From a Slate interview with Jonathan Franzen, America’s most indubitably Franzenish novelist:

Last year, author Garth Greenwell suggested that Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life could be the great gay novel that contemporary culture was waiting for. A few months later, Greenwell produced his own contender for that title when his acclaimed What Belongs To Us was released. Around the same time, Alexander Chee’s…

Globally, inequality is falling. You may not have known that, because within countries, inequality is rising. We live in dangerous times. Why? We talked to the man who wrote the book on it.

Bono’s daughter, Tommy Hilfiger’s daughter, and Edgar Bronfman Jr.’s daughter were among the guests at a recent dinner celebrating Arianna Huffington’s “ubiquitous tome,” Sleep Revolution. Huh. Has anyone actually read this book? Serious question.

The sixteen-novel Left Behind series of evangelical thrillers is at least as influential a text in the annals of latter-day prophecy belief as the Book of Revelation. Which, of course, happens to furnish source material for the series’ intensively literalist accounting of the rapture, the tribulation, and the final…

The idea of a universal basic income for all citizens has been catching on all over the world. Is it too crazy to believe in? We spoke to the author of a new book on the ins, outs, and utopian dreams of making basic income a reality.

This afternoon, Virginia State Senator D*** Black responded on Twitter to a Gwaker story about an email he recently sent to an AP English teacher about Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Jessica Berg, the teacher, objected to State Senator D*** Black’s support of a (failed) bill that would require teachers to obtain parental…

At a certain point while preparing for my interview with the novelist, memoirist, and editor Edmund White, I had to ask myself: What could I possibly say about a certain segment of gay life that Edmund White hasn’t already said beautifully or unflinchingly? “What we desire is crucial to who we are,” he wrote in his…

When people think of someone with an “addictive personality,” the image typically isn’t a pretty one. “When is an addict lying?” goes a joke told by addiction counselors: the snide answer is “when his lips are moving.” Media portrayals of addiction tend to depict people with addictions as “fiends” or “demons” whose…

From the 2008 recession all the way through to the current presidential campaign, reformers of all types have been advocating for a breakup of the world’s biggest banks. Why? And how? We have just the right author to explain.

The following is an excerpt from the new book Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America, by Tamara Draut, an executive at the progressive think tank Demos.

If you care about gay culture and/or good writing, you need to read Garth Greenwell’s debut What Belongs To You. The slim novel, which chronicles a multi-year relationship between its narrator and a hustler named Mitko that he hires after meeting him in a bathroom under the National Palace of Culture in Sofia,…

Marco Rubio has decided to dispel the rumor that he is, in fact, a robot by lightening up a little. First on the docket: talking smack to Ted Cruz’s 76-year-old father.

We certainly read a lot of bad things this year—but we also read a bunch of stuff that was great. Here are our picks for the best books, essays, articles and Urban Baby blog posts of 2015.

Barnes and Noble plans to save itself from inevitable death by “expanding its offerings of toys, games, gadgets and other gifts and reshaping the nation’s largest bookstore chain into a ‘lifestyle brand.’” Eh. Gawker readers once suggested “Turn them into bars,” which seems more likely to succeed.

Shitty internet man and mediocre comedian Josh “The Fat Jew” Ostrovsky took some heat this summer when the entire internet agreed that his career is based on stealing jokes from other people. But like any fraud, Ostrovsky has a book deal. Now, that whole book is online, for free, from someone else.

The American intelligentsia is excited about a new book with a shocking and previously unheard thesis: black people do not like crime in their neighborhoods. Does this revolutionary idea change everything we thought we knew?

Some people read the New York Times Book Review section for the book reviews. Other, smarter people read the New York Times Book Review just for the descriptions of the self-published books.

Grow up, J.K. Rowling! C’mon!

Black women are in trouble. Or at least, that’s the narrative. Headlines warn that they’re less likely to attain a college degree than their peers; that they pose a higher risk to various health afflictions like cervical cancer and hypertension; that they “experience unintended pregnancies” at three times the rate of…