Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
The Irresistible Rise of On Tyranny
1.4 million copies sold. A quarter million of those in 2025. Left-leaning people process their political feeling by buying books (1984 & The Handmaid’s Tale in 2016, a mini-course worth of books about racism in the wake of George Floyd). The latest to cash-in is Timothy Snyder’s slender, easy-to-digest On Tyranny. If you have been in an indie bookstore lately, you probably (as Laura Miller wisely observes) have been it near the cash register. An impulse-buy for the doomscrolling set. Unsurprisingly, it has been all over social media, but the harder question to answer is this: did social media make it or is social media just reflecting that people are buying it? The answer is somewhere in the messy middle.
Kirkus’ Fall Books Preview
Some look forward to leaves turning. Other to the return of football or pumpkin spice. Me? I am a “fall books preview” guy. Give me 300 books I want to read. Add another 200 that I would never read but just like to know about. And a few hundred “man humans are a range” titles that are simply beyond me. I want it all. And sometimes, I want to see the handful of titles that someone who is really in it is excited about. Tom Beer, Editor-in-Chief of Kirkus, is definitely in it, so looking at his short(ish) list carries extra weight with me.
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I Will Never, Ever Understand The Future Library Project
I am a sucker for twee book-related things. Look at what I do for a living. But The Future Library Project completely misses me. We get authors to write a manuscript, give it to us, then we shelve it for 100 years at which point we mow down this special forest we have been growing to make paper to publish them on. Oh and there will only be 1000 copies and you have to pre-order them now for more than $1000 even though you will be dead when you can get them. Also their is a sealed vault that has been specially designed for this? Oh make sure to make our website insufferable. I think we’re done here.