Everybody loves a good book. It's almost Canada Day, and could there be a better time to discover new Canadian writers?These writers have very little in common. They are all Canadian. They are all

It is right to rethink old literature. But does cancel culture amount to book burnings? Sooner or later, everybody gets cancelled, but I could not imagine why anybody would pick on Dr. Seuss, a childhood favorite of mine.

Deciphering the most beloved, most reviled children’s-book author in history.

Lawrence Wright is not interested in saying "I told you so." At the beginning of his new novel, he writes: "Dear Reader, The events depicted in The End of October were meant to serve as a cautionary tale. But real life doesn't always wait for warnings." Wright's fictional tale is about a mysterious virus that starts in Asia, sweeps across continents, cripples the health care system, wrecks the economy, and kills people worldwide.

In his fifty-four years among the living, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn wrote twenty-nine books in just about every conceivable genre—folktales, travelogues, novels, cookbooks, translations, dictionaries of proverbs—none of which can compete, in terms of sheer Dickensian horror and pluck, with the story of his own life. He was born in 1850 on the Greek island of Lefkáda (one of the Ionian Islands, at the time still under British control), to an Ionian mother named Rosa and an Irish father, Charles, who was stationed there as a staff surgeon in the British Army.

As we grind up against the absolute limits of humanity’s use and misuse of our environment, it’s tempting to look to Silent Spring and ask why it had such a profound impact. By Meehan Crist.

In Ted Chiang’s new collection of stories, technology can be a force for human—and robotic—good. By Joyce Carol Oates.

America in denial: Gabor Maté on the psychology of Russiagate. With Aaron Maté.

Andrei Rogatchevski reviews Forræderens Guide til Nord-Korea by Morten Traavik.

How should we read Thucydides? By Johanna Hanink.

At times, autofiction can seem to refer not so much to a genre as to our desire, collectively, to seek the author in a text. We group together novels by Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Jenny Offill because they make it easy to presume that the writer is the protagonist. This freedom feels new, so we assume that autofiction must be new, too. For precedent, we reach for “Reality Hunger,” David Shields’s manifesto, from 2010, in which he called for a “deliberate unartiness.

Boris Dralyuk appreciates a “riveting political biography” of Mikhail Sholokhov, “Stalin’s Scribe” by Brian J. Boeck.

A rumor has emerged on the web suggesting that Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin is working with FromSoftware - the developers of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and the recently-released Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice - on an open-world video game. The rumor emerged on the Spawn Wave YouTube channel, citing Liam Robertson (a writer with a good reputation for scoops) as its source. Spawn Wave makes it clear that nothing here has been confirmed publicly, and therefore we should come at this story with some skepticism.

You may know Henry Winkler as The Fonz from Happy Days or the "very good" Bluth family lawyer from Arrested Development. Or perhaps, more recently, for his Emmy-winning role as the eccentric acting coach Gene Cousineau on the HBO comedy series Barry. But what Winkler is most proud of is, he says, may be his least recognized body of work: his best-selling children's book series Here's Hank, which follows the adventures and struggles of a dyslexic kid named Hank Zipzer. Winkler, who has dyslexia himself, pulls from his own experiences to write the series along with Lin Oliver.

From James Baldwin to Susan Sontag: the American authors labelled enemies of the state. By Douglas Kennedy.

Not long ago, during an Amtrak ride, I met a college student who told me he was a fiction writer. I asked him what he’d been writing and reading, and he said that he was writing a novel about time travel, and that he was reading — well, he had been reading Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth,” but after about 50 pages, he said, he’d tossed it into the trash.

Katy Kelleher presages a boom in eau de Nil, the slippery color that snakes through Egypt.

Only Jesus made his father more famous. Harper Lee’s father was actually named Amasa, but, by the end of his life, he was answering to “Atticus Finch,” a reflection of how closely the character was modelled on him and how wildly well known his fictional doppelgänger had become. When “To Kill a Mockingbird” was published, in 1960, it instantly—and seemingly irrevocably—entered the canon of American literature...

The book artist Edward Gorey, when asked about his tastes in literature, would sometimes mention his mixed feelings about Thomas Mann: “I dutifully read ‘The Magic Mountain’ and felt as if I had t.b. for a year afterward.” As for Henry James: “Those endless sentences. I always pick up Henry James and I think, Oooh! This is wonderful! And then I will hear a little sound.

Gary Saul Morson on the literary legacy of 19th-century Russian revolutionary terrorism.