literature

LAcon V, the 84th World Science Fiction Convention, presented the 2026 Hugo Awards in a ceremony held at the convention on Sunday, August 30th, 2026. The full results including the detailed reports on voting are published on the LACon V website. The results will be updated here on The Hugo Awards site as soon as our bandwidth allows. Best Novel The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow (Tor US; Tor UK) B…

Is your work creative? The pencil case model of creativity I delete the same sentence from my thesis introduction, for the twentieth time today. It feels like no combination of letters will save me: how will any of them convince a PhD assessment committee? The ringing bell is a welcome interruption. I join my friend for a walk, happy to enjoy the three days of summer we get this year. We wander t…

_Zenodo_. 2026This paper presents the formal mathematical and neurobiological foundations of the Bulut Doctrine, establishing a deterministic and falsifiable framework for quantitative narratology and biophysical aesthetics. Traditional literary criticism remains predominantly interpretive, relying on subjective, post-hoc qualitative evaluations. In contrast, the Bulut Doctrine reconstructs narra…

Author Sarah Pierce explores dating apps, loneliness and human connection through a novel about a corpse-matching algorithm

Getting dressed in the morning, many of us will look in the mirror and ask ourselves what our outfit says about us. In this way, it is easy to treat clothing as something to be read: a way of communicating who we are, where we belong, and what we value. Yet this familiar way of thinking about fashion can obscure as much as it reveals. Fashioning argues that our preoccupation with what adornment m…

People are born old in their graves and get more robust over life, only to shrink into babies who are pushed into their mother’s womb. The ambitious Under Story conjures a disconcerting, “backwards” world, finds science fiction columnist Emily H. Wilson

Journalist Amanda McCracken shares how she turned a theme in her book about longing into a vulnerable story for Runner’s World. The post How a freelancer pitched a personal essay about running and romance to Runner’s World appeared first on Association of Health Care Journalists .

The Empire of Information Roopika Risam’s new book shows how various data regimes, from clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia to today’s biometric databases, shaped human lives. Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate by Roopika Risam. HarperCollins, 2026. 480 pages. LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engagi…

The children’s author Mac Barnett does not pull punches when it comes to his chosen profession: “If you don’t think children’s books are real books,” he writes, “on some level you don’t think children are real people.” The author of more than 70 books, Barnett has become a key evangelist for high-quality children’s literature, particularly […]

From China Miéville to Brandon Sanderson via a tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin, there are some really huge names with new sci-fi novels out this month - as well as a new Doctor Who tale, says Alison Flood

_Arts of Management Journal_ 10 (3):52-62. 2026Although Islamic communication ethics has received growing scholarly attention, relatively little work has examined Qawlan Hasanan as a comprehensive normative framework grounded in the Quranic concept of human dignity (karamah) and applicable to both interpersonal and digital communication. This article addresses that gap by examining the Quranic co…

The journalist Jon Ronson finds metaphor and meaning in the story of one man’s baronial fantasia and others like him who are living unmoored from reality.

A new book by Zoologist and Surrealist Desmond Morris contains surprising insights.