Articles tagged as Books | Smithsonian Magazine

A Bengali edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The beloved children's book by British scholar Charles Lutwidge Dodgson has been translated into every major language and numerous minor ones, including many that are extinct or invented.

The Mad Challenge of Translating “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

Explore the linguistic tricks used to make Lewis Carroll’s puns, parodies and nonsense accessible in hundreds of tongues

July 23, 2015

Controversy still surrounds the release of Go Set a Watchman

July 14, 2015

Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster’s first book, was published in 1961 and came about accidentally, through procrastination and boredom.

Why Milo’s Sunrises Are a Symphony of Color in The Phantom Tollbooth

Author Norton Juster says one boon to his magical writing is that he was born with synesthesia and hears colors

July 3, 2015

Lee's Maycomb, indelibly evoked in the novel that sells a million copies annually, endures in the small-town reality of Monroeville.

What’s Changed, and What Hasn’t, in the Town That Inspired ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’

Traveling back in time to visit Harper Lee’s hometown, the setting of her 1960 masterpiece and the controversial sequel hitting bookstores soon

July 2015

Melville joked that Dana’s descriptions of Cape Horn “must have been written with an icicle.”

Before Moby-Dick, There Was “Two Years Before the Mast”

This salty memoir by Richard Henry Dana Jr. was one of America’s first literary classics

July 2015

An 1898 portrait of Twain painted by Italian artist Ignace Spiridon, which now hangs in the Mark Twain Library in Redding.

The Library Mark Twain Built

The author helped create a library in the last town he called home—and it’s full of great summer reading suggestions

June 30, 2015

The Most Loved and Hated Novel About World War I

An international bestseller, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was banned and burned in Nazi Germany

June 16, 2015

Copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf are displayed at a German museum. The controversial manifesto has been banned in Germany since the end of World War II.

Rival versions of the book once vied for American readers

June 9, 2015

Membership in the American Booksellers Association is up

May 29, 2015

A blood-sucker creeping around on a potential victim's pristine white sheets.

Cool Finds

How Our Modern Lives Became Infested With Bed Bugs

After being bitten by the tiny pests, author Brooke Borel set out to learn all she could about her blood-sucking foes

May 5, 2015

The litterbug blames Amazon, arthritis for his habit of illegally discarding books

April 24, 2015

An early draft of the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Personal Writings of Arthur C. Clarke Reveal the Evolution of “2001: A Space Odyssey”

Works donated from the author’s archives in Sri Lanka include letters to Kubrick and an early draft of his most famous novel

May 2015

A stunning, modern wing of the Royal Library of Copenhagen, added in 1999.

The World’s Most Interesting (and Accessible) Library Collections

From the Magna Carta to Winnie the Pooh, what you can see at some of the world’s great libraries

April 14, 2015

Trending Today

These Were 2014’s Most Challenged Books

Native Americans, Iran and gay penguins top the American Library Association’s Top Ten List of Frequently Challenged Books

April 13, 2015

The great Charles Dickens may one day come to the aid of the creators of bad password.

Cool Finds

Trouble Remembering Passwords? Charles Dickens May Be Able Help

A programmer has devised a creative “password generation scheme” using A Tale of Two Cities

March 23, 2015

Cool Finds

The Children’s Book That Caused Japan’s Raccoon Problem

When the story of one man’s childhood pet raccoon became a hit in 1970s Japan, it heralded a biological invasion still troubling the country today

March 16, 2015

It's time for the Romance Novel to get its due as an influential genre in the literary canon.

Why Can’t Romance Novels Get Any Love?

The genre is long overdue to be the focus of serious study from academics

March 12, 2015

A reader can point a smartphone at the pages of this children's book to reveal surprising animations.

This Week in Crowdfunding

An Augmented Reality Children’s Book, Bacon Jerky and Other Wild Ideas That Just Got Funded

Never worry about halitosis again with the Breathometer Mint bad breath tracker

March 6, 2015

Is Hitler’s 90-year-old manifesto too dangerous to be on bookshelves?

February 26, 2015

Each Librii site will include an anchor building for housing collections, an e-hub with computers and an agora equipped with WiFi.

Smart Startup

Building Libraries Along Fiber-Optic Lines in Sub-Saharan Africa

The Washington, D.C.-based startup, Librii, is rethinking what a library looks like

February 23, 2015