What can we learn from Marie Stopes’s 1918 book Married Love? – Rafia Zakaria discusses Stopes’s book, which was published in the era of the First World War – a year before The Sheik – and tackled the issue of sex in marriage. Like much Romance fiction, past and present, Stopes ... more >
Dear Rebecca Grace Allen, Taming Sugar is a BDSM novella loosely based around Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Triple-threat Broadway up-and-comer, Roxy Cavanaugh, heads to upstate New York for a week of rusticating to learn patience, after she is sacked from a dream role for her rudeness to the ... more >
BSFA Awards – An excited shout of congratulations to Aliette de Bodard for winning two out of four British Science Fiction Association Award categories – Best Novel and Best Short Story – for The House of Shattered Wings and “Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight.” The full list of nominees can be found ... more >
Missing Hong Kong booksellers ‘working on book on Xi’s love life’ – Five Hong Kong publishing colleagues reportedly working on a book focused on the President of China’s former girlfriend have disappeared, prompting democratic legislator Albert Ho to allege that the men have been kidnapped for political purposes – specifically to ... more >
New Study Finds Low Levels of Digital Library Borrowing – According to this summary of the latest Book Industry Study Group findings, libraries are not doing a great job of appealing to patrons who read digital books (you can download the executive summary for free here). Of library patrons surveyed, more ... more >
The Internet is getting less and less free – The new Freedom House Freedom on the Net 2015 Report has been released, with its its country-by-country rankings (I think the country score comparison graph on the report page is even better than the map in the Wa Po article). Iceland and Estonia ... more >