.
At The Nation, Kelly Kong reported on what she calls Taiwan’s “bookstore revolution,” profiling booksellers Tsai, Chang, and Chiang, who were each asked the same question: how do you change minds? All three answered the way bookstore owners tend to answer – by pointing to reading itself as the mechanism of change. The piece sits in useful tension with the Lit Hub column asking whether books still matter. Taiwan’s independent bookstore owners are betting their livelihoods that they do. The National Book Awards named 25 finalists across five categories this week, adding another data point to the ongoing argument about which books are breaking through.
Steven Thrasher reviewed three new books examining Joe Biden’s relationship with Israel and with the press – a cluster of titles that arrived close enough together to suggest publishers read the same tea leaves at the same time. Elsewhere, Dissent asked what happens to publications that keep pivoting to Substack, a question that touches every outlet currently watching its print numbers and wondering whether the newsletter model actually solves anything or just relocates the problem. The Hedgehog Review published Willis Jenkins’s remembrance of Wendell Berry, describing him as “the farmer-prophet of rural Kentucky” – a phrase that manages to be accurate and slightly reductive at the same time, which Berry himself might have appreciated.
A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times Magazine this week about John Berger as an antidote to what he calls the infinite scroll – the argument being that Berger’s way of looking, his attention to the attention of others, offers something the feed cannot. Scott’s framing: “You pay attention to his attention.” Meanwhile, Dissent published a piece on how psychedelics became the drug of choice for the technofascist set, which is either a cultural history or a warning, and the Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction and nonfiction dropped for the week, offering a different kind of map of what readers are actually buying – a list that, this week, does not include whatever Sally Rooney titles UK booksellers were still holding when the news broke.
