At The Reading List, we’re trainspotters when it comes to interesting book links, and here are a number that caught our eye.

• Students are turning to YouTube, podcasts and ChatGPT-crafted summaries rather than actually reading their assignments for class. Professors are unsure how to adapt.
• Sally Rooney is in the news with the publication of her new novel Intermezzo: ‘The work of writing is so much more fulfilling for me than the existence of the finished book.’
• By analysing 30,000 stories across various formats, researchers found that narratives with more frequent and pronounced changes in emotional tone tend to be more successful.
• Travel back to 1960 with James Baldwin’s short story ‘This Morning, This Evening, So Soon’.
• ‘I no longer have to save the world’: Novelist Richard Powers on fiction, the climate crisis and his latest novel, Playground.
• Five Books That Conjure Entirely New Worlds, as chosen by Jeff VanderMeer.
• The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself: The web’s collective memory is stored in the servers of the Internet Archive. Legal battles threaten to wipe it all away.
• The latest episode of the Granta Podcast features novelist and essayist Rachel Kushner.
• A team of researchers, including Arizona State University professors, were recently able to authenticate an extremely rare book that’s 437 years old.
• Slovakia’s populist government is targeting ‘wealthy’ book buyers with steep VAT rise.
• The Regime of Capital: An interview with the editors and translators of a new edition of Karl Marx’s Capital.
• ‘What The Bell Jar tells me about my mother, Sylvia Plath’, by poet and artist Frieda Hughes.
• Fredric Jameson, the American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist, has died. Read his 2020 essay ‘Time and the Sea’ here.

• Find our previous Footnotes here.

Header image: Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Categories Fiction International

Tags Footnotes