Anne Carson’s Best Books

“I came to think of translating as a room,” Anne Carson wrote, in her illustrated book of poems “Nox,” “where one gropes for the light switch.” When the Swedish Academy awarded Carson the Nobel Prize in Literature this month, they continued a long tradition of recognizing the superior art of poet-translators, from Rabindranath Tagore to Pablo Neruda, Czesław Miłosz, Seamus Heaney, and Jon Fosse. In her essays and poems—as in her translations of Sappho, Euripides, and Sophocles—Carson lays down each word as if it were arrived at after a suspended period of searching and testing, of slowly gathering a language to illuminate half-sensed, mysterious thoughts and feelings. As I noted earlier this month, her great theme is eros, and her truly exceptional books let us inhabit the longing and loneliness of desire. Merve Emre, The New Yorker

The New Age of Reading

Alarm about declining interest in books is perpetual. But, as bookselling reaches unexpected heights, James Daunt, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, thinks a different future is at hand.

Actually, in America, the reading of books is up. Sales of print books have increased nearly twenty-five per cent from a decade ago. The number of independent bookstores in the United States has climbed steeply since 2009, with a seventy-per-cent increase since 2020. A survey by the Pew Research Center found that thirty-eight per cent of American adults read one to five books in 2025, and fourteen per cent read at least twenty. The global book market is expected to grow five per cent annually for the next several years; for the generation now entering college, book sales are at a lifetime high. Nathan Heller, The New Yorker

in the picture the double-height main room of Daunt Books, which opened in 1990, on Marylebone High Street, in London. 

Smuggling Literature

During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) coordinated the secret distribution of books to key individuals, libraries, research institutes, cultural organizations, universities, and schools. From mid-1956 through 1991, these “forbidden books” found their way to six Warsaw Pact countries — Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and eventually the Soviet Union.

The CIA’s clandestine book program was little-known to the public until 2003, when a former official of the CIA-founded Free Europe Committee (FEC), John P. C. Matthews, disclosed it in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. The program was later chronicled by Alfred Reisch, who oversaw the Hungarian book distribution project until 1974, in his “Hot Books in the Cold War.” Reisch’s book provides an encyclopedic, scholarly account of the program’s origins, operations, and impact. Henry T. Edmondson III, The MIT Press Reader

Why do people’s pupils dilate when they’re surprised?

“Pupil dilation signals a spike in arousal, and our findings support the idea that these rapid fluctuations in arousal are doing something useful in the brain,” said study author Matt Nassar, an associate professor of neuroscience and of cognitive and psychological sciences at Brown. “They’re enabling us to deal with a world that often changes from one context to another context.” Corrie Pikul, News from Brown

What is it that makes books so magical?

Such is the gist of Marriott’s first book, The New Dark Ages, a polemical elegy tracing the rise and fall of print from Montaigne to Mr Beast. The point is modest – scroll less, read more – but the tone is grandiose. Literacy turbocharged our capacity for complex argument, he argues, but adds that “conversation is very far from useless”, and says “literate civilisation … has never produced a work of art with quite the same quality of heroic starkness as the Iliad or Beowulf”. Anthony Cummins, The Guardian

recensione a The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society di James Marriott (Bodley Head);

vedi anche: 

It feels as if we’re increasingly seeing bookshops doubling as coffee shops or wine bars in recent years, as business owners try to broaden their customer base in tough financial times. “Bookshops are the Swiss army knives of retail,” the Bookseller Association managing director Meryl Halls tells me. They are “constantly adding new tools to remain cutting-edge while always staying rooted in books and reading”.

Yet, as Pettegree points out in The Bookshop, this survival instinct has a long precedent: in the 17th century, few shopkeepers would “risk their livelihoods on the exclusive sale of books”, with most offering a range of other goods too – stationery, medical supplies, newspapers – effectively, they were general stores.

 

Twilight of the Dons

Colin Kidd’s intriguing new history of Oxbridge intellectual life, Twilight of the Dons, explains the snub not as a powerful display of academic censure, but as the death throes of a declining cultural force. 

In the 1950s, the academics of Oxford and Cambridge universities enjoyed high prestige, freedom and confidence. They constituted nothing short of a “secular clerisy,” entrusted with the maintenance of civilised values and higher truths, and expected to lead debates within British public life. From hosting college dinners for cabinet ministers to dominating BBC current affairs programming to provisioning the intelligence services with promising students, Oxbridge dons held deep reservoirs of social capital and political power. Tristram Hunt, Financial Times

un libro molto interessante per cercare di capire il mondo universitario d'elite di Oxbridge. Il libro viene anche recensito da Fedirico Varese sul Domenicale del Sole 24 Ore del 20/9/2026.

Per rimanere nell'ambito dell'education anglosassone ed europeo in generale, da leggere anche questo articolo, "European education powerhouses rocked by falling scores in global study", Jon Henley, Deborah Cole in Berlin, Angelique Chrisafis in Paris and Miranda Bryant Nordic correspondent, The Guardian

How to make a bestseller

Think about the last book you bought. How did you choose it? Was it from a recommendation, a review, a TikTok video? Did the cover grab you, were you swayed by the quotes on the front, or did you just happen to spot it on an appealing table as you walked into the shop? Did you think about all the nudges that led you to that decision – by the publisher, the bookseller or that person you follow on Insta?

The reality is that our reading choices are directed and massaged at every turn. “It’s all about the art of persuasion,” says Philip Gwyn Jones, who was a publisher for more than 30 years and is now a literary agent. And who are the persuaders? They’re the booksellers, the supermarket stock buyers, the publishing houses and their ranks of marketers and publicists. And, more recently, persuasion often comes from BookTokers and online influencers, social media videos, podcasts and Instagram posts. How is all this changing publishing? John Self, The Guardian

What makes a good comic novel?

Nobody knows what a comic novel is. And once you start discussing it, all the fun runs out. EB White compared it to dissecting a frog (you’re left with innards and a dead frog) but I would compare it to turning all the lights on at a party: everyone looks terrible and you’ve ruined the party. [...] I think they are books that decide something is funny, as Jerry Seinfeld once defined comedy. In Moby-Dick, it’s a coin nailed to a masthead. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, it’s the worst best poem you’ve ever read. And yet we feel we’re getting at something the most solemn narratives aim for: an understanding of the human condition, of grief, of love, of death. All the big stuff. The comic novels I love are books that could just as easily have been tragedies. It is simply that the author has decided it’s funny. Andrew Sean Greer, The Guardian

How Brown University is navigating the rise of generative AI use in the classroom

Among its key findings, the report revealed that while most students report using generative AI in the course of their studies, many of those same students worry that it is negatively affecting their long-term cognition. Faculty members shared these concerns, and while many faculty have begun using AI in some capacity in teaching or research, many course syllabi do not adequately establish clear expectations or limitations on AI use. News from Brown

intervista interessante, in particolare per gli insegnanti 

Art Spiegelman

He is 78 years old, slight and scruffy-looking, with a grizzled goatee and wispy grey hair, and he can still talk faster than most people can think. He offers me a coffee when I arrive at his home on a sweltering June day, but then keeps getting distracted from making it by his own anecdotes. He takes me on an impromptu tour, showing me the living room that held Mouly’s huge, 1,000lb Multilith printing press, until they had a toddler and it became too dangerous to keep. There is a mural painted by the cartoonist Gary Panter on the living room wall, and another just above their bed, painted to replace a set of bookshelves that collapsed onto the couple when they were asleep, breaking Mouly’s nose and prompting a big book clear out. “Is this book worth dying for?” Spiegelman says they asked of themselves, a more hardcore alternative to Swedish death cleaning, but even so there are full bookshelves in every room, and pieces of art and curios everywhere. Sophie McBain, The Guardian

a settembre uscirà una nuova edizione di In the Shadow of No Towers di Art Spiegelman presso Penguin