The Latest Breaking News on Books

The Sandman: how representations of dreams and nightmares have changed over time

As Netflix’s new series, The Sandman, notes, we spend a third of our lives in sleep and dream. In popular culture, The Sandman is a folkloric being who helps us drift off to the land of nod where he controls whether we have nightmares or dreams. He is also the…

The Conversation · Aug 12, 2022

Salman Rushdie ‘stabbed in neck’ on stage at New York event

The author of The Satanic Verses was once the subject of a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini

The Independent UK · Aug 12, 2022

Salman Rushdie stabbed in neck on New York stage before speech in front of packed crowd

Sir Salman Rushdie, who wrote the controversial novel The Satanic Verses, was attacked at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state today, with police arresting a 24-year-old man

Daily Mirror · Aug 12, 2022

Nuclear war no longer seems to scare us as much as it used to – have we become accustomed to the unthinkable?

The UN secretary general last week said humanity remains ‘one miscalculation away from annihilation’. We should be frightened – and angry

The Guardian - AU · Aug 12, 2022

French cartoonist Sempe, famous for whimsical New Yorker covers, dies age 89

French cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempe, who won international acclaim with a series of more than 100 drawings for the covers of The New Yorker magazine, has died at the age of 89.

France 24 · Aug 11, 2022

Desire by Jessie Cole review – an author reckons with her yearning for intimacy

For fans of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, Cole’s second memoir deals with the pain of an ambivalent courtship – while exploring her visceral need for love

The Guardian - AU · Aug 11, 2022

This week's bestsellers from Publishers Weekly

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Aug. 6, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by NPD BookScan © 2022 NPD Group.

Tribune News Service · Aug 11, 2022

Three Raymond Briggs books that helped make the graphic novel respectable

Raymond Briggs, who died on August 9 aged 88, transformed the way we see and value the strip cartoon and graphic novel in this country. Briggs’ great achievement was to make the form intellectually respectable through telling stories about seemingly ordinary characters, which were rendered skilfully in the egalitarian medium…

The Conversation · Aug 11, 2022

Book has insight, no clear answer on Northam yearbook photo

Another investigative effort to uncover the origins of a racist photo on Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook page has ended inconclusively

The Independent UK · Aug 11, 2022

Fahrenheit 451 Was Once Sanitized for Public Schools

A publishing company ironically removed the original version of the Ray Bradbury novel depicting mass media censorship.

Reason · Aug 11, 2022