The Reading Room.
The foundation's newsletter, published fortnightly since the fall of 1994. Essays, citations, interviews, and quiet dispatches from a year of reading — sent, on Sunday morning, to thirty-four thousand readers who mostly reply.
Feature
The Weight of Four Hundred and Seventeen Books.
Kaveh Delshad, on chairing a panel of five.Interview
Three Questions with Mira Chen.
Priya Anand, three days after the ceremony.Essay
The Small Presses that Wrote the Decade.
Frances Ede, on Cormorant, Coffee House, Kore.Dispatch
From Fuzhou.
Anh Ngo, on translating what a mother wrapped in tissue.Departments
Letters · The Reader's Register · The Colophon.
The weight of four hundred and seventeen books.
The 2026 fiction chair, Kaveh Delshad, on the eight weeks between his appointment and the arrival of the boxes. An essay in three parts.
Alongside: Priya Anand's post-ceremony conversation with Mira Chen, Frances Ede on the small presses that quietly wrote the decade, and Anh Ngo's dispatch from Fuzhou.
Read the whole issueRecent essays
& dispatches.
The Reading Room commissions essays from the year's jurors, from former laureates, and from readers we admire. All essays are the copyright of their authors and are permanently archived here.
On the Word Attend, and How It Entered the Language of American Criticism.
A statistical and stylistic reading of forty-six years of citations, tracking the terms the panels have most reached for. First appearance of attend: 1994. Peak appearance: 2019 to the present. The essay argues that the shift from "haunted" to "attended" is not a stylistic tic but a proposition about what American fiction has begun to want. Includes a fold-out chart.
Notes from the Cooper Union.
The 2025 ceremony, described in the register of a diary. What Amara Yosef wore. What Louise Erdrich said in the two-minute silence before her speech. What the ushers said, after.
From the Vietnamese: A Grammar of Salt.
Anh Ngo, laureate for translation, on the six years she spent inside Diêm Huynh's The Book of Salt. A meditation on the untranslatable word for a particular kind of remembering.
A newsletter that mostly reads.
Every other Sunday. Free, and always will be. No sponsorships, no affiliate links, no drop-down banner. Approximately one long essay, one short interview, and one dispatch. Occasionally, a poem.
Read by 34,000 people, roughly two-thirds of whom finish it. We are, on the whole, proud of the two-thirds.
Every issue,
since 1994.
Seven hundred and twenty-eight issues to date. Every one indexed, every one available. If you can remember an author, an argument, or a sentence, you can find it.