The portability of Nintendo Switch makes it a great system to play a wide variety of genres, and while visual novels can be enjoyed perfectly well on your TV, there’s something about playing them on a handheld which just feels ‘right’. Since launch, the console has accrued some great examples of the genre, and the…

ITHACA, N.Y. — Modern e-reading devices may be capable of carrying thousands of novels in the palm of one’s hand, but there’s nothing quite like actually holding a real book as you anxiously turn the pages. While many book publishers have expressed concern in recent decades over the digitization of books, researchers from Cornell University report…

In Britain, Japanese novels in English translation are experiencing a boom in popularity among a new generation, with word-of-mouth on social media driving book sales. Trends on social media platforms such as TikTok — where members of the “BookTok” community recommend and theorize about their favorite books, genres and authors — have inspired young Britons…

Jonathan Escoffery, 43, was born in Texas and lives in Oakland, California. His debut, If I Survive You, about a second-generation Jamaican in Miami, where Escoffery grew up, was shortlisted for last year’s Booker and is currently on the shortlist of the Gordon Burn prize, announced on 7 March. The novelist Rumaan Alam has called…

Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature, an august body founded in London in 1820, seemed poised to stride into the new year on a bold footing, with an inclusive programme of events and a revitalised membership. Its Booker prize-winning president, Bernardine Evaristo, alongside poet Daljit Nagra, chair of the society’s leadership council, were promising…

“The books becoming popular on TikTok are [because of] people being genuinely excited about them, not publishers,” Freudenheim said in a recent interview. “If we try to push a book, that’s not what works. It is readers responding to them. It is genuine.” Novels by Japanese authors such as Mieko Kawakami (above) have become popular…

The book is dead: that’s what I hear every time I’m in London or New York. How can a bound stack of printed pages begin to hold us in an age of search-engine attention spans? And why would anyone pick up a novel when she can stream movies around the clock? Publishers these days sometimes…

Growing up, I often thought of my mother as a collector of people. She collected people the way other people collect things. So it was never just us five—my parents and their three girls. Instead, people appeared, staying for various periods and disappearing: the live-in helpers; teens and young women my mother helped through some…

In his book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, author Johann Hari puts forth the idea that our ability to focus deeply as a species is being systematically eroded, preventing us from taking collective action against climate change. He says that a problem as complex as this requires us to come together and think deeply…