Biblio

British author Zadie Smith said the idea that motherhood could be a threat to creativity is 'absurd', while Louise Doughty condemned it as 'completely ridiculous'.Smith, the best-selling author of White Teeth and NW, said multiple children left female writers with a 'surprising among of free time', adding: 'I have two children. Dickens had ten'.

At this year’s Clinton Global Initiative America (CGI), the literacy nonprofit First Book unveiled a two-year plan to help thousands of young readers. The push began in March In March 2013, when First Book bought '$1 million worth of culturally-diverse content' from Harper Collins and Lee & Low Books.

In 1955, the pioneering photojournalist Eve Arnold photographed Monroe reading a worn copy of James Joyce’s modernist classic, Ulysses. It’s still debated whether this was simply an attempt to recast her image (she often played the 'dumb blonde' character in her ’50s films), or whether she actually had a pensive side (her personal library, catalogued at the time of her death, suggests the latter.

New Canadian research finds reading a literary short story increases one’s comfort with ambiguity.

Richard Thomas: This list is entirely subjective, based on books that I’ve read over the years. But what they all have in common is that they’ve stayed with me. I’m hoping that you’ve read most of these and will spend much of this column nodding your head in agreement. More importantly, I hope you find some new authors and novels that will enlighten you at some point down the road

A hardened prisoner was comfortable enough reading werewolf romances that he sued for the right -- and won.

Self-published titles accounted for over a fifth of crime, science fiction, romance and humour ebooks sold in UK in 2012.

If you have ever felt overwhelmed by the ubiquity of McDonald's, this stat may make your day: there are more public libraries (about 17,000) in America than outposts of the burger mega-chain (about 14,000). The same is true of Starbucks (about 11,000 coffee shops nationally).

Iain Banks, who has died aged 59, was a novelist who achieved popularity and critical success in two separate fields: literary fiction, for which he appeared on the first Granta list of young writers beside the likes of Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and AN Wilson; and, as Iain M Banks, science fiction, much of it set in an interstellar anarcho-communist utopia called The Culture.

Revelations that the federal government is collecting massive amounts of data about telephone calls and Internet traffic has some people nervous that George Orwell's vision of Big Brother constantly watching them has come true.

These characters will dazzle you with wit and charm, then destroy you without remorse. Meet literature's ten most disturbing sociopaths.

While readers have enthusiastically embraced digital publishing, the book industry itself has continually dragged its heels. Even those who’ve embraced digital review platforms like NetGalley have been reluctant to make similar leaps for retail sales of digital books, and their reticence has limited consumer access to digital titles, particularly backlist – the same books consumers have the most difficulty finding in print.

If your goal is to read a lot, there are a few obstacles to overcome: keeping track of the books you want to read; refining the list down to ones you’re going to read in the near feature; actually reading them; retaining the important parts.

German researchers have created a new DRM feature that changes the text and punctuation of an e-book ever so slightly. Called SiDiM, which Google translates to 'secure documents by individual marking', the changes are unique to each e-book sold. These alterations serve as a digital watermark that can be used to track books that have had any other DRM layers stripped out of them before being shared online.

Iain Banks died last Sunday, just before the publication of his final novel The Quarry. Last month he talked to Stuart Kelly about writing, politics and all the things still left to do.

Dans les pays anglophones, les révélations sur les programmes massifs de surveillance des citoyens a fait remonter 1984 dans le classement des meilleures ventes de livres.

Eleven librarians at the Seattle Public Library make up the Books on Bikes team, a bicycle library pilot initiative which will visit local parks and events throughout the summer, including the Seattle Pride Parade, and cultural festivals including...

Over the weekend, author Iain M. Banks died of cancer — just two months after announcing that he had less than a year to live. He left behind some of the greatest works of science fiction ever written. Here are eleven Banksian rules of good SF writing, that we would do well to remember long into the future.

Take a look at some of the the much-reworked drafts for Beckett's first major novel, which show his extensive revisions as well as doodles of James Joyce, Charlie Chaplin – and himself

The Wasp Factory author Iain Banks dies aged 59, two months after announcing he had terminal cancer, his family says.

Shakespeare's Star Wars is one of the higher-profile Shakespeare remixes to hit the stands, due out July 2 from Quick Books, who ushered in the era of mash-up classics with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Since then, they've wrung Austen dry and moved on to Kafka, Tolstoy, and, yes, Shakespeare.

Los Angeles artist ETMCA painted a coded poem (pictured above), chopped his painting into 18 pieces and hid the pieces in Venice, Italy bookstores.