High rise havoc and haunted houses: Andrew F. Sullivan and Nick Cutter deliver the horror
The Marigold is a quintessential urban horror tale; The Handyman Method relocates the terror to the suburbs.
Lisa Alward’s debut short fiction collection is a quietly potent cocktail
The stories display a surface placidity that belies their deeper structure.
Fail better: Stephen Marche on the one constant in a writer’s life
Failure is inevitable because perfection is unattainable.
The debut novel by Jessica Johns reclaims Indigenous horror tropes in a story about pervasive familial grief
What is apparent throughout Bad Cree is Johns's facility for dealing with the rocky and tumultuous terrain of familial memory.
Emma Smith’s Portable Magic is a conversational meander through the use and abuse of books in history
Smith guides readers through almost six centuries in which the technology of the codex has remained relatively unchanged.
U.S. judge Florence Pan rules against publishers in decision blocking the merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster
The U.S. Department of Justice called the ruling "a victory for authors, readers, and the free exchange of ideas."
Stephen King and Jonathan Karp square off in the early days of the DoJ/PRH/S&S antitrust suit
"When I started in this business, there were literally hundreds of imprints, and some of them were run by people with extremely idiosyncratic tastes, one might say."
Final briefs filed in PRH/S&S merger fight with U.S. Department of Justice
The suit to block the proposed merger is set to begin in a Washington, D.C., court on Monday, August 1.
America’s Next Great Author makes lofty promises for what amounts to the ongoing gamification of literature
The notion that a televised competition could produce a "great" writer (always paying careful attention to how the producers define that notoriously slippery word) is questionable at best.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 13: “Dread” by Clive Barker
Barker’s psychologically tense story examines the price we pay for confronting our darkest fears.