The Evolution of Arthurian Literature King Arthur is one of the most famous figures to emerge from the Middle Ages, but the legend surrounding him was built over centuries of medieval storytelling. Writers across Britain and Europe transformed Arthur from a shadowy ruler into the centre of a vast literary tradition filled with knights, quests, romance, betrayal, and magic.

At Sotheby’s, a feast of rare science books includes volumes from Copernicus, Galileo and Newton that together revolutionized human understanding of the cosmos.

PBS News Hour (9/16/2026), "Exhibition explores connection between Black women and the works of Shakespeare": "There's a sort of longstanding myth that Shakespeare's world was not a diverse world ... Black women ... lived and worked in London at the same time that Shakespeare was living and writing there ... Black women, as artists, as creators, as theater professionals themselves have used Shakespeare to tell their own stories." Video on Youtube. An excerpt from the exhibition catalog edited by Patricia Akhimie introduces the entire open access collection of essays, including Shanelle E. Kim's article on Frances DeBerry, the game show contestant mentioned on PBS News Hour. See also Esther Ferington's quiz on Black women and Shakespeare and Patricia Akhimie's previous lecture on "The Goodness of the Night: Editing Othello" (transcript).

The People's Bookshelf in the atrium of the National Library of Latvia (NLL) is one of the central design elements of the building. The Bookshelf stores books donated to the Library and currently is home to almost 8 000 books in 50 languages from all over the world. Everyone is asked to donate a book – of special importance to themselves – to the NLL, also writing a message or personal story relating to the book on its title page.

In a sense, Vollmann is Sacramento. "He's weird, he's quirky, he's got his own kind of thing going," Lytle said. "He doesn't really care what anybody else thinks about him. He's just living his life the way he wants to live it."

“The Sea-King and the Sorceress” examines the lives and deaths of the diverse people who called themselves Vikings.

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The French author discovered Carson on a bus while stranded in a snowstorm and has been enthralled by her fearless imagination ever since

• Where to start with Anne Carson

• ‘Delights await!’: Margaret Atwood and other writers on Nobel winner Anne Carson

1. Anne Carson is one of the greatest writers of our time. I discovered her work on a Peter Pan bus from New York to New England. I’d bought Antigonick in a bookstore a few days earlier, almost randomly. From the very first lines, I was enthralled. While we were on the bus, a snowstorm suddenly blanketed the roads, and the other passengers and I found ourselves stuck for 10 hours in rural America, surrounded by an entirely white landscape. I took my computer out of my backpack and started to translate Antigonick into French. Spontaneously. I was so absorbed by the power of Carson’s text that I didn’t notice the hours pass.

2. One of Carson’s greatest strengths is that, unlike so many other contemporary writers, she doesn’t try to “make literature”. She writes. Sometimes clouds do the speaking, in her work, and sometimes monsters do; sometimes, in the middle of a collection of poems, she lets an imaginary Catherine Deneuve take over the narration. Sometimes she writes a letter to her own sleep and sometimes she publishes notes she’s scribbled on her hand. She writes about Homer, but also Rosalía; about Brecht, but also Marilyn Monroe.

Translated by Josh Cohen

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© Photograph: Golli/Kjartan Þorbjörnsson

© Photograph: Golli/Kjartan Þorbjörnsson

© Photograph: Golli/Kjartan Þorbjörnsson

The world may be going to hell in a handcart, but at least now I get to say I know a Nobel prize winner

“Anyone worried about pneumonic plague?” This is a friend – a medic – texting me after reading reports at the weekend of the 28-year-old Russian woman who died while working at a “plague research lab” in Siberia. Relying on details from the famously open Russian state guaranteed the presence of a certain dark subtext to the tantalisingly short news item. Namely: lab-grown disease cultivated for reasons unknown and with a 100% mortality rate escapes Russian facility into general population, eight hours’ flying time from London. In other words, we’re all going to die.

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© Photograph: TT News Agency/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Live News.

© Photograph: TT News Agency/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Live News.

© Photograph: TT News Agency/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Live News.

When her sons died the Book of Goose author turned to Grief Lessons, Carson’s translation of four plays by Euripides. She reflects on the ‘life sustaining’ work of an extraordinary writer
• Where to start with: Anne Carson
• ‘Delights await!’: Margaret Atwood and other writers on Anne Carson

It is preposterous to agree to write a short piece on Anne Carson’s work. The task is impossible, akin to that of solving the mathematical problem of dividing zero by zero. If one had the power to solve it, perhaps one would have some confidence in attempting to write about Anne Carson’s work. Attempting, I say, not succeeding. In attempting to do so, I shall emphasise that all words fall short in extreme situations, which not only include unfathomable losses (of children, in my case) but also include articulating anything about Anne Carson’s work.

One could start with Carson’s words. “Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.” (Autobiography of Red) But to let the words exist in their own desires and yearnings and frustrations and confusions, to let the words scream with inarticulable pain or tell a riddle with a twinkling smile or make love to one another – how many of us have achieved that kind of mastery of words? But, oh no, mastery is the wrong word here. Only the minor and the greedy and the power-thirsty writers want to be the masters of the words. Carson does not subjugate or manipulate her words. She lets them be; and lets herself be led by the words – hers, and the ancients’ translated into unforgettable English by her.

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© Photograph: TT News Agency/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Live News.

© Photograph: TT News Agency/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Live News.

© Photograph: TT News Agency/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Live News.

From essays on sexual jealousy to retellings of classical Greek tragedies, here’s a guide to the Nobel prize-winning writer’s catalogue of work

• ‘Delights await!’: Margaret Atwood and other writers on Nobel winner Anne Carson

• Anne Carson wins Nobel prize in literature 2026

Anne Carson, the Canadian poet who has been awarded this year’s Nobel prize in literature, is an exhilarating choice by the committee. The sheer range of writing she has been producing since the mid-1980s is exceptional: poetry, essays, translations, collaborative artwork, and works that find intriguingly under-explored meeting points between scholarship, graphic design and personal rites of passage.

But open any of these books and most of all it’s the extraordinary tone that strikes you. Carson sounds like nobody else. All her writing has a kind of high austerity. Almost jaunty in its intellectual cut and thrust, it deals with sometimes painful material without sentiment, sometimes even through literal deletions in the printed text. The result is a compression and intensity that is unputdownable.

Fiona Sampson’s WaterTango Against Extinction is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press.

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© Photograph: Peter Power/Toronto Star/Getty Images

© Photograph: Peter Power/Toronto Star/Getty Images

© Photograph: Peter Power/Toronto Star/Getty Images

The Handmaid’s Tale author is joined by Emily Wilson, Ocean Vuong and Booker-shortlisted writer Rebecca Perry in celebrating the newly announced Nobel laureate

• Anne Carson wins Nobel prize in literature 2026

• Where to start with: Anne Carson

Anne Carson’s work has long been admired among poets of many countries. For new readers, I would recommend The Beauty of the Husband – direct and visceral, funny and angry and sad – or Men in the Off Hours. Delights await!

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© Photograph: Peter Smith

© Photograph: Peter Smith

© Photograph: Peter Smith

Anne Carson is the 2026 Nobel Laureate in Literature. She is a poet from Canada who has settled in Iceland. You can read her poetry in the London Review of Books, the New Yorker and Poem Hunter. Her work is also widely available in bookshops and libraries. There are many interviews with her, including this recent one with the Paris Review. You can also watch lectures by her on YouTube, including On the History of Skywriting and Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind. And here she's reading poems in Reykjavík.

Most prestigious literature prize goes to Canadian known for genre-crossing works such as Autobiography of Red

The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded to the Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson, the Swedish Academy has announced.

The academy cited the author’s “bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.

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© Photograph: Pontus Lundahl/TT/Reuters

© Photograph: Pontus Lundahl/TT/Reuters

© Photograph: Pontus Lundahl/TT/Reuters

where to find me in the afterlife is a densely interconnected collection (or carrier bag) of personal writing, digital ephemera, and quotations, loosely themed after an archaeological dig site. Created by @jordantyranny.bsky.social, it's the kind of thing the web was made for.

There's a lot to dig into (ha ha), and full disclaimer I've only barely scratched the surface myself. The "tools" and "intro/tours" (scroll down past the map a bit) are a good starting point. The accompanying thread on Bluesky is a fun rabbit hole as well.

The Canadian poet and Chinese experimental writer are the bookmakers’ favourites to win, with Haruki Murakami, Gerald Murnane and Margaret Atwood also in the mix

Canadian poet Anne Carson and Chinese experimental writer Can Xue are the bookies’ favourites to win this year’s Nobel prize in literature, set to be announced Thursday.

The frontrunners both have 10/1 odds of taking home the world’s most prestigious literary prize, this year worth 12m Swedish Krona (approximately £900,000), according to Ladbrokes.

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© Composite: PR, Alamy

© Composite: PR, Alamy

© Composite: PR, Alamy

That Will There, Transcription, and Down Time each tease out the confluence of ambivalence, exhaustion, and over-compensative compliance that underscored pandemic life is compelling. Their characters' lack of clarity about Covid and its consequences is, ironically, its own form of clear-sightedness. It speaks to a very contemporary feeling of unease about Covid and the recent past and what this ultimately says about where the culture is heading.

It's the software engineers who are losing their jobs to AI, not the weed trimmers, pawn shop workers, garbage men, and grocery store workers. In these novels and in this economy, even the extralegal jobs, despite being precarious on their head, have become more stable than most.

The Prix Goncourt has removed a book from its longlist. This is another in a growing series of AI-writing scandals. Earlier in the year it was the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The Ai detection service used is Pangram, notable for its extremely low false positive rate. These awards required that the artistic works be human-generated. But what about outside the prize arenas? Should authors use Ai in their writing? Some have embraced it.

Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections turned 25 this year (it was published right before Sept. 11). Here is a small collection of articles, including an overview, some critics revisiting the book [archive], a Gen Xer who asks Was this the last great American novel?, two interviews with Franzen, one in The New Yorker [archive], one in the Grauniad, and news of the (inevitable?) Netflix adaptation.

Related: How Jonathan Franzen became America's most divisive novelist [BBC] Jonathan Franzen: The Great American Misogynist [Medium, archive] Jonathan Franzen 'considered adopting Iraqi orphan to figure out young people' [Grauniad] A-and: Never forget [archive]

A new book describes how cutting-edge genomics techniques yielded “extraordinary proof” that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings.

[Toni Morrison's] articulation of the subliminal, subaqueous life of Moby-Dick has proved the most valuable means I have of making sense of the recent violence in the United States. More than maybe anything else, this was her project as a critic; she herself recognised that the connection between novels and the world, the author and history, the past and the present, was of great importance not only to Melville and the fractious union of the 1850s, but to her own time and place: "to question the very idea of white progress, the very idea of racial superiority... and to meditate on the fraudulent, self-destroying philosophy of that superiority... that was dangerous, solitary, radical work. Especially then. Especially now."

The collected essays of Dario Amodei help explain why some people are so worried about artificial intelligence.

© Manuel Orbegozo for The New York Times

Anthony Tommasini (LitHub, 9/10/26), "Beauty in Ambiguity: On Marian Anderson's Lifelong Love For Schubert": "When selecting songs ... she always looked first to Schubert, 'the composer I love best,' who wrote 'hundreds of them,' each 'more beautiful than the last.'" E.g.: Ständchen (No. 4 in D. 957); Der Tod und das Mädchen (D. 531); Ave Maria (D. 839); and Erlkönig (D. 328) i.e. Goethe's poem based on a ballad also adapted in Benedikte Naubert's 1792 "The Erl-King's Daughter." Classical Voice North America on Tommasini: Anderson "feared she would be remembered for breaking barriers rather than for her artistry." At LitHub, Tommasini discusses "Wohin?" and "Ungeduld" from D. 795, but also "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child." He mentions Roland Hayes singing Schubert as an influence. At Largehearted Boy, he makes more suggestions.

The tech giant must pay $3,000 per pirated book that it used to train its chatbot. Many authors fear they could lose funds to others in the book business.

© Jason Henry for The New York Times