In this month’s New Yorker, Joan Acocella looks at English journalist Henry Hitchen’s The Language Wars: A History of Proper English (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Acocella looks back at different attempts made throughout history to codify and regulate the English-language. In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage written by retired school teacher H. W. Fowler in 1926, […]

The Nebula Awards are a series of prizes given each year by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America to the best in science fiction writing (novel, novella, short story and more). The award for best novel went to Jo Watson’s young adult novel  Among Others, about a young girl in Wales struggling with the […]

The Underground New York Public Library chronicles people reading on the subway on their daily commute. Check out some of their amazing pictures (and maybe find your next read?). Let’s get a Beijing-version going, although we would have to expand the types of transit to include buses, san yuan che’s and bikes!

Weldon Owen has put together a great infographic outlining just how an idea becomes a book (spolier alert: drinking and goat farms are involved).  

The Bookworm is up for top honors in a few categories for The Beijinger Bar & Club Awards – including Best Cafe, Best Networking and, of course, Best Quiz. You can vote for us here and Voting is open until May 9th.

In celebration of China Week, (China is the market focus at the London Book Fair this week), Granta is publishing a short stories, excerpts and podcasts from Chinese writers, including BLF 2011 author A Yi‘s Petty Thief (trans. Alice Xin Liu) about a thief with a secret power and a poem from Wang Yin, Flying […]

The Orange Prize shortlist was announced today. This is the UK’s only annual book award for fiction written by a woman. The finalists are: Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues Anne Enright The Forgotten Georgina Harding Painter of Silence Madeline Miller The Song of Achilles Cynthia Ozick Foreign Bodies Ann Patchett State of Wonder The winner will […]

Paul French‘s brilliant Midnight in Peking will be adapted to the small screen. Midnight in Peking follows the murder and investigation of British-citizen Pamela Werner in 1037 in Beijing. Kudos Television of London will be developing the book for television. Let the casting speculation begin!

BLF 2012 author Mara Hvistendahl was named a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction for her book Unnatural Selection. Listen to the podcast of Hvistendahl’s BLF 2012 talk at BLF 2012 here. The 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction was “awarded to “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” by Stephen Greenblatt (W.W. Norton […]

On February 14, environmentalist Lester Brown, the founder of the Worldwatch Institue and the Earth Policy Institute, returned to The Bookworm to discuss his latest book World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse. In the book, Brown warns that the world is facing issues of near-overwhelming complexity and unprecedented urgency and outlines his […]