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Wednesday, August 13, 2025

The Associated Press Is Ending Its Regular Book Coverage., by Brittany Allen, Literary Hub

In good news for people who love bad news, the Associated Press is apparently ending its regular literary coverage. Starting September 1st, the national news source and media hub will no longer release their standardized, stand-alone reviews for new books.

The Last Of The Private Co-op Dining Rooms, by Adriane Quinlan, Curbed

Steinberg’s building is one of the last prewar co-ops to have a private restaurant. The amenity was ubiquitous in the years when developers were inventing the modern apartment building and the city wasn’t yet bursting with dining options, said historian Andrew Dolkart, who lives in a building that had a restaurant for exactly that reason. A private restaurant was a cost-saving measure that allowed a family to cut the difficult-to-hire cook, and a way developers could differentiate their buildings from tenements — useful to the middle-class homeowners skeptical about apartments.

Missed Connections, by Alana Pockros, The Nation

Catherine Lacey is much more interested in the questions than the answers, and so the circular nature of The Möbius Book seems fitting: It turns out that the maze she sends us into has no exit and no end. Just like a Möbius strip, we might be sliced down our middles, even split in half. But the bind that holds us together will always stay intact.

In The Lobster Trap, Globe Reporter Greg Mercer Examines A Fishery Pulled In All Directions, by Karen Pinchin, The Globe and Mail

In his new book, The Lobster Trap, Mercer draws on his Maritime roots and decades of reporting experience to paint a vivid portrait of a historic, lucrative industry facing the brunt of intersecting crises. He travels from the roiling shores of his home province of New Brunswick to a world touched by the tendrils of the global lobster industry; from a bustling seafood market in Quingdao, China, to Narragansett, R.I., where warming ocean waters are fuelling a shell disease that turns the crustaceans’ carapace to sponge.

At the heart of the book lies a question: How much do we value this pricey, contested species and what are we – particularly our federal government – willing to do to save it and the rural communities dependent on its harvest? The answer, as Mercer discovers, is as complex as the creature and the fishery itself.