Warring contingents of the Steinbeck family have been battling over the rights to his works for half a century.

Samuel Delany was 20 when his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, appeared. That was in 1962, and by 1967–69 (when “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” and “Aye, and Gomorrah …” nabbed Hugo and Nebula awards), he was a luminary of American science fiction and fantasy.

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.”

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

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.

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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.

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.

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

Celebrating National Book Lovers Day doesn't have to come with a deep commitment to a new book, as there are a number of novels out there that can be read in a single day. Acknowledged annually on August 9, National Book Lovers Day encourages people to celebrate their favorite pieces of literature. Along with paying tribute to some of the books that captured a place in a person's heart, people are encouraged to take a break from their smartphone and enjoy a new story or reconnect with one of their favorites.

Famously written in 100 days, John Steinbeck’s novel drew on years of other work and an agonised sense of duty to migrant farm workers

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.