Faulkner and O'Connor built Southern Gothic on Poe's ground
Poe and Hawthorne laid the ground, and Faulkner, O'Connor and McCullers built on it. Eight books to start with, each backed by two publications.
category archive
Books.
Written worlds, reading lives and the ideas we carry away from a page.
Gothic horror: the novels that taught readers to love fear
From Walpole's falling helmet to Anne Rice's sorrowful vampires, the BBC and the British Library trace Gothic horror. Eight books to start with.
Poe turned gothic clichés into horror of the mind
Edgar Allan Poe took live burial and doubles from a tired genre and set them inside the mind. The Guardian traces who followed him.
Dracula in Whitby: what Bram Stoker took from the harbour
Bram Stoker's 1890 stay in Whitby gave Dracula a wrecked ship, a black dog and a name found in a library book, say The Guardian and the BBC.
Who decides what goes on a book cover?
Publishers' design and marketing teams usually decide, working from what editors tell them. At Harlequin, it starts with a form the author fills in.
The Catholic Index banned books for four centuries
From 1559 to 1966 the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books barred Luther, vernacular Bibles, the Talmud and, in 1827, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
Onyx Storm sold 2.7 million copies, or 1.3 million, in a week
Rebecca Yarros's first novel found no publisher. Onyx Storm later broke a fiction sales record, and the New York Times and Circana still disagree on its size.
The Dewey system shelves books by subject number, then letters
Melvil Dewey published the scheme in 1876. Ten classes of a hundred numbers sort a book by subject, and author letters settle ties on the shelf.
Gloria Steinem's new memoir, and the life behind it
Gloria Steinem died aged 92, weeks before her second memoir, An Unexpected Life, came out. It goes back to Toledo, India, and a lasting fear of poverty.
A major book prize does not always lift sales
Winning a major literary prize can send a novel back to press within a day, but publishers say the sales lift is unpredictable and sometimes negligible.