Welcome to the weekly Vox book link roundup, a curated collection of the internet’s best writing on books and related subjects. Here’s the best the web has to offer for the week of May 27, 2018.

The London Book Fair has named this English-language bookstore in Sweden the world’s best international bookstore:

“People would assume that most of my customers are expats, but 90 percent are Swedes who read for pleasure in English. Of all ages, from 13 to 92.” Over a cup of tea in a courtyard behind the shop, the same courtyard that receives weekly deliveries of half a ton of books from Essex, we discuss the mutual cultural admiration between Swedes and Brits. “Yes, we are anglophiles,” [Jan] Smedh admits, but he does not see it as key to their success. “It’s about a general love of the English language. We see ourselves as a country that is internationally minded.”

The accountant for Chuck Palahniuk’s literary agency has been charged with embezzling millions from authors. Palahniuk says he’s sad to be broke but relieved to have realized he wasn’t imagining things:

More recently, Palahniuk said, “the trickle of my income stopped” and payments for titles including Fight Club 2 “never seemed to arrive”. He wondered if the money had been stolen, but told himself he “had to be crazy” – until the news broke. “All the royalties and advance monies and film-option payments that had accumulated in my author’s account in New York, or had been delayed somewhere in the banking pipeline, [were] gone. Poof. I can’t even guess how much income. Someone confessed on video he’d been stealing. I wasn’t crazy,” wrote Palahniuk in a statement on his website.

The New Yorker has a long and fascinating profile of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

It had been nearly ten years since her first stint in America, as a college student, when, as she later put it, she discovered that she was black. Her roommate at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, learning that she was from Africa, had been amazed that she knew how to use a stove, that she didn’t listen to “tribal music.” She had since imbibed, bit by bit, the semiotics of race in America, which she had initially found mystifying. She now understood why people got offended at the mention of watermelon, or fried chicken, or hair.

In 1993, Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess wrote about whether art can corrupt. LitHub has the full essay:

A work of art has a magisterial quality about it, a justifying élan which grants virtue to imitation. We know, and do not wish to know, that the story of Abraham’s proposal to sacrifice his son to the Lord God has been a justification of child murders, and that the multiple murderer Haigh’s drinking his victims’ blood had its origin in a manic devotion to the Holy Eucharist. Possibly a man may see Hamlet and then do what he has put off doing — namely, kill his uncle. Whether The Silence of the Lambs has genuinely promoted cannibalism or the mad butchery of its major villain we do not know. We all bow now, anyway, to the thesis I thought I would never accept — that art is dangerous.

Frankenstein’s 100th anniversary is this year, so the think pieces are plentiful. At Shondaland, my pal Ann Foster writes about what we forget about Frankenstein’s creator, Mary Shelley:

Despite Mary’s literary pedigree, she was often dismissed as a dilettante. That “Frankenstein” had been first published anonymously but featured a prologue by Percy continued to lead people to suspect it was he, and not Mary, who had written the novel itself. “Frankenstein” is a great novel: well-written, genre-defining, captivating audiences even centuries later. To admit that an 18-year-old girl wrote its first draft, and that a 20-year-old woman was its published author, is too great a challenge to some critics and readers even today.

And at LitHub, Fiona Sampson examines the first days of Mary Shelley’s marriage to Percy Shelley. (They eloped when he was married and she was a teen, the scandal!)

In 1814 reputations have material consequences: unless, like Percy Bysshe Shelley, you are heir to a baronetcy and can buy the freedom to do as you want. With a hypocrisy that would be funny if it weren’t so sorry, Percy, soaring above Mary Jane’s “pathos” on wings of aristocratic privilege, counters her arguments by encouraging Jane to think of own her situation in terms of the French Revolution, which has done away with the very privileges he himself enjoys; of France’s “past slavery and […] future freedom.” Sure enough, Mary’s stepsister changes her mind, telling her mother she won’t return to England; whereupon, “Mrs. Godwin departed without answering a word.”

Also at LitHub, Emily Temple has collected a list of the most-recommended books of the summer. (Florida, at the top of the list, is indeed excellent; keep an eye out for our forthcoming review.)

A new study suggests that print books and ebooks are such different products that owning each is a wholly distinct psychological experience.

At Bomb magazine, Lucas Mann explains why he wanted to write a book on reality TV: