As spring takes hold, the days arrive with a freshness that makes people want to linger outside; the balmy days almost feel wasted indoors. While you’re taking in the warm air, you might as well also be reading. Enjoying a book at a park, a beach, or an open-air café encourages a particular leisurely frame…

Last week, Diane Goettel was on vacation in Florida when she saw an alarming email on her phone. After 55 years, Small Press Distribution (SPD)—one of the last remaining independent book distributors in the US—was shutting down immediately, with no advance notice or transitional support. Its website went dark, its Twitter account was deleted, and…

It’s been an eventful month in my book-loving family: My youngest child is learning to read. I, of course, have greeted this news with all the chill of a bounce house full of otters. “No pressure!” I call to him as I plant Sandra Boynton board books in strategic locations around the living room. “I…

John Barth, the playfully erudite author whose darkly comic and complicated novels revolved around the art of literature and launched countless debates over the art of fiction, has died aged 93. Johns Hopkins University, where Barth was an emeritus professor of English and creative writing, confirmed he died on Tuesday. No cause of death was…

John Barth, a novelist who crafted labyrinthine, fantastical tales that were at once bawdy and philosophical, placing him on the cutting edge of the postmodern literary movement, died April 2. He was 93. His death was announced in a statement by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he was a longtime faculty member. The statement…

Maryse Condé, a French-language author from Guadeloupe who became known as the grande dame of Caribbean literature while writing exuberant, lushly descriptive novels that explored the brutal legacies of slavery and colonialism, died the night of April 1 at a hospital in Apt, in southern France. She was 90. Her death was announced by her…

She explored the history and culture of Africa, the West Indies and Europe in work that made her a perennial favorite for the Nobel Prize. Maryse Condé, a writer from the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe whose explorations of race, gender and colonialism across the Francophone world made her a perennial favorite for the Nobel…

There’s certainly no shortage of raucous, semi-fictionalised memoirs by Eve Babitz to choose from. However, I Used to Be Charming offers us a rollicking cross-section of her best work. Sumptuous, seductive and filled to the brim with razor-sharp wit, editor Sara Kramer compiles nearly 50 pieces written by Babitz between 1975 and 1997, including her…

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The tale behind a new museum of children’s literature is equal parts imagination, chutzpah and “The Little Engine That Could.” On a crisp Saturday morning that screamed for adventure, a former tin can factory in North Kansas City, Mo., thrummed with the sound of young people climbing, sliding, spinning, jumping, exploring and reading. Yes, reading.…