"Becoming" by Michelle Obama is not just one of the best-selling books of the past year — it is one of the hottest titles of the decade. The inspirational memoir by the former first lady has been on sale for more than two months, yet it is still No. 1 on Amazon's constantly updated list of best-selling books. Amazon said "Becoming" enjoyed the longest streak at No. 1 for any book since "Fifty Shades of Grey" came out in 2012.

For centuries, we’ve given lavish attention to the specifics of punishment, and left Heaven woefully under-sketched. When I was a kid of ten or eleven years old, newly returned to New York after a few years living in Chicago, I started accompanying my mother to a church in Harlem, in a shallow, sunlit upper room just south of 125th Street. Every Sunday, service began with a procession. The Hammond organ would start up, and the ministers, carrying their Bibles, trailed by the pastor, would file in in a loose line, singing a song.

Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is a chilling exposé of the business model that underpins the digital world. Observer tech columnist John Naughton explains the importance of Zuboff’s work and asks the author 10 key questions.

What qualities must a book have to be considered science fiction? Genre categories can be helpful in guiding us toward works that we might like, or just are in the mood to read, but those definitions can be slippery, and many of the very best books defy conventions and upend expectations.

It’s a tale as old as time, or, at least, the internet: None of us are reading any more, the physical book is dead, Amazon has killed the independent bookstore, and it’s all only going to get worse. But this year, the story looks like just that—a fiction. We are buying books—especially the kind with physical pages—and we’re doing so, increasingly, in well-loved indie bookstores.

Censorship in the country is more complicated than many Westerners imagine.

In The Water Margin, first put to paper in the 14th century, local injustice is the rule, and defence against cruel local authority is a matter of vengeance, stratagem, and violence

A major survey of American authors has uncovered a crash in author earnings described as “a crisis of epic proportions” – particularly for full-time literary writers, who are “on the verge of extinction”. Surveying its membership and that of 14 other writers’ organisations in what it said was the largest survey of US authors’ earnings ever conducted, the Authors Guild reported that the median income from writing-related work fell to a historic low in 2017 at $6,080 (£4,760), down 42% from 2009.

Whether your interest is in winning arguments online or considerably deepening your knowledge of world cultural and intellectual history, you will be very well-served by at least one government agency from now into the foreseeable future.

During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. In Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith argues that it's important to define and describe dehumanization, because it's what opens the door for cruelty and genocide.

Graphic design studio Super Terrain’s edition of Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi classic Fahrenheit-451 took the internet by storm, thanks to a video showing how its all-black pages become readable text when exposed to an open flame. (This will, and quite possibly should, also work with a hair dryer or something else not completely on fire.) And now, for only $451 — get it? — you can preorder one to keep on a specially-heated shelf in your home! If you have $451 to drop on an artist’s book, we figure you could have custom heated shelves.

The Little Prince, Astrid Lindgren, the Brothers Grimm, made us readers. But they came to English years ago—where’s all the stuff that’s happened since?

The New York Times weighs in on an Authors Guild survey that shows a "drastic 42% decline in authors' earnings over the past decade. John Scalzi offers some important perspective.

I am reposting this list for International Women’s day. I would also like to ask for help from anyone who would like to aid in creating individual posts for each of the names in this list.

It is known as the “fly’s eye Dante”: an 1878 edition of the Divine Comedy which is so small – just 11/4 by 13/4 inches – that it is said to have taken 11 years to print, and to have damaged the eyes of both its compositor and corrector. Bound in red leather embossed with gold, the world’s smallest edition of Dante’s classic poem, which was printed by the Salmin Brothers in Padua, is one of almost 50 officially designated miniature books housed in the London Library.

In May of 1967,” writes Patrick Iber at The Awl, “a former CIA officer named Tom Braden published a confession in the Saturday Evening Post under the headline, ‘I’m glad the CIA is ‘immoral.’” With the hard-boiled tone one might expect from a spy, but the candor one may not, Braden revealed the Agency’s funding and support of all kinds of individuals and activities, including, perhaps most controversially, in the arts. Against objections that so many artists and writers were socialists, Braden writes, “in much of Europe in the 1950’s [socialists] were about the only people who gave a damn about fighting Communism.”

It’s the time of year when the sanctuary of the bookstore transforms into a battlefield. Here’s how to make life easier on both sides of the counter

An overstuffed bookcase (or e-reader) says good things about your mind.

Shadowlands Book I: Rhia Harlyn is a noble in Shen, one of the dozens of shadowlands which separate the bright, alien skyland. She has a missing brother, an unwanted marriage proposal and an interest in science considered unbecoming in her gender. A delightful new science fiction book.

As anyone who has ever used the Internet knows, cats are everything. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, more than 36 U.S. million households sport a feline companion. Where dogs are blindly loyal, a cat's ambivalence speaks of alien wisdom.

The mobile library bringing books to children in some of Jakarta's poorest neighbourhoods.

Bill Gates reviews “The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness” by author Andy Puddicombe.

A few years ago, when people heard I was a reading researcher, they might ask about their child’s dyslexia or how to get their teenager to read more. But today the question I get most often is, “Is it cheating if I listen to an audiobook for my book club?” Audiobook sales have doubled in the last five years while print and e-book sales are flat. These trends might lead us to fear that audiobooks will do to reading what keyboarding has done to handwriting...

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...

If you want to understand Warren Buffett’s approach to investing, here are 7 books that can help you do that. When Warren Buffett started his investing career, he would read 600, 750, or 1,000 pages a day.Even now, he still spends about 80 percent of his day reading. “Look, my job is essentially just corralling more and more and more facts and information, and occasionally seeing whether that leads to some action,” he once said in an interview.

Perusing the best-seller list these days is an adults-only experience. The top 25 books on Amazon’s list as of this writing include cookbooks titled What the F*@#k Should I Make for Dinner? and 50 Ways to Eat Cock, as well as a self-help guide called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Two others are adult coloring books—it’s a whole thing—titled Calm the F*ck Down and Go F*ck Yourself, I’m Coloring. What the f*ck is going on?

Empire of Silence (Sun Eater, #1) Hadrian Marlowe, a man revered as a hero and despised as a murderer, chronicles his tale in the galaxy-spanning debut of the Sun Eater series. A big book, a truly great read. Has a flavour of Frank Herbert's Dune without the LSD. The only problem with it, is it's the first book of a series and the rest haven't been published yet. I want more.

After the decline of feminist bookstores, there's a new trend emerging: mobile, black-owned book operations.

Running a business, being a writer, living a full life — these things depend on the knowledge that we can gain and use. What we call following our gut, is really us being subconsciously guided by every piece of information we’ve ever consumed, shaping our instincts and ideas and forming us.

When Charles Dickens died, he left behind an unfinished book containing unresolved mysteries. In ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood,’ who killed Drood—and is Drood really dead?

Jin Yong's fantasy novels of martial arts heroes and legends sold millions around the world.

How folk tales and traditional life snuck into avant-garde kids' books in the 1930s.

Ezra Glinter surveys the work of Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem.

On the ineffable magic of four little manuscripts of Old English poetry

The Measure of Homer bounds acrobatically backwards and forwards across the centuries, from the aristocratic Greek symposium of the sixth century BC to Christian Gdanmaa in the fifth century AD. By Peter Thonemann.