A graphic novel by Melissa Chan and Badiucao imagines China and the US at war in 2035. They hope to remind young people that ‘authoritarianism everywhere is bad’
Drinking Tsingtao beers, eating congee, walking with hands behind their backs: for many young people in western countries, “Chinamaxxing” has become all the rage. Some content creators have even gone beyond the jokes about being in “a very Chinese time in my life” and have followed this passion to the Middle Kingdom: making TikToks in Chongqing’s multilayered metropolis, bathing in Chengdu’s 24-hour spas or backflipping on the Great Wall of China.
This irreverent, mostly ironic trend is jarring for some, but Chinese Australian artist Badiucao and Chinese American journalist Melissa Chan don’t want to lecture the so-called Chinamaxxers.
Global crises are tightly linked to how we treat each other at the local level, argues this optimistic book
In times of crisis, there is one person to whom the left still turns for guidance.
More than a decade and a half after leaving government, Gordon Brown has mellowed into the Labour party’s favourite wise elder; one who has never disappointed the faithful by going off to make a ton of money, remaining quietly committed to public service and deeply engaged with the world’s knottier problems. Having successfully led the global response to the financial crash of 2008, and advocated powerfully during the pandemic for global cooperation against the virus, he was never going to simply sit back and shrug as the world spiralled into conflict and chaos under Donald Trump.
Struggling with Alzheimer’s, the central character sets out on his final journey to a euthanasia clinic
The word “Alzheimer’s” never appears in Switzy, Emma Cline’s third novel, which arrives pre-endorsed as a Booker prize longlistee. But we can be certain that it is the disease afflicting its central character, David Hastings – certain in a way he finds it increasingly hard to be about anything.
When the novel begins, David and his assistant Cody are aboard a private jet flying from his home in the US to the UK. Landing at London City airport (which the book, experiencing its own senior moment, situates in the countryside), they visit David’s daughter and her family before travelling on to Zurich (hence “Switzy”). One more appointment, a catchup with an old boarding school roommate called Tom, awaits just over the French border, after which David will be euthanised at a facility resembling Dignitas.
Stavroula Adameitis, AKA Frida Las Vegas, is an Adelaide-based artist and designer known for her camp, pop art aesthetic. A typical work might feature palm trees, poodles, Greek pillars or bin chickens (Australian white ibises), sometimes all at once. Does it veer into kitsch? ‘I hope so,’ she says. ‘Nostalgia, colour and fun can be very energising, and the feeling we get from these objects in popular culture binds us together.’
The term kitsch comes from the German verkitschen, meaning ‘to cheapen’. In the 19th century it was deployed by elites to look down on the supposedly trashy vulgarity of art for the masses. ‘The idea still carries negative connotations,’ says Adameitis. In her new book, she invites us to stop sneering and start relishing Australia’s unparalleled genius for kitsch: ‘Good kitsch laughs with you not at you. It brings people along for the ride.’
Grammy award-winning American artist selected as 13th person to submit written work to Oslo-based project
The next manuscript by the American artist Laurie Anderson will remain unseen for 88 years, as she becomes the 13th figure to contribute to the Future Library project.
Anderson joins Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, Ocean Vuong and other prominent authors who have written secret manuscripts, which have been locked away until 2114.
Grammy award-winning American artist selected as 13th person to submit written work to Oslo-based project
The next manuscript by the American artist Laurie Anderson will remain unseen for 88 years, as she becomes the 13th figure to contribute to the Future Library project.
Anderson joins Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, Ocean Vuong and other prominent authors who have written secret manuscripts, which have been locked away until 2114.
The author on the habit she can’t control, the writer she’s never read, and the true love of her life (it’s not her husband)
Born in North Yorkshire, Adele Parks, 57, studied English at the University of Leicester then worked in advertising. In 2000, she published her debut novel, Playing Away, and has since written a book every year. Her latest is Eyes on You. Her work has been translated into 31 languages and in 2022 she was awarded the MBE for services to literature. She is an ambassador for charities promoting literacy including the National Literacy Trust, which is collaborating with the Department for Education on the National Year of Reading 2026. Parks is married with a son, and lives in Surrey.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Speaking negatively to myself.
From cover design to shelf placement and influencer partnerships … how publishers will persuade you to buy their books this autumn
Think about the last book you bought. How did you choose it? Was it from a recommendation, a review, a TikTok video? Did the cover grab you, were you swayed by the quotes on the front, or did you just happen to spot it on an appealing table as you walked into the shop? Did you think about all the nudges that led you to that decision – by the publisher, the bookseller or that person you follow on Insta?
The reality is that our reading choices are directed and massaged at every turn. “It’s all about the art of persuasion,” says Philip Gwyn Jones, who was a publisher for more than 30 years and is now a literary agent. And who are the persuaders? They’re the booksellers, the supermarket stock buyers, the publishing houses and their ranks of marketers and publicists. And, more recently, persuasion often comes from BookTokers and online influencers, social media videos, podcasts and Instagram posts. How is all this changing publishing?
Country star came to South Yorkshire town in 2007 for UK launch of the Imagination Library, her book donation scheme
Shane Jarman was up a ladder decorating a Christmas tree at the school where he was deputy headteacher when he got a call asking him to come to Rotherham hospital ASAP. It was December 2007 and Jarman’s wife, Claire, had given birth the previous day to their first child, a girl called Emma, so of course he rushed to the phone. All was well, he was told, but that “everything would become clear” when he got to the hospital.
Once there, his wife told him – somewhat unexpectedly – that they were going to meet Dolly Parton. “And literally within what felt like five minutes,” he recalled, “there were great camera flashes, lots of noise, lots of clicking and in walked this real big bundle of energy.”
The former UK prime minister is still shaping politics (even if he doesn’t want to interfere). He talks about keeping his temper, staying fit – and why he won’t pay £90 for a Scotland football shirt
It’s a Monday in August and as England burns in dystopian heat, Gordon Brown and I are in his office at the top of his house in North Queensferry, overlooking the moody waters of the Firth of Forth. It’s hard to recall the top of my own sauna-like house in London as we stand here in the cool, wearing wool suits and necessary socks, my coat slung over the back of a chair. “I was watching Raith Rovers – the local football team – on Saturday,” Brown says, “and it was really cold. There was a wind blowing in from the sea.” He asks if I’ve heard the famous joke – “Scotland’s only got two seasons: July and winter”– then chuckles. It’s one of his favourites. (I’ll hear him tell it three times today.)
That’s not to say Fife has been untouched by the multiple heatwaves. They had a few sunny days. One hit 24C – “a shock”, Brown says, July temperatures typically being 15-17C. He stood in his kitchen and considered the modest patch of grass at the back of the house. “I never imagined being out in the garden in the summer. I never imagined it because it’s either raining or too cold.” Once out, he found himself battling a “very dangerous” nest of wasps. One family member was stung, then there was the rigmarole of specialists in thick gloves and protective suits undertaking its removal. By the time that was done, the sun had gone in.
Poetry with wonder and wit; a heartwarming tale for horse lovers; a portal to the future; a brilliant YA wartime romance and more
Small Monster, Big Monster by Allan Sanders, Phaidon, £7.95 Refrigerator is EMPTY. Monster is FULL (of pizza!). An eye-wateringly bright board book, featuring splendidly zany, toddler-pleasing pairs of opposites.
The Flying Machine of Dreams by Kate Wakeling, illustrated by Viviane Schwarz, Otter-Barry, £12.99 A delectable picture-book collaboration that perfectly distils the wonder of the everyday, from the textures of a leaf to a squishy-cushioned den. Wakeling’s irresistible poetry is richly heightened by Schwarz’s sweet, strange illustrations.
A heartbroken woman becomes fixated on a famous writer in this witty, touching follow-up to Sorrow and Bliss
The protagonist of Meg Mason’s new book, the follow-up to the 2020 tragicomedy Sorrow and Bliss, is an invisible woman. She might well be standing there but you won’t notice her. She’s a techie at literary festivals – the person who shuffles up to a famous writer a few minutes before their event and apologetically slides a microphone cable down their shirt while they’re making small talk with the chair or accepting a bottle of room-temperature mineral water from an anxious publicist.
No man is a hero to his valet, and no writer is a hero to the technical staff lurking in the wings of a venue. Mason’s opening pages present a teasing but not quite libellous series of cameos from real writers: George Saunders deciding at an inconsiderately late stage to insist on swapping his headset for a lapel mic; Ann Patchett being frosty with a fan; Mick Herron accidentally stepping on someone’s foot and not apologising.
Edinburgh has given festival audiences a look at two long awaited musicals – Bliss and Disenchanted! – with both aiming to now scale up their spectacle
The Edinburgh fringe is mostly where new work is forged but that’s not the full picture. Amid all the hot-off-the-press shows are a number of familiar titles that have been around for years yet are only making their professional UK debut now. That’s the case with two fairytale musical productions hoping for a longer life whose festival run is a chance to engineer that happily ever after.
Bliss, co-created by Tyler Beattie and Emma Lively, won a new play award in the US in 2019 and had its world premiere in Seattle the year after. A handful of its songs were released in 2022. Now developed into what is billed as “the biggest new musical of the Edinburgh fringe”, it has a cast of 17 which exceeds regular fringe proportions – as does the running time (80 minutes rather than the standard hour).
In spite of capable performances and deployment of hygge, gothic and Nordic noir elements, you’ll search for a feasible plot or a character insight in vain
Adapted from the 2017 novel by Anna Ekberg (actually a male writing duo), this thriller from Denmark chucks in a bit of everything into the mix: hygge lakeside melodrama, manor-house gothic, and Nordic-noir corruption. But this franticness can’t disguise that it’s a dopey and facile thriller that, despite capable performances, plumbs neither its characters’ depths nor hits thematic pay dirt. It also merits a stiff investigation from the plotting police.
Despite amnesia that leaves her unable to remember her life prior to running an idyllic Norwegian rural cafe, Louise (Natalie Wolfsberg Madueño) is gearing up to get hitched to crime writer Joachim (Pål Sverre Hagen). When a tourist approaches and calls her by another name, she is sufficiently shaken to take a DNA test; it confirms she is actually Helene Söderberg, a Danish shipping heiress presumed dead, with a husband and son back home. Originally found stowed away on a cargo ship, she handed over an ID card – for Louise Anderson – which the authorities accepted. Now wanting to reclaim her identity, she pitches up on the capacious doorstep of company executive Edmund (Claes Bang), her former partner.
The author of The Adversary and Yoga unearths a history that includes the Nazis, Russia, and the Académie Française
When Emmanuel Carrère’s mother, Hélène, died in 2023, at the age of 94, President Macron spoke at her memorial. She had been “perpetual secretary” of the Académie Française, in effect its head, and 200 people gathered at Les Invalides in Paris to pay tribute. Emmanuel’s father, Louis, was there too, in a wheelchair, only half aware of what was going on. This 400-page memoir, translated into English by John Lambert, is a homage to both parents and the unlikely history that brought them together. It’s also an act of reparation towards Hélène, whom Emmanuel worshipped as a child but upset as an adult by publishing a book that she’d forbidden him to write.
Hélène grew up in stateless poverty in Paris, the daughter of Georges Zourabichvili, whose parents had fled Georgia in 1921, and Nathalie von Pelken, who as a child had six governesses, one for each day excluding Sunday. Though “the magical world of the fallen Russian aristocracy” was the backdrop, conditions were tough, not least after Georges disappeared in 1944, murdered by partisans for alleged Nazi collaboration. Hélène was 15 at the time and unsuccessfully tried to hide the truth about George’s death from her younger brother, Nicolas.
A terminally ill woman makes a final trip to Egypt in an exquisitely wrought portrait of end-of-life reckoning
Virginia Woolf said of Middlemarch that it is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. In the shallow and infantilising age through which we are living, Colin Thubron dares to assume that his readers are adults. Passage is a very beautiful, very moving, authentic work of art. Hardly more than a novella, it sits lightly in the hand, but its emotional and aesthetic weight overtips the balance.
Thubron began his career as a travel writer and a large part of the action of Passage is set in a vividly but economically evoked Egypt. This is not the teeming Egypt of Cairo or Alexandria, but of the countryside, the villages, and the great immemorial tombs and ancient monuments. The best travel writers know that “abroad” is most convincingly evoked not by awed exclamations at the world’s wonders, but by an attitude of relaxed familiarity. Thubron is obviously an old Egypt hand, or at least has the skill to convince us that he is.
As I turned 21, fear was holding me back. So I decided to face it headfirst. It taught me that courage leads to connection – and people who owe you nothing can be astonishingly kind
In May 2024, I decided to spend 30 days getting rejected on purpose.
At first, it sounded ridiculous. After all, most people spend their lives actively trying to avoid rejection – and I was deciding to walk, full force, towards it. But it had become obvious, as I turned 21, that my terror of being rejected was holding me back.
Richard Russo has penned 10 novels, won the Pulitzer Prize, and collaborated on screen adaptations and TV series based on his work. In his latest book, "Under the Falls," Russo continues to revisit the community of his youth. Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown visited him for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.
Reading decline happens during the big transition all middle-grade readers go through: moving from short illustrated chapter books to fully fledged novels. | Ryan McVay/Getty Images
Something happens to kids when they’re about 9 years old. Before then, they’re voracious little bookworms, with most of them saying they read for fun at least five days a week. After their ninth birthday, only 35 percent still do.
Experts call this phenomenon “the decline by 9,” and they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to stop it. They talk up and cherish the books that break through: the Harry Potters and the Percy Jacksons, which got so many kids to keep reading through those danger years and which sold so well through millennial and Gen Z childhoods. Publishers keep looking for new books compelling enough to keep kids away from their screens and glued to the page.
But for the past 10 years, books for kids ages 8 to 12 (known as middle grade) have been selling less and less.
“It had been happening for maybe a decade, very very slowly,” said Joanne O’Sullivan, a children’s book author and reporter for Publishers Weekly. What had been a gradual slope got dramatically worse in 2020. And in the years since the pandemic, publishers have shut downmultiple middle-grade imprints, culminating in it happening twicethis year.
No one in publishing is entirely sure why kids books stopped selling, but there are two major theories. One says that children are no longer reading as much as they used to, because they are worse readers than previous generations were. The age group that used to happily devour Harry Potter is now distracted by iPads and YouTube shorts, so they never developed the ability to sit down and focus on a printed page. Their reading scores, which started falling in 2014, tell the tale.
The other theory says that the kids aren’t the ones who changed — publishers are. Starting in the 2000s, middle-grade books began getting long, with the average going from 174.5 pages in 2006 to 290 in 2016. According to this narrative, publishers flooded the market with books too difficult for their target audience. Kids responded by tuning out.
Whichever theory is true, the fact remains that all those ravenous 8-year-old bookworms depend on middle-grade publishers to keep on reading after they turn 9. The publishers who sell these books have built massive businesses on their ability to supply kids with exciting, addictive stories. If they’re failing, what will kids turn to for entertainment instead?
Key takeaways
Sales of middle-grade books have been declining for over a decade, but the decline worsened during and after the pandemic.
Some industry insiders argue that, under the influence of Harry Potter, publishers started putting out books too long for their young readers.
Others argue that today’s overscheduled kids no longer have the free time to devote to reading for pleasure and that the pandemic broke the middle-grade book discovery chain.
Looking forward, publishers are focusing on short and funny books heavily loaded with graphics.
The middle-grade novel of the future looks like the Dog Man books.
Why did tweens lose interest in books?
Reading decline happens during the big transition all middle-grade readers go through: moving from short illustrated chapter books to fully fledged novels. It’s a pain point.
“They’ve been doing short chapter books; they’ve been doing those leveled readers in the classroom; and, then, all of a sudden, what’s available to them is a lot chunkier, more challenging,” O’Sullivan said. She described the transition as “abrupt,” adding, “that’s not necessarily just for kids who are struggling with reading. That’s also for kids who like reading and are capable.”
“If you have a kid who’s not a very confident reader, a long book is very intimidating,” Kelly Dickinson, a middle school librarian in Bethesda, Maryland, told Vox. “They just stall out before they can even pick one, because they look at it and they think, ‘I can’t read that.’”
The shadow of Harry Potter, with its doorstopper volumes approaching a thousand pages, looms large here. Before Harry, a standard middle-grade novel might look like The Baby-Sitters Club volume The Truth About Stacey, which clocks in around 35,000 words. In a Substack post in April, Vicky Weber, an author, literary agent, and author coach for middle-grade books, pointed out that Sorcerer’s Stone was 76,944 words long, already pushing the limits of a middle-grade reader’s attention. After the books became phenomenons, they got much longer; Order of the Phoenix was 257,045 words, which is heftier than most adult novels. As publishers raced to catch up, their books began to expand, as well.
“When something becomes really popular, other publishers try to replicate that success,” Weber told Vox. “I think one of the things we didn’t take into account is how many Harry Potter readers were adults.”
While middle-grade books really did get longer, everyone I spoke to also acknowledges that kids’ reading scores really did drop, too. Kids have lost a lot of their unstructured play time to the grind of organized sports and music lessons, which means the empty childhood hours that are such perfect reading opportunities have vanished. “That time to just sit down and read is so truncated for a lot of kids, probably a lot of the kids who would have chosen to read a 400-page book if they had the time,” O’Sullivan said.
Then, there was the trauma of Covid, which smashed right into kids’ reading habits. “There were factors like schools and libraries closing, not much time with peers, and plenty of screen time during the pandemic,” said Kristen McLean, who runs the thought leadership collective Circana Entertainment Knowledge Group. All these bad effects, McLean said, that essentially “broke the discovery chain” for middle-grade fiction, in what she describes as “a perfect storm for lower literacy.”
The graphic novel pivot
The good news is that kids didn’t stop reading entirely during the pandemic. A few categories spiked: illustrated books, graphic novels, and manga. Jackie De Leo, now the chief merchant and publisher at Scholastic, was a vice president at Barnes & Noble during the pandemic, and she describes seeing kids with an unquenchable thirst for manga all through 2020.
“If you sat in a store and watched the manga section, you’d see little kids at lunch; you’d see them through the day; and, then, it would move into being adults,” De Leo said. “The only real constraint was actual inventory.”
Now, O’Sullivan says she keeps hearing middle-grade publishers say, “Let’s meet them where they are.” In practice, that appears to mean they’re focusing on books like the wildly popular Dog Man, a graphic novel series featuring a hero with the head of a dog and the body of a police officer.
“Dog Man is full color — so immersive,” De Leo said. “There’s these fun parts about the physical book, too, where you actually have to flap the pages and it makes an animation reel.” More importantly, she said, the books are funny. “Kids like things that are funny, and we were giving them some pretty serious things for a while — books for adults packaged as middle-grade books.”
The new ideal middle-grade book is short, punchy, and comedic and comes with a hefty dose of graphics. “Maybe it’s comics, maybe it’s illustrated novels,” O’Sullivan said. “Maybe, instead of just running text, they’ll have a panel with some text messages in it or something, just to break up the text to make the entire experience of reading less intimidating.”
This focus on breaking up the text means that publishing isn’t going back to what middle-grade books looked like before Harry Potter: short, simple chapter books à la The Baby-Sitters Club and Encyclopedia Brown. Those series weren’t hefty or overly serious, but they were massive bestsellers on the strength of their words, not their images. (It’s also worth noting that Scholastic adapted a few of the BSC books into graphic novels in 2006 and, then, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, picked up the project again in 2021.)
I asked De Leo if she thought the industry’s shift to including more illustrations suggests that kids have lost an ability to handle pure text, even when it is short and sweet.
But De Leo said that reading graphic novels represents a “different type of literacy” from that required to read Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, not a lesser one. She said that when she reads a graphic novel, she has trouble forcing herself to look at the images, not just the words. When she sees kids focusing on the pictures with ease, she takes it as evidence of “a real visual literacy that they have that I am jealous of.”
Dickinson, the librarian, said she wishes that publishers would put out comedic fiction in more formats. “A lot of kids want funny books, and a lot of the funny books are the illustrated hybrid stuff,” she said. “There’s not enough other funny books, in my opinion.”
Reenvisioning middle grade books
Experts are hopeful that publishers’ new direction will be enough to get kids reading again — and to get their parents to buy books. “This is probably the first year where I’ve heard people being optimistic and feeling excited about the new ideas that are coming,” O’Sullivan said. “People are beginning to be able to re-envision middle grade.”
The publishing shutdowns reflect the industry’s new direction. One of the three people to survive the March closure of Dial Books for Young Readers was an editor specializing in picture books and graphic novels. Macmillan is replacing the now-defunct Roaring Brook Press imprint, which also closed in March, with a new imprint specializing in nonfiction and illustrated books for kids, although it’s not yet clear what age group the new imprint will cater to.
With kids becoming stronger readers and books getting shorter, the hope is that they’ll meet in the middle.
“Kids in the middle-grade age are extremely self-centered and view everything through how it impacts them. Developmentally, that’s very normal,” Dickinson said. “But also, they’re incredibly empathetic at this age.” Reading fiction, which allows us to imagine how other people’s minds work, can be deeply impactful for this malleable age if kids can hold onto their love of reading long enough to reap the benefits.
“This is a time when reading habits and interest in reading can really die,” Dickinson said. “The hope is to help kids discover what kinds of books or what formats they like — and to show that there are ways in.”
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