Free Republic

In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading. Many teenagers are assigned few full books to read from beginning to end — often just one or two per year, according to researchers and thousands of responses to an informal reader survey by The New York Times. Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts. Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future,...

Charlie Kirk’s new book has become such a popular title that on its publication day, hardcover editions had sold out after the book rocketed to the top spot on Amazon’s list of bestsellers. “Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life” appeared Tuesday and hit the top of the Amazon Top 100 bestseller list before being listed as temporarily out of stock, according to The Wall Street Journal. The book was still available through other sellers. Winning Team Publishing printed 200,000 copies and will be printing more, a representative of the company said, indicating...

In a brazen push to normalise the unthinkable, radical abortion activists are now targeting America’s youngest minds with a colorful children’s book that glorifies killing the unborn as some kind of heroic “superpower.” The extreme left are coming for the kids, framing abortion as destiny-shaping magic in a bid to “rewrite cultural scripts” and stomp out any resistance to their anti-life ideology. The book, titled Abortion Is Everything, is being peddled by the pro-abortion group Shout Your Abortion (SYA), set to ship in January 2026. Aimed squarely at children aged five to eight, it uses vibrant, water-color style illustrations to...

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird hardly needs an introduction, as I expect everyone in the world has read it, or has seen the film starring Gregory Peck. (If you haven’t read it, perhaps you should.) Lee, incidentally, went to visit the film set, and had this to say about Peck: “an inspired performance. In some mysterious way, Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch transcended illusion.” If that seems a tad clichéd and not especially insightful, then I’m afraid to say that this is the general tenor of the nonfiction pieces in The Land of Sweet Forever , alongside eight previously unseen...

Men aren’t vanishing from fiction. The truth is more complicated (Cannot be posted due to FR rules.)

Fantabulous timing for a book like this. A book, I say, that you cannot miss. A newly-discovered @DrSeuss manuscript that celebrates the United States is going be published next year, just in time for America’s 250th birthday. Featuring the @CatInTheHat, "SING THE 50 UNITED STATES!" helps teach readers the names of all the states. 🇺🇸https://t.co/AetyDXJkG8 pic.twitter.com/rO5XkIZZI1— Ajit Pai (@AjitPai) October 29, 2025Yes, adult children, we're getting a brand-new Dr. Seuss book in the summer of 2026, written by the man himself, Theodor Geisel! The manuscript was discovered earlier this year at the Geisel Library at UC San Diego. The text...

A “very significant” unpublished story by Jack Kerouac described as “a lost chapter of the On the Road saga” has been discovered after languishing in the files of an assassinated Mafia crime boss for at least 40 years.

Molly Lee is talking to me about the tales her aunt Nelle, known to the world as Harper Lee, would weave for her when she was a little girl. "She was just a great storyteller," says the 77-year-old from her home in Alabama. That's an understatement if the success of Harper Lee's Pulitzer-prize winning novel To Kill A Mockingbird is anything to go by. Since its publication in 1960, when it was an instant hit, the book has sold more than 42 million copies worldwide Based around the story of Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of rape, it's...

For many years I have appreciated and enjoyed the Vision series – a sequence of biographical novels about the lives of the saints and Catholic heroes written especially for younger readers. The series commenced in the hoary antiquity of the 1940s and has continued over the decades, featuring a variety of authors—some of whom, like Louis de Wohl for example, were writers of supreme talent. Several of the books in the series have been reviewed by your humble blogger over the years, among them books on Saint Helena, Blessed Miriam Teresa Demjanovich, and Saints Louis and Zelie Martin. The last...

When I finished and published my first novel, it became apparent to me that an Author’s Website was important. I set about creating mine. What are the benefits of an Author’s Website? It shows professionalism and dedication to prospective agents, publishers, event coordinators, journalists, and your readers. An agent or a publisher is far more likely to become interested in your novel if you demonstrate that you are dedicated to your craft. A website will confirm your dedication. You have full control over your brand and the presentation of your work. Even if social media or retail outlets remove or...

People coming of political age in the last decade or so were no doubt shocked to learn of the Biden administration’s insane plan for saving the northern spotted owl from purported extinction. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for implementing the Endangered Species Act, preserving the owl requires slaughtering nearly half a million barred owls at a cost, opponents say, of $1.3 billion over the next 30 years. That is so, the FWS maintains, because the larger, aggressive barred owl is killing its cousin at a prodigious rate. Perhaps more stunning to these political newcomers is...

Not to disappoint Philip Roth, but the fact that you title your book, The Great American Novel, does not make it a great American novel. My definition of Great American Novel is pretty straightforward: a first rate fiction, by an American, that tells us something large and expansive about the American experience. One other condition—it has to be readable. A caveat upfront for the sensitive: seven of the ten novels listed below use the word “nigger,” not the infantile “n-word,” but the actual word itself. For the last many years, we have collectively refrained from using “nigger,” even in an...

Why young men don’t read — and publishing doesn’t care.A quiet crisis is consuming the world of literature, and no one seems to care.Male writers are vanishing — not by fluke or market whim, but by design, denial, and quiet cultural disdain. Fewer men are reading fiction, and fewer men are publishing novels. (RELATED: Male Novel Readers Are Not Fiction)Men are reading less because the literary world no longer offers them mirrors.This isn’t a lament for some patriarchal golden age, where men smoked pipes, quoted Hemingway, and felt vaguely superior just for owning hardcovers. It’s a warning. The decline of...

Okay Freepers, you are a magnificent resource to draw upon. I'm hoping that among you are some who have already broken the ground I now seek to tread, and maybe you can give me some advice. Perhaps even tell me if I'm doing something wrong and could change up my approach.A lot of people have told me over the years that they wanted me to write my life story. It took ten years of on and off labor (and there came to be even more things to write about in that time) but in the end this past November I...

1969 film adaptation of Shirley Jackson's classic horror short story.Click hereNo doubt that Old Man Warner is praying he doesn't win again.

Over the past year, my husband and I have watched both film versions of 'Inherit the Wind'. I would like to read a good book about the Scopes trial, free of the dramatization and fictionalization. Can anyone suggest what they think is the best book? Thanks.

Hello everyone! I recently released my very first science-fiction, political-thriller novel on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. I've been told that the work seems to embody the writing style of a Tom Clancy or a Michael Crichton, blended with an Isaac Asimov. While this is high praise, indeed, I want to go to the next level. Enter an analysis of a very quiet, very low-action scene in the first season of Game of Thrones. That analysis is here.The analysis is stellar. The writing is stellar. The analysis talks about how: Robert Baratheon was not a lecherous drunkard, but actually a very...

Incredible new post-apocalyptic novel based on conservative ideals and current events Hey folks, I’ve just finished a newly released novel titled “Ivy Moon Total Eclipse” and I have tell people about it. Trust me, it’s like nothing you’ve ever read. It’s by a guy named Bill Furney who lives in North Carolina where I live and the story takes place in the eastern part of the state. Technically, it’s a young adult novel, but in the vein of Hunger Games, which simply means there’s no sex, drugs, or profanity. But the story revolves around adult themes and conservative principles that...

A special section inserted into the Sunday Chicago Sun-Times featured page upon page of fun summer activities, including a list of 15 books to bring along while lounging by the pool or relaxing in a favorite reading spot. The only problem: The authors are real, but most of the books don’t exist. Artificial intelligence, employed by a Chicago freelance writer, simply made them up. Readers looking to fill their carts with titles such as “Tidewater Dreams” by Isabel Allende, “The Collector’s Piece” by Taylor Jenkins Reid or “Hurricane Season” by Brit Bennett were likely disappointed to find the elaborate plot...

Nearly 2,000 years after it was buried in Mount Vesuvius ash, a charred Roman scroll has revealed its author and title without even being unrolled. Title revealed on PHerc. 172 using ink detection model. - Vesuvius Challenge The scroll, named PHerc. 172, is one of hundreds unearthed in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum, which was entombed in volcanic debris when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, one of history’s most infamous eruptions The scroll was scanned in July at Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron facility in Oxfordshire. Unusually, traces of ink appeared in the X-ray images, enabling...