The Independent Scholar

In this week's issue: How the American right invented "Cultural Marxism" — and why a new book says the Frankfurt School had almost nothing to do with it A publisher commissions a crisis report about children not reading, then sells them the cure Argentina's most powerful literary agent telling the Buenos Aires Book Fair that publishers now print twice as many books as they can sell Michael Wood's elegy for Julian Barnes — one of the LRB's finest critics writing about one of England's finest novelists A linguist who spent 33 years preserving a dying American dialect is hanging up his tape recorder Let's get into it.

In this week's issue: Pre-publication Salinger letters surface at the New York antiquarian book fair — what he asked his editor to hide from reviewers Siri Hustvedt's memoir of her 43-year marriage to Paul Auster, including 35 pages of his unfinished final writing A London-based independent press, African-owned and Black and woman-led, lands on the Women's Prize shortlist for the first time in 30 years Andrea Long Chu's Authority in paperback — and her charge that Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith are guilty of "complacent humanism" An essay arguing that literate culture has become a threatened subculture in a world now dominated by video and audio Worth your Sunday morning.

In this week's issue: Josh Kline's essay on why NYC real estate has made non-commercial art structurally impossible — and why it went viral in October magazine A third Elsevier editor quietly removed mid-term, and the citation-count J-curve that gave it away Mrs Justice Lieven overturns a £585,000 fine and finds the regulator had "closed its mind" before the investigation began Grand Central Publishing reprints the one Octavia Butler novel she spent her career suppressing Three Tongan scholar-artists and a bamboo nose flute the world had nearly forgotten Read on.

In this week's issue: A 1943 novella that imagined the Holocaust before it fully happened — lost for decades, now translated into English for the first time Clare Bucknell reviews a new cultural history of pedantry in the New York Review of Books, and the implications for intellectual life are weirder than you'd expect A Georgetown philosopher on why the UN's landmark March 2026 resolution on the transatlantic slave trade finally matters — and what reparations actually require UNT shuts down a Chicano artist's solo exhibition mid-run, and faculty and students push back The Vatican weighs in on artificial intelligence, and it is more philosophically serious than you might think On with it.

In this week's issue: France's most storied independent bookshop chain — 16 stores, 140 years old, 500 employees — in court-supervised reorganization and betting its survival on used books Justin Garson's new history of how NIMH psychiatrists used LSD and amphetamines to induce schizophrenia in human subjects, and what it did to American psychiatry Deborah Lutz's first full Emily Brontë biography in over twenty years, drawing on previously inaccessible manuscripts to present a very different Brontë than the legend A GWU Illiberalism Studies Program essay tracing how a little-known Argentine writer became the dominant intellectual of the transnational Spanish-speaking radical right Here we go.

In this week's issue: Luke Dunne's LARB tribute to Alexander Kluge pushes back against the somber-sage obituary and recovers the flamboyant, sentimental filmmaker-theorist who refused moral seriousness Romila Thapar at 94 — the doyenne of Indian historiography, her career-long battle against Hindutva revisionism, and a Psyche portrait that opens with grief Hussein Aboubakr Mansour asks why there is no redemption in the Arabic novel — and argues the question implicates far more than literary taste Taylor Lorenz ran a pangram analysis across the top 25 Substack bestsellers in every category to find out how much of the platform is actually written by AI Plenty here. Dig in.

In this week's issue: 42 Jewish authors and the institutional politics of the Jewish Book Council Arna Bontemps and the forgotten infrastructure holding Black literary memory together Whether "Certified Human" will become a meaningful literary category in the age of AI A new literary magazine, a new city, and a fight over whether Toronto even has a literary identity All worth your time. Let's get into it.

In this week's issue: A university press pulps 5,000 copies of an Indigenous children's book — not because of anything in the book, but because of its illustrator's Substack Peter J. Carroll, the man Robert Anton Wilson called the most important writer on Magick since Crowley, died unexpectedly at 73 — announced only via his publisher's social channels Coco Fusco on why Wifredo Lam's synthesis of Afro-Cuban religion and Surrealism is one of the twentieth century's most underrated critical frameworks Rohmer's entire filmography, reread as a map of philosophical problems — with Le Rayon Vert as the unlikely centerpiece Here we go.

In this week's issue: Wallace Stegner, a fellowship, and the bluntest career advice in American literary history Martha Nussbaum's new OUP book staking democratic freedom on what opera does to the emotions A North Carolina county that dissolved its entire library board rather than keep a children's book on the shelf A French feminist philosopher's reckoning with the Pelicot trial, now reaching German readers Read on.

In this week's issue: - How Hong Kong's National Security Law is now reshaping who can even exhibit at the world's largest Chinese-language book fair - A publicly funded UK poetry journal that accepted a poem and then pulled it — allegedly because of what the poet had said online about gender - Tennessee's "Charlie Kirk Act" and what it actually does to campus speech once you read past the name - Why literary Twitter is in a genuine rage about what Picador has done to Roberto Bolaño's covers S

In this week's issue: - A court in Oran sentences Kamel Daoud in absentia to three years in prison for his Prix Goncourt novel — reportedly the first time Algeria's post-civil war Charter has ever been applied to a work of fiction - 308 authors including Leïla Slimani and Emmanuel Carrère sign a public letter demanding a "conscience clause" after Bolloré's shadow falls over Éditions Grasset - J.H. Prynne, widely described as potentially the greatest English-language poet since Milton, dies at 8

In this week's issue: - 130+ French authors—including Virginie Despentes and Bernard-Henri Lévy—walking out of Éditions Grasset after Vincent Bolloré ousted its 26-year president - Christian Lorentzen in the LRB on Ben Lerner's fourth novel *Transcription*: a broken phone, a dying mentor, and what gets lost when recording fails - Ian Penman on Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys—one of the LRB's more unusual deep-dives in recent memory - Sam Kahn's case, in *Persuasion*, for why reading is the only

In this week's issue: - 308 French authors quit a major publisher to stop a billionaire's ideological capture of cultural institutions - Ben Lerner's new novel *Transcription* argues that when technology fails, genuine conversation becomes possible again - Anthropic just settled a copyright lawsuit for $1.5 billion—the largest in history—but authors are calling it inadequate - Samuel Moyn names the real crisis: America's political system is paralyzed by gerontocracy, and no one has a succession

In this week's issue: - 170 French authors flee a prestigious publishing house after its CEO is fired—and Vincent Bolloré's billionaire agenda may be why - A 17th-century Flemish painter whose signed works were misattributed to men for three centuries is finally getting her due at the Royal Academy - PhD admissions in freefall: doctoral applications up, but acceptances down 20% at a major research university that can't afford its own students - International scholars convene around Germaine de