Literature

The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged on Monday that he had included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by A.I.

The author, Steven Rosenbaum, whose book “The Future of Truth” was released this month to great fanfare, incorporated more than a half-dozen misattributed or fake quotes in sections of the book reviewed by The New York Times.

The Times asked Mr. Rosenbaum about the quotes on Sunday and Monday. On Monday night, Mr. Rosenbaum acknowledged in a statement that the book had “a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” and said that he had started his own investigation.

He said that the inclusion of the incorrect quotes was an accident and that he had “no intention of fabricating any viewpoints” while writing the book.

archive.is link

By naming their new book The Technological Republic, Palantir executives Alexander Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska gesture toward this heritage. The book comes at a unique juncture in Silicon Valley’s history. Its leaders have awoken to their status as a distinct social elite but remain uncertain as to what obligations that status carries. Their old “Californian Ideology,” half libertarian fantasy and half globalist prophecy, has collapsed. What creed will take its place is not clear.3 Few seem better placed to address these questions than Karp, a founder known as much for intellectual ambition as for entrepreneurial success. While leading a defense tech company, with close ties to the sitting administration, he and Zamiska are perfectly positioned to lay out a new civic philosophy for America’s technological elite.

Readers hoping for such a book, however, will be disappointed. The Technological Republic is not a serious exploration of the political foundations of technology, nor a study of the technological foundations of American power. It is not a sober forecast of technological trends or a reckoning with their implications for the American public. It is not even a business history of Palantir itself. The Technological Republic aims at something “substantial and ambitious,” inhabiting “the interstitial but we hope rich space between political, business, and academic treatises.”4 It reads like a collection of TED Talks. Its chapters are discrete and disconnected. The themes that tie them together are nowhere explicitly laid out but must be inferred by the reader.

The most persistent of these themes is a critique of Silicon Valley’s “engineering elite.” Karp and Zamiska insist that the fortunes and fame of this elite were not created ex nihilo. This class is, in fact, deeply indebted to the civilization that made their firms possible, one that most of them feel no kinship with or obligation to. At the center of that civilization is the United States. The American nation should demand the loyalty of those who prosper most from it. This loyalty should be freely given. Karp and Zamiska believe that tech leaders should focus their substantial talents on bettering this nation. Like Palantir, their firms should not shy away from the provision of public goods. Silicon Valley should boldly take part in the “articulation of the national project.”5 Alas, the instinct of the Silicon Valley founder is to move as the market lists. How does the market list? Toward “lifestyle technologies” whose main purpose is to “enable the highly educated . . . to feel as if they have more income than they do.” America’s engineering elite is brilliant, but their brilliance is wasted on baubles.6

These observations may be accurate, but the goal of The Technological Republic is to inspire American technologists to become American techno-nationalists. Regrettably, Karp and Zamiska offer no roadmap for accomplishing this. The two men invoke the technologists of genera­tions past as archetypes the modern engineering elite might aspire to, but they do not investigate the religious, social, political, or economic milieu that created these technologists. This is unfortunate: Karp and Zamiska’s sermonizing is not sufficient to make patriots out of a generation of engineers who have never been trained to think of themselves as stewards of a state. Elevating Silicon Valley’s engineering elite into a governing class would require much more: institutions, alliances, and traditions that root the wealth and expertise of our technologists in service to the nation.

The United States has had such a class in the past. They were the architects of the Second Industrial Revolution: engineers, industrialists, and entrepreneurs who believed that a technological revolution was needed to propel America toward greatness. They were, in this sense, America’s first governing class of techno-nationalists. In the mid-twentieth century, Americans would label their descendants the “Eastern Establishment.” This class did not materialize out of thin air. Examining their origins, and the reasons for their seventy-year dominance of American business and government, provides a useful corrective to Karp and Zamiska’s fragmented thinking and hazy wishcasting.

The Faustian myth warns us against making pacts with the devil. To trade something as invaluable as the soul for wealth, fame, and power, the story goes, is to diminish every facet of our existence, to suck the life out of our very core. But to sacrifice earthly glory, even our banal and temporary possessions—to humble ourselves in the eyes of God—for spiritual favor has been celebrated since the Old Testament and thought to restore, revive, and rejuvenate life. What, though, if your sacrifice provides neither earthly nor spiritual benefits?

Jon Raymond’s novel God and Sex hinges on a pact—a “bargain,” as the protagonist, Arthur, calls it—between him and a higher power. Arthur ventures to the Wy’East Resort in Oregon, where Sarah, the married woman he loves, is spending the next few days on a retreat, to tell her that her husband, Phil, suspects she’s having an affair. A writer who has only ever experienced mediocre book sales but feels on the brink of a bestseller with his new work, Arthur isn’t exactly happy to be giving up precious writing time to make the trip. Returning home, he sees “the fuzz of gray coming over the sky, and the sun going blood-orange,” and his phone alerts him that a forest fire is raging near the retreat. Sarah’s phone goes straight to voicemail numerous times, so he turns around, heading right into the eye of the fire to find her. As he scours the burning forest, he pleads with a God and prays, “I’ll give you the most important thing I can imagine if only you allow her to continue to exist.”

But Arthur can’t leave it at that. “I thought these new words over and over, in different formulations, honing the bargain,” he discloses, as if he can revise, control, and bend the pact to his whims the way he can revise, control, and bend the “Tree Book” he has set out to write and whose composition overlays Raymond’s novel. Or perhaps to revise is to revive. “It was a part of a writer’s job, I believed, to resuscitate,” Arthur asserts. This more self-serving idea about writing is in the service of a book that tries to explore much more: our responsibility in the face of climate change, the relationship between faith and love, and writing’s purpose in times of both global and personal crises.

I feel like it's pretty common in fiction these days, Game of Thrones being probably the most popular example with character viewpoint changing chapter-by-chapter and gradually weaving the different threads of plot into one connected whole. It's used in movies and television constantly, too.

The oldest I'm personally aware of is Dune, more-so in Dune Messiah, which I've read for the first time recently. I presume Herbert wasn't the first, though, and have been wondering how old the technique really is. Anyone have any insight (or even good guesses) on where it started?

In April 1975, Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor whose efforts to track down Nazi war criminals had earned him the title of “Nazi hunter”, wrote a letter to Albert Speer, the Nazi war criminal. Wiesenthal thanked him for a psychology book Speer had sent him, and forwarded a copy of the French edition of his own memoir. Their decade-long correspondence also includes holiday postcards and birthday wishes. It ends with a personal note from Speer’s widow Margarete on her husband’s death in 1981, telling Wiesenthal how important their friendship had been to him.

Wiesenthal’s friendship was a private echo of the extraordinarily warm international welcome that Speer received as a public intellectual after his release from Spandau prison in 1966. Speer had served as minister of armaments in wartime Nazi Germany, and was found guilty of crimes against humanity; yet when he died, he was in London to promote his new book on the BBC.

Speer’s rehabilitation was a masterpiece in duplicity. In his defence at the Nürenberg trials – and in later books and interviews – he was the only high-ranking official to take on full responsibility for the Nazi crimes; and this seeming moral clarity allowed him to credibly lie that he had not known about the extermination camps. The evidence for that would emerge only after his death, prompting Wiesenthal, among many others, to admit he had been duped. Until then, the lie allowed Speer to become an authority on the endlessly fascinating topic of Adolf Hitler’s personality and psyche.

Every day I meet strangers who share intimate details with me. It’s called reading. In a newspaper piece a former sex addict recalls her need for BDSM (“when a sexual partner hurt me, I felt seen”) and how she conquered her dependency. On Substack an actor describes her grief on losing a baby (“After the miscarriage, I became convinced my daughter was backstage. I would push back the costumes on the rack and almost expect to find her”). And then there are the published memoirs, first-person stories of trauma, displacement and heartbreak. It’s not just women who unburden themselves, of course. As Martin Amis says in his memoir, Experience: “We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the CV, the cri de coeur.”

Recent memoirs have upped the ante, though. What was once a geriatric, self-satisfied genre (politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers) is now open to anyone with a story to tell – “nobody memoirs”, the American journalist Lorraine Adams has called them. Candour is the key, no matter how fraught the consequences. “Most writers I know,” Maggie Nelson writes in The Argonauts, “nurse persistent fantasies about the horrible things – or the horrible thing – that will happen to them if and when they express themselves as they desire”. But she takes that risk, addressing the book to “you”, her fluidly gendered husband Harry (who’s angry when she shows him a draft), while exploring identity, pregnancy, motherhood and sexuality.

“The words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the concrete floor”; this appears in the first paragraph of The Argonauts in 2015. It’s hard to imagine an author volunteering that 30 years ago, or being allowed to be so passionately upfront (and violently facedown) at the start of the story. I remember the embarrassment I felt in the 1990s, walking into the office one morning, after a reviewer in the Sunday papers had noted a passage in the memoir of my father I’d written in which I describe masturbating in the bath around the time of his death. What possessed me to disclose that? What would my colleagues think of me? I wouldn’t need to be so blushingly shy about it today.

Shelly Romero has early memories of going to her local supermarket and picking pulp fiction off the shelves. “We were very working class; my mom was working two jobs sometimes,” she recalls. “The appeal of books being cheaper and smaller and able to be carried around was definitely a thing.”

For generations of readers, the gateway to literature was not a hushed library or a polished hardback but a wire spinner rack in a supermarket, pharmacy or railway station. There, amid chewing gum and cigarettes, sat the mass-market paperback: squat, roughly 4in by 7in and cheap enough to be bought on a whim.

But the era of the “pocket book” is drawing to a close. ReaderLink, the biggest book distributor in the US, announced recently that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks. The decision follows years of plummeting sales, from 131m units in 2004 to 21m in 2024, and marks the end of a format that once democratised reading for the working class.

Romero, who grew up in the working-class, Latino and industrial city of Hialeah, Florida, says: “I don’t remember a bookstore. I had the library in Miami Springs across the bridge but in Hialeah around us, what was in walking distance because we didn’t have a car, was the Publix [supermarket] and sometimes we would get books from Goodwill [thrift store] as well.

“They had that democratic aspect to them where you can just find them anywhere and it always felt like it was the pick ’n’ mix candy-type store where there is something here for everyone, whether it’s the Harlequin romance novel or something very pulpy like a sci-fi or horror novel that you could quickly get.”

In the book’s second chapter, “The Reader,” she observes that “it is equally important, to the understanding of the poem, not to read at all.” Why? What is the power of this empty space, this absence of mind, this not-reading that reading provokes in us?

For Woolf, what a reader attains by not reading is “that state of mind in which it seems possible to us to write the book, not to read it.”

When an author uses AI for "polishing" a draft, they are not seeing improvement; they are witnessing semantic ablation. The AI identifies high-entropy clusters – the precise points where unique insights and "blood" reside – and systematically replaces them with the most probable, generic token sequences. What began as a jagged, precise Romanesque structure of stone is eroded into a polished, Baroque plastic shell: it looks "clean" to the casual eye, but its structural integrity – its "ciccia" – has been ablated to favor a hollow, frictionless aesthetic.

Until last year, the history of Black bookstores in the United States had not been fully told.

Journalist Char Adams changed that.

In November, Adams published “Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore,” the first known full-length book to chronicle the history of Black bookstores and their role in political movements throughout U.S. history.

A surprising discovery in Adams’ research comes at the very beginning of the book with the story of David Ruggles, the first known owner of a Black-owned bookstore, who opened his shop in Manhattan in 1834. Ruggles also was a major abolitionist figure who helped free enslaved people through the Underground Railroad.

While studying Ruggles, Adams learned that the phrase “by any means necessary,” often attributed to Malcolm X, was first said by Ruggles more than a century earlier.

“I was really honored to be able to shine a light on him [Ruggles],” Adams says.

What motivates a seemingly once-brilliant person who appeared to share my values (as an artist, a writer, a thinker), to double, triple down on intolerance? Then of course there are the likeminded so-called leaders who build brands off of persecuting trans kids (and adults), amongst other vulnerable minorities. That some bigoted “leaders” will literally sacrifice certain groups of seemingly less-powerful people for their own benefit isn’t itself surprising, if one has read history (or Harry Potter).

As another example, I’ve often contemplated those once-beloved comedians who are so apparently fixated on bullying trans people that they’re willing to sacrifice their careers to it. (Just the other night, I couldn’t make it more than a few seconds into the Eddie Murphy doc when I saw Chappelle and had to stop.)

I do (still) fantasize about Rowling one day just waking up and saying, Hey you know what? I was wrong and I’m sorry. I felt backed into a corner and it made me say some really terrible stuff. I hope I can work to learn better and to put my resources to good use.

Imagine how people would celebrate Harry Potter, if she just got real with us, said, whoops, mea culpa.

Cynically, one hopes she realizes it’d be great for business, if she just surrendered. These days I do sense even cis people are pretty tired of her crap. I read this summer about a bookstore back home in San Francisco that at long last stopped selling her titles, given she now publicly donates and coordinates anti-trans persecution campaigns. Given how much her evil’s already affected her country—and beyond.

How and when do you all find time to read?

I've always read on and off but now have come to a realization that it should be done daily.

For me, I try to read for 30m-1h but I usually run out of time and haven't scheduled a time dedicated for reading, maybe it's just that. I don't see reading as part of my personality, but I see the power that one has when it comes to acquiring knowledge and experiences through books.

What are your thoughts? And restating the main question:

How and when do you all find time to read?

Alan Moore is 72 years old now. Since the 1980s, he’s been celebrated as the greatest writer in comics history. But he’s done with all that. Full-time novelist now. Finally. Spends his days at home just writing, reading, and smoking “frightening,” “staggering,” “saturating” amounts of weed.

“I use it to work,” as he told Alex Musson. “Always have done.”

Except these days he does it without the weekly deadlines, the phone always ringing, questions and chitchat with illustrators, coauthors, publishers, press — none of it.

Life of a novelist now. Solitude.

And he’s embarked on something new: a five-novel series called The Long London. It might not seem like a huge venture, given that Book One, The Great When (2024), reads as a fairly straightforward fantasy story, just about 300 pages, self-contained, quick-moving, irreverent.

But it marks a big change for Moore.

There’s no illustrator for this series. No coauthor. No photos to pair with the text. It’s got none of the postmodern hijinks that defined his debut, Voice of the Fire (1996), nor the cosmic 1,200-page sprawl of his follow-up, Jerusalem (2016). Those freshman and sophomore books, in their complexity, were insulated from the general readership. In order to judge them, you first needed the patience and brainpower to read them. You needed, in other words, to be a fan already.

It’s a book-length work of ambitious, conventional, commercial prose. Nothing to show except Alan Moore’s words.

For the first time in his 45-year career, Alan Moore is alone on the page.

He’s picky about biscuits. Amenable to the Nice brand, “which I find admirable in its unassuming stoicism.” Doesn’t care for glam in a biscuit. Party Rings, for instance — shortbread cookies with multicolored neon glaze, squiggles of icing on top — “the upper-class call girl of the biscuit world.”

Opinions about everything, really, but you oughta be careful what you ask, because one thing that’s happened with age is he’s lost his grip on “linear time,” as he puts it. He’ll tell a story, some random thing from 30 or 40 years ago, and the telling, itself, is like brain surgery with chopsticks: effortless, fluent, eloquent, detailed, well-paced. It’s got an arc. Inflections are measured. He remembers every detail. Every bliss and triumph. Every resentment.

Just don’t ask Moore what decade it was. And be ready to step in, too. Folks’ll show up for an interview, ask a question, and if nobody stops him, he’ll just — it’s like a frog across lily pads — start with a word about the weather and then boom. We’re talking about Einstein. Fourth dimension. Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence, which Moore quite likes, though of course, if we’re just playing this out over and over, it means he shall have to endure Margaret Thatcher again. Incidentally, since you’ve brought her up, go watch the original Toho Godzilla movies in chronological order, he says, and you’ll see a subtextual narrative arc about Japan’s nuclear trauma, the way that they go from being terrorized by this giant radioactive lizard (a metaphor for the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima) toward a point, some dozen years later, where they’ve successfully harnessed its energy, via nuclear plants, and that’s when Godzilla becomes a good guy. Hey actually: he wrote a song about Godzilla being depressed. “Trampling Tokyo.” Says that, after a few installments, he could see the lizard’s “heart wasn’t in it anymore.” Good movies, though. Y’know he probably never told you about the time he got approached by Malcolm McLaren, did he? Sex Pistols manager. Yeah: Malcolm McLaren gets in touch with him, mid-1980s, says he’s got a financier, he’s ready to make a film, he just needs a script. What he’s got in mind, he says, is a modern retelling of Beauty and the Beast, except it’s set in the fashion world, and here’s what we call it: Fashion Beast. Based partly on the life of Christian Dior. Alan says, Yeah, I can write that. Especially once he’d got some books together about Dior’s actual life and thought, This is quite gothic, isn’t it? And so he starts working on the screenplay (“which [McLaren] was very approving of”) and then one day McLaren calls and says, “Can you make it a bit more like Chinatown?”

Alan says, “Um . . . yeah.”

McLaren said, “And Flashdance?”

Alan says yeah: “So it’s a kind of Christian Dior-Chinatown-Flashdance-Beauty and the Beast sorta thing?”

Science, philosophy, Godzilla, film. Eventually Moore will pause to re-light his joint. By and by he’ll ask his interviewer what time it is, and the answer lands with audible horror.

The idea of 100 Notable Small Press Books was born November 2024, after The New York Times’s annual 100 Notable Books list featured eighty-two books from the Big Five publishing houses (Penguin-Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan) and their imprints. Many of these books had the marketing might of these publishers behind them and had already made their way onto the front tables of chain bookstores and the front pages of dwindling book review sections in print and online. The Notable list then, with all its esteem and future marketing power, served largely as a retrospective of the year’s biggest literary books.

Of the eighteen independently published books on the 2024 list, nearly a third were released by Grove/Atlantic, a mid-sized indie that publishes around 100 combined frontlist and paperback books per year, or W.W. Norton, which publishes even more than that. This meant only 11% of the New York Times‘s “notable books” were released by small, independent publishers, which we are defining here as independently owned US publishers with roughly 50 or fewer titles per year, and not imprints of the Big Five publishing houses. A thriving ecosystem of books from publishers taking risks, publishing from the margins, operating on few resources, with small distribution and even smaller marketing budgets, were largely being ignored.

For 2025, The New York Times Notable list tipped slightly toward the indies, featuring 14 books published by small, independent publishers. Hurrah for those publishers and authors! In the meantime, forty reviewers across thirteen genres spent the year reading small press books. Our efforts, like small presses themselves, were low on resources but high on resourcefulness. Reviewers had to search out, request, and read at least nine books across a chosen genre from small publishers before making their recommendations. We limited ourselves to books published in December 2024 through November 2025.

Our guiding principles were “read a lot, recommend a few” and “seek out a diverse array of authors and publishers.” We were especially interested in BIPOC and LGBTQ authors and publishers, who have an even steeper climb to mainstream recognition.

Within these guidelines, our reviewers were free to read any small press books they chose, and as a result you’ll find this list dappled with well-known presses, such as Tin House and Europa Editions. But for every Graywolf, we feature presses that are not household names, like LittlePuss and Publication Studio and Kallisto Gaia.

There were times our definition of “small press” was tested. Was Tin House still a small press after it was acquired by Zando in March? Yes, we decided, since Zando was not a big five publisher. Were university presses that published well over 50 books yearly small presses? We decided they were so long as their creative offerings fell under that number. We tried to stay nimble and responsive, while sticking to the project’s principles.

There are a few important things this list is not: This is not a best of list. This is not a comprehensive survey of all small presses. This is not a juried selection of books. This is instead the product of a group of enthusiastic, committed reviewers reading hundreds of small press books from the past year and choosing the few they heartily recommend.

Ours is not the first list to highlight small press books. One of the joys of this project was finding the many other venues already doing this work. If our list interests you, find more small press books highlighted at CLMP, Foreword Reviews, and Necessary Fiction, to name a few.

Without further ado, 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025:

One of the largest distributors of print books for libraries is winding down operations by the end of the year, a huge disruption to public libraries across the country, some of which are warning their communities the shut down will limit their ability to lend books.

“You might notice some delays as we (and more than 6,000 other libraries) transition to new wholesalers,” the Jacksonville Public Library told its community in a Facebook post. “We're keeping a close eye on things and doing everything we can to minimize any wait times.”

The libraries that do business with the distributor learned about the shut down earlier this month via Reddit.

Baker & Taylor has been in the book business just short of 200 years. Its primary focus was distributing physical copies of books to public libraries. The company also provided librarians with tools that helped them do their jobs more effectively related to collection development and processing.

But the company has spent decades being acquired by and divested from private equity firms, served as a revolving door for senior leadership, and was sued by a competitor earlier this year for alleged data misuse and was almost acquired again in September, this time by a distributor that works with mass-market retailers like Walmart and Target. That deal fell through.

On October 7, Publishers Weekly reported B&T let go of more than 500 employees the day the internal announcement was made. At least one law firm is currently investigating B&T for allegedly violating the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, and it took the company weeks to let account holders know.

Since the internal announcement, Kennedy says customer service staff at B&T have not received guidance on how to respond to inquiries from libraries, leaving them on the frontline and in the dark on issues ranging from whether existing orders would be fulfilled to securing refunds for materials they may have already paid for.

A vending machine in Washington, D.C., is providing nourishment — for the mind. LitBox is filled with books by local authors, just steps from the White House, World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Lauren Woods launched the project in May after growing frustrated with what she saw as some publishers' focus on sensationalism and the lack of bookstores focused on local authors in the area. "I had friends who wrote award-winning books and couldn't get their books into D.C. bookstores because they were smaller presses, or they didn't have a mass appeal, or the book buyer didn't think they would be profitable," Woods said. "And that always seemed wrong to me."

Inspired by a European book vending machine, she set about planting one in the nation's capital to try to market books more equitably and see how they sell. The hypercompetitive publishing industry makes it challenging for some books to get into stores, and Woods wants those she still finds excellent to get to readers. "Although those bigger books are going to be marketed differently, when they are marketed equally, they sell pretty equally," Woods said.

Her experiment seems to have worked out so far. People are buying from the vending machine almost as many smaller press books as those from the "Big Five" publishers — Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster.

Most e-books have digital rights management software that means, like print books, they can only be checked out by one person at a time. But unlike print books, which can sit on library shelves for decades, e-books are often sold on time-limited contracts — meaning public libraries must buy them again after several years or, in some cases, several months. The costs can add up quickly.

Courtney, a lawyer by trade, believes that the strict contract terms are “undermining every library’s mission across the United States.”

“We can’t own our books. We can’t preserve them. We can’t keep them. We can’t check them out without having to pay for the same book over and over and over,” Courtney said. “And that’s problematic for collection development, for access, for budget, for all sorts of things.”

Courtney leads a nonprofit called the eBook Study Group that lobbies state governments to adapt e-book contract regulations to reflect existing consumer and contract law. Since its 2020 inception, it has successfully lobbied the Connecticut state legislature to prohibit libraries from buying e-books whose contracts limit both time and number of checkouts. The goal is to drive down demand for short-term e-book contracts and force publishers to offer e-books to libraries on better terms.

Last Sunday I spent hours at the Brooklyn Book Festival, a too rare occasion for me to pull myself away from the internet for an entire afternoon. As I looked around at the crowd on their way to panels or checking out indie press booths, I was reminded that, even if it doesn’t always seem apparent from looking at news headlines, there are many, many of us out there: people who care about books and culture and their community in general.

The previous weekend I had gone to Cleveland to give a talk about literary citizenship. It’s an amorphous kind of concept, often changing with the moment, but needed more than ever today when corporate interests have a stranglehold on the arts, literary institutions are being devastated by the cancellation of NEA grants, and the freedom to read is under attack. As people who care, and if you’ve read this far I suspect you care, I figured we could all use a refresher on how to be a good literary citizen. Below you’ll find my top seven tips on how you can help make a difference.

On Oct. 8, 2010, the New York Times ran a story on its front page: “Picture Books No Longer a Staple for Children.” As we interviewed children’s publishing professionals while compiling this list, several told us they remembered exactly where they were when they read this death knell for their industry. The Times wasn’t wrong: Sales were down, especially of new books. Once upon a time, an adult shopping for a child might have bought a classic they remembered from their own childhood, and also a new book, recommended by a bookseller. More and more, buyers just went for the classic—almost always Seuss or Sendak—and new books languished on the shelves.

But, feared a number of ambitious authors and illustrators, the art form’s struggles couldn’t simply be blamed (as the Times suggested) on achievement-obsessed adults pushing chapter books too early. Picture books were struggling artistically too. The next year, a group of 21 creators issued a picture-book manifesto. “WE BELIEVE,” the manifesto read, “we must cease writing the same book again and again.” Books for children should be “fresh, honest, piquant, and beautiful,” and unafraid to be odd: “Even books meant to put kids to sleep should give them strange dreams.” And, added the document, “WE CONDEMN … the amnesiacs who treasure unruly classics while praising the bland today.”

This call to arms had a ring of truth to it. When we became parents, we too initially gravitated toward the unruly classics we loved as children, while shying away from new picture books. There were just so many of them! The ones we saw on the front tables in bookstores all seemed to be authored by celebrities—or, worse, were branded tie-ins promoting movies and TV shows. How could any of them be as good as the books of our youth, let alone better?

But picture books have undergone a revolution in the past 25 years—one that was already underway before that Times obit, but which that manifesto helped spur along. The art form is now remarkably different from what it was when we were little.

To start with, a dramatically more varied cast of characters both stars in picture books and makes them. The industry, encouraged by activist organizations like We Need Diverse Books, has belatedly come to understand the value of making books that, in the words of the influential academic Rudine Sims Bishop, offer young readers not only “mirrors” of their own experience but “windows” into the lives of others. Stories by and about nonwhite, nonstraight people are now much more likely to appear in libraries and bookstores, become bestsellers, and win awards.

But other, less obvious changes have swept the art form as well. A turn-of-the-millennium boom in animation, led by Pixar, gave rise to more illustrators making a living as storytellers—and, frustrated by the machinations of Hollywood studios, telling their own stories in a simpler, more personal form. Creators, including many signatories to the 2011 manifesto, have become more interested in innovating within, and subverting, the picture-book form: shortening the text, breaking the fourth wall, and fostering reader interaction—encouraged, perhaps, by the success of a certain argumentative pigeon. Picture-book nonfiction has grown in popularity, becoming especially useful in classrooms—where older elementary and middle school students, often fans of now-commonplace graphic novels, find it crucial in accessing difficult historical topics. And, of course, celebrities have flocked to the picture book—with mostly lukewarm results, although at least one TV star has published an unalloyed work of ridiculous genius. You’ll find it on our list.

To make this guide, we surveyed more than a hundred authors, illustrators, librarians, booksellers, academics, and publishing pros. We ended up reading more than 200 books, for which we must fulsomely thank our local libraries. Our goal: to find the books that represent the best of these transformations, and to tell the story of an art form that responded to a front-page crisis with a new wave of inventive stories that respect the intelligence, playfulness, and widely differing experiences of young readers.

Over the course of two generations, from 1984 to 2023, the proportion of 13-year-olds who said they “never or hardly ever” read for fun on their own time has nearly quadrupled, from just 8% to 31%.

During that time, the percentage of middle-schoolers who read for fun “almost every day” has fallen by double digits, according to surveys conducted for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test widely known as “the nation’s report card”: In 1984, 35% of middle school kids read for fun almost every day. By 2023, it was just 14%.

The phenomenon is part of a larger shift away from reading, research suggests. A new study from the University of Florida and University College London found that daily reading for pleasure has dropped more than 40% among all age groups over the last two decades, “a sustained, steady decline” of about 3% per year.

Findings like these have sparked fears that, after more than a century of steadily expanding literacy, reading is devolving into an act relegated to a small group of elites, a “reading class” that enjoys books while the rest of us see them as, in the words of scholar Wendy Griswold, “an increasingly arcane hobby.”

It’s a strange and thorny problem that in some sense seems contradictory: If you followed around a young person for a day, you’d likely see that she is reading constantly, but often in tiny fragments. In addition to school assignments, she’s taking in a ton of atomized content: alerts, text messages, memes and social media posts. All those bits add up for sure — one study found that the typical American reads the equivalent of a slim novel every day — but it isn’t the same as sitting down to read a book.

For many young people, school is what gets in the way of books.

Julia Goggin, 15, grew up reading books and loving them. She consumed the first few Harry Potter books unassisted in second grade and finished the series by fourth grade. She read a lot in middle school.

In high school? Not so much.

Like Baez, she’s heavily scheduled, running cross country in the fall and track and field in the winter. She’s in her school’s theater group, which means after-school rehearsals. Then homework. All of it leaves little time for reading anything aside from school assignments.

“If a school is too overbearing about forcing kids to read a lot, it makes them not want to read for fun because it’s not fun anymore,” she said. “Because school isn’t fun.”