Gabrielle Bellot on Pablo Neruda, Virginia Woolf, and Saying Goodbye to Dead Pets.

The authorship controversy has yet to surface a compelling alternative to the man buried in Stratford. Perhaps that’s because, until recently, no one was looking in the right place. The case for Emilia Bassano.

Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” strikes a middle point between his more surreal lyrics of the ‘60s and his more straightforward love songs, and as Polyphonic’s recent video taking a deep dive into this “musical masterpiece” shows, that combination is why so many count it as one of his best songs. By Ted Mills.

Tired with life? Fed up with the same routine? Become a winner! I wrote for you a list of 3 books that can change your life in a meaningful way and help you to improve it greatly. I chose for you readers of my blog books that will change you and fire you up in 3 very important aspects of life : fitness, business and spirituality.

George Orwell meant his novel to be a warning, not a prediction—and that warning is relevant in new and unsettling ways.

Van Gogh spent three years in London and delighted in Britain’s literary heritage, a love that is explored in a new Tate show

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.

In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones. Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances.

By day, she researches the poetry of John Donne as a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. But in the evening, when Dr Katherine Rundell wants a bit of comfort, she reads Paddington. “As an adult, the thing I love about Paddington is that the structure Michael Bond has built into his books is one of hope. Things which appear to be negative turn out to be just cogs in the greater machine. I think Bond sees life as miraculous – and that’s in the structure of the book.”

Many of the best new books coming out in May ask readers to question humankind’s durability in the face of adversity, whether it be troubling changes meant to “rejuvenate” society, as in Ma Jian’s China Dream or more personal, devastating loss, as in Jayson Greene’s Once More We Saw Stars. Several of the characters in these books, as well as the writers behind them, maintain a sense of encouraging optimism as they struggle through trying times. Here, 10 books you should read in May.

I did read a few books published in the last thirty years. Most of them bored me to tears. A few, however, were so odd or stupid or, here and there, brilliant that I had to take notice. I was not able to dismiss them, as I would probably have preferred to do.

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.

Mark Twain continues to bedevil the academy, if not the reading public. Like Kipling, he has been by turns reviled and revered, often for the wrong reasons. Daniel Karlin considers the difficulties in dealing with an American classic.

Why am I here? How can I live a good life? What does it mean to have a mind and be a person? Since the days of antiquity, philosophers have puzzled over fundamental questions like these that sit at the very heart of our lived experience and interactions with the world. Solving these problems is not merely about increasing our knowledge of the world, to fill up academic textbooks and sit on library shelves, but to impart wisdom to aid us as we navigate through life's uncertainties and its profoundest mysteries.

It’s been a wild year for science fiction enthusiasts, as real life continues looking more like something out of an Arthur C. Clarke novel. Case in point: we just sent a robot to Mars and received a photo from it 8 minutes later. Here are our 10 favorite sci-fi books of 2018, from small-press debuts to Big Five bestsellers.

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

“Without a book, so often the child is alone,” says Antonio La Cava. The retired schoolteacher converted his three-wheeled van into a mobile library, the Bibliomotocarro. Driving the hills and mountains of Basilicata, Italy, La Cava is able to reach children in remote villages like San Paolo Albanese, which only has two children of primary school age. “I was strongly worried about growing old in a country of non-readers.” La Cava believes that it’s important to spread the joy of literature to as many children as possible: “carrying out such action has a value, not only social, not only cultural, but has a great ethical meaning.”

“It is, in the deepest sense, a privilege as well as a duty to have the opportunity to speak out — to many thousands of people — on something so important.”

Yesterday was Laura Ingalls Wilder's 150th birthday. It's time to take a critical look at her work

From hiding from a copy of The Exorcist to being unnerved by the likes of Shirley Jackson, Stephen King and Iain Banks, here are your most alarming reading experiences

A Tennessee library book that nearly ended up in the trash was sold for a whopping $1,250 when it was found to be a first edition. The Friends of the Memphis Public Library book store said the copy of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novella that served as the basis for the film Blade Runner, had been taken off the library shelves and placed in a bin for books to be sold or thrown away.

Listen up, you pathetic little nerdy fucklits: my name is George Raymond Richard Martin, and I’ll write whenever and whatever the goddamn fuck I want. I see your little comments on my LiveJournal blog, on your Reddits, on your Twitters, and on your Facebooks. You think you’re so fucking smart with your bitchy replies about my new Targaryen history book, like you’re a real fan for wanting my next book to be The Winds of Winter.

Radio War Nerd

One of the first things I did when I moved to Austin a decade ago was visit the Gutenberg Bible housed in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. As a bibliophile, the importance of that book was not lost on me. However, the impact of Johannes Gutenberg's surviving bibles as cultural treasures and book collectors' dreams was something I ignored. That is no longer the case. Margaret Leslie Davis' The Lost Gutenberg, which traces one Bible's 500-year journey, is an informative, superbly researched book that explores the lives of those who were in contact with the best example of Gutenberg's work.

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is one of history’s most famous novels and one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history. On this special episode of It’s Lit! we explore how Les Miserable became both a national and revolutionary anthem, and so publicly adored that all 1,900 pages never went out of print.

There are precious few writers who can claim to have influenced the course of literary history and literary criticism in the manner of legendary author Gabriel García Márquez.

It's always fun to speculate about how we'll die, like to break the ice during a party or while chatting in the subway with terrified strangers. We've all done that, right? Well. these people took it to a whole new level.

An interview with Paul Tang, whose People' Recreation Community has tapped into an intriguing new market.

With the onslaught of e-books, what will the rare book even look like 50 years from now? 200? Will it exist?

London's Lambeth Palace, home to the Archbishop of Canterbury, also has a leading historic book collection. The palace's library was the scene of a major crime that stayed undiscovered for decades.

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Etymology, or the study of the origin of words, is dry, dusty stuff that will give you allergies if you play with it too long.

Are you uncomfortable with ambiguity? It’s a common condition, but a highly problematic one. The compulsion to quell that unease can inspire snap judgments, rigid thinking, and bad decision-making. New Canadian research finds reading a literary short story increases one’s comfort with ambiguity.

It turns out that Harry Potter scribe J.K. Rowling is the author behind “Robert Galbraith’s” The Cuckoo’s Calling. Amazon reviews are overwhelmingly positive, citing its “engrossing” twists and “complex and compelling” characters as a few of the highlights.

People say it all the time: they’d love to get into science fiction or fantasy, but they’ve no idea where to start. If this is you (or if you’re one of those stubborn folks who looks snootily down on genre), listen up. Your trusty Flavorwire editors have a few suggestions for you — that is, a whole 50 sci-fi and fantasy novels that are well worth your time, whether you’re brand new to the concept of dragons and/or spaceships or a seasoned veteran.