BOOKS

From Celine Dion’s “erotic motorcycle” to the crafty female platypus who faked a pregnancy in order to bust out of the Bronx Zoo, 2023 was full of some pretty great stories.

Here are a few things about this iconic piece of literature that might not have been covered in your high school English class.

A meta-analysis found a greatly reduced level of information retention when people got their data from screens instead of physical books.

Thomas Hardy’s memorable heroine was modeled after the last woman to be hanged in Dorset, England.

Willy Wonka is undoubtedly an eccentric man. But could he and his band of Oompa-Loompas be hiding a homicidal secret?

From murder mysteries to secret societies and more, the best dark academia novels from Donna Tartt and other authors capture the macabre in the most unlikely of places.

From James Baldwin to Gertrude Stein and beyond, literature’s most celebrated authors have faced stinging and ruthless rejections.

Penguin Books commissioned the work in 1965, but the "A Clockwork Orange" author only completed several hundred entries before discarding the project.

‘Little Women’ author Louisa May Alcott was also an early suffragette who fought against slavery and registered women to vote.

Novelists have used everything from real killers to newsworthy hostage situations to literal white whales to craft their fiction.

If you want to expand your horror reading beyond Stephen King, look no further than this list, which features everyone from Mariana Enriquez to Stephen Graham Jones and beyond.

Some, like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Victor Hugo, believed they had communicated with spirits directly; others, like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Hardy, had ghostly encounters they couldn’t explain.