# The Quantum of Light

> Stories behind the authors

The Quantum of Light, the stories behind the authors and the worlds they build: interviews, debut voices, writing craft and poetry.

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## Sections
- [Interviews](https://thequantumoflight.com/category/interviews): Conversations with the authors behind the books
- [Debut Authors](https://thequantumoflight.com/category/debut-authors): First-time voices and the books that launched them
- [Writing Craft](https://thequantumoflight.com/category/writing-craft): On process, discipline, and the work of writing
- [Author Journeys](https://thequantumoflight.com/category/author-journeys): The lives and paths that led to the page
- [Poets & Poetry](https://thequantumoflight.com/category/poets-poetry): The poets and the verse worth slowing down for

## Latest articles
- [Combee Won the 2025 Pulitzer for History by Telling Harriet Tubman's Civil War Raid Through the People She Freed](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/combee-pulitzer-2025): Edda L. Fields-Black traced her own ancestor into the Combahee River Raid, the day Harriet Tubman helped free 756 enslaved people.
- [James Won the 2025 Pulitzer for Fiction by Handing Huckleberry Finn's Story to Jim](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/james-pulitzer-2025): Percival Everett spent decades as a writer other writers revered, then gave Mark Twain's runaway his own voice and won the biggest prize in American fiction.
- [Howl and Other Poems Turns 70: The 75-Cent Pocket Book That Survived a Customs Seizure and an Obscenity Trial and Never Went Out of Print](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/howl-allen-ginsberg-70-years): City Lights published Allen Ginsberg's first collection on 1st November 1956. Seventy years on, the same small black-and-white edition has passed a million copies.
- [M. John Harrison, 81, Could Become the Oldest Booker Winner Ever](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/m-john-harrison-oldest-booker-contender): The writer who started out on the science fiction magazine New Worlds is shortlisted for The End of Everything, and a win would beat the record Margaret Atwood set at 79.
- [John Berger at 100: How He Used His 1972 Booker Prize Speech to Name the Caribbean Sugar Fortune Behind the Money and Gave Half of It to the Black Panthers](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/john-berger-at-100-booker-prize-speech): Born 100 years ago this week, John Berger stood up at the Café Royal in 1972, told the Booker dinner where the prize money came from and handed half of it to the British Black Panthers.
- [To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause Won the 2025 Pulitzer for General Nonfiction With the Soviet Dissidents Who Turned the Law Against the State](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/to-the-success-of-our-hopeless-cause-pulitzer-2025): Benjamin Nathans tells how a small band of Soviet citizens demanded that the Kremlin obey its own laws, and helped bring the system down.
- [Twenty Five, a Lycan Found-Family Fantasy for Mature Teens and Adults Drawn from Author Moshea's Years in Group Homes](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/best-werewolf-books-for-adults): Ten-year-old Jean-Eza's arrival at a group home changes the lives of 24 other boys, who discover their hidden Lycan nature and form a pack. Its author has spent decades studying child psychology, fostering, coaching and tutoring young people.
- [Ana Braunstein Turns Her Award-Winning Short Film This Case and My Life Into a Four-Book Series](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/this-case-and-my-life-book): The screenwriter and actress first told the story of attorney Chris Roberts on screen. The four novels follow him from a Manhattan law firm into marriage, fatherhood and a family home in Connecticut.
- [Anthony Eddolls on His FBI Thriller Series and Where Agent David Stilley Goes Next](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/anthony-eddolls-fbi-thriller-series-interview): The Maui-based crime novelist, who publishes through his own company, Robert Anthony Books, also talks about finding readers as an independent author and the scams aimed at new writers.
- [The Original 1768 Mason-Dixon Line Map, Once Owned by Malcolm Forbes, Is Up for Auction Again](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/mason-dixon-map-auction-brunk-forbes): Drawn and signed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the western section of their survey carries an $800,000 to $1.2 million estimate at Brunk Auctions in Asheville on October 29, the same range Christie's set when it last sold in 2002.
- [True Crime Author Maureen Hughes on Spotting a Rehearsed Answer and Staying Safe While Investigating the Mob](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/true-crime-author-maureen-hughes): The former police officer and bodyguard has written about organized crime for 26 years, from a newspaper heiress's ties to Johnny Roselli to a 1956 Cairo case ruled a suicide.
- [Tom LeNoble, Who Joined Facebook at 50, on How to Reinvent Yourself](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/how-to-reinvent-yourself): The former head of customer service at MCI, Walmart.com and Palm now advises founders and executives on changes of direction, and his memoir has won seven book awards, including a 2026 NYC Big Book Award.
- [Anne Carson Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature : Always Trying To Do Something Else ](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/anne-carson-nobel-prize-literature-2026): The Canadian poet and classicist took the call over tea in her Reykjavík kitchen, calls her own career "inadvertent" and is already working out how to give the prize money away.
- [Gender Queer Tops the American Library Association's Ranking of the Most Challenged Books Since 1990](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/ala-most-challenged-books-1990-2025-gender-queer): Ellen Hopkins has 14 of the 153 titles, more than any other author, while To Kill a Mockingbird ranks No. 65.
- [Rick Tabor's Sci-Fi Political Thriller The Blink of Humanity Explores the Dire Cost of Political Corruption](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/rick-tabor-the-blink-of-humanity): The Blink of Humanity follows a bioengineer with epilepsy and her robot companion as they set out to bring a corrupt US president to justice after a nuclear attack on Chicago.
- [Hanns Scharff's Son Chris Scharff Traces His Family's Path From Wartime Germany to Africa and America in WWII Memoir](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/hanns-scharff-son-chris-scharff-memoir): Born in Greiz in 1936, the Carlsbad author spent 20 years in South Africa and Rhodesia before joining his father in Los Angeles, and in retirement met one of the American pilots his father had interrogated.
- [Physician Associate and Spiritual Coach Elizabeth M. Lykins Says Lasting Change Begins in Stillness](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/elizabeth-m-lykins-reflections-on-transcendence): An urgent care provider since 1996, Elizabeth wrote Reflections on Transcendence, which features 59 paintings by her lifelong friend, the late expressionist Steven D. Lyons, who selected each painting to match the text.
- [Beautifully Unbroken Review: The Shower Shirt Inventor's Breast Cancer Memoir Begins with the Loss of Her Mother](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/beautifully-unbroken-review): The medical journalist who patented The Shower Shirt after her own mastectomy tells the story behind it, and the story of the mother she lost two weeks after her wedding, in a memoir that will be of most use to a woman with surgery ahead of her.
- [George Clooney at Venice Film Festival 2026 warning on authoritarians who silence journalists and storytellers first](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/george-clooney-at-venice-2026-warning-on-authoritarians-who-silence-journalists-and-artists-first): Collecting the festival's top career honour at 65, Clooney told reporters that deepfakes let people dismiss real evidence as fake, then used his acceptance speech to say authoritarians silence journalists and artists first.
- [Call Out The Dogs Review: Anthony Eddolls Takes Agent Stilley From a Rome Murder to the Doors of the White House](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/call-out-the-dogs-review): The third Special Agent David Stilley adventure opens as a two-city murder case and finishes as a political thriller, written by an author who spent four decades in finance before turning to crime fiction from his home in Upcountry Maui.
- [Shakespeare's First Folio Found in Saint-Omer](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/shakespeare-s-first-folio-found-in-saint-omer): The story of the Saint-Omer copy of Shakespeare's First Folio, catalogued for two centuries as a worthless eighteenth-century reprint before a librarian looked twice.
- [ Books Preserve a Civilization's Literary and Artistic Heritage](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/books-preserve-a-civilization-s-literary-and-artistic-heritage): We reflect on how books preserve literary and artistic heritage. The identity a civilisation carries forward each time it keeps a book alive from one generation to the next.
- [The Book Lady: How Dolly Parton's Imagination Library Gifted 332 Million Books](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/the-book-lady-how-dolly-parton-s-imagination-library-gifted-332-million-books): Celebrating Dolly Parton's literacy legacy, the Imagination Library she built for her father, who never learned to read.
- [Great and Unfortunate Things: The Memoir Jason Arday Leaves Behind](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/great-and-unfortunate-things-the-memoir-jason-arday-leaves-behind): What Jason Arday's memoir Great and Unfortunate Things tells, and how critics have received it, following his death days after its US publication.
- [Jason Arday, Cambridge's Youngest Black Professor, Dies Days at 41 After His Memoir is Published](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/jason-arday-cambridge-s-youngest-black-professor-dies-days-at-41-after-his-memoir-is-published): Jason Arday resigned from Cambridge on 5 August amid allegations of academic misconduct he denied. His memoir was published three days before he was found dead at his London home, prompting tribute from colleagues and renewed debate over how certain media reporting against him, not about him, were conducting toxic journalism.
- [A Music Photographer Is Hanging His Marked-Up Contact Sheets Next to the Finished Prints](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/andy-gotts-the-playlist-el-encanto-contact-sheets): Andy Gotts brings forty portraits to Santa Barbara for his first California show, and six of them carry the sitter’s signature as well as his own.
- [Lisa F. Crites Turns Her Own Cancer Recovery Into a Patented Invention and a New Memoir, Beautifully Unbroken](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/lisa-crites-beautifully-unbroken): The medical journalist behind The Shower Shirt™, the first patented water-resistant garment for chest surgery patients, tells how the sudden loss of her mother, a breast cancer diagnosis, and a book deal she turned down twice became an Amazon Best Seller, with proceeds pledged to breast cancer support groups.
- [Destroying Books Is a Cultural Crime. Project Panama Destroyed Millions of Books with No Legal Consequence](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/destroying-books-is-a-cultural-crime): Anthropic bought millions of books, cut them apart and pulped them after scanning. No court called it a crime. Destroying books is a cultural crime and no ruling changes that.
- [In  Conversation With Francis Fukuyama on the Last Man He Once Declared Triumphant](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/in-conversation-with-francis-fukuyama-on-the-last-man-he-once-declared-triumphant): In 1989, a young political scientist announced that history itself had reached its destination. On 2 September, at the London School of Economics, Francis Fukuyama returns to ask what he got right, what he got wrong and what thirty-seven years have done to that argument. He discusses his new memoir In the Realm of the Last Man at the London School of Economics on 2 September 2026. Here is what to expect.
- [A Social Reading App Now Has Five Million Members, and Most of Them Are Women Under 40](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/fable-five-million-members-book-clubs): The company's own figures, and a survey of its own users, are the case it is making against the idea that young people have given up on books.
- [Authors May Have to Keep Records of How They Write Their Own Books](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/authors-records-ai-written-books-harpercollins): HarperCollins' chief executive says no software can reliably tell a human manuscript from an AI-assisted one, and that a book written with AI help might not be copyrightable at all.
- [Readers Cannot Tell Whether a Short Story Came From a Person or ChatGPT](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/readers-cannot-tell-ai-written-short-stories): In three experiments with more than 2,500 adults, the same story scored higher whenever readers were told a human had written it.
- [ Bloomsbury Anthropic's $1.5 billion Copyright Settlement with Authors over 14,087 Titles ](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/bloomsbury-anthropic-s-1-5-billion-copyright-settlement-with-authors-over-14-087-titles): The Harry Potter publisher is due a multimillion pound payout from the largest copyright settlement in US history. The more interesting story is what it reveals about how a book's value gets counted once a machine has read it.
- [Army Veteran and Nurse Nik Nanoski Releases DUMB 31, a Post-Apocalyptic Novel Ten Years in the Making](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/nik-nanoski-dumb-31-post-apocalyptic-novel): The San Antonio author spent a decade writing a science fiction novel where survival depends on teamwork, not lone heroes, drawing on twenty years as a combat medic and nurse.
- [The Brexit Lie Has a Name — and the Men Who Told It Have Gone Very Quiet ](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/the-brexit-lie-has-a-name-and-the-men-who-told-it-have-gone-very-quiet): Anthony Seldon's 'The Brexit Effect' is the most serious reckoning with the Brexit decade yet published. It is also, conspicuously, missing the voice of the man who has said plainest what many now believe: that Brexit was a con and that the people who sold it should be held to account. When you read it alongside Michael Heseltine's 'From Acorns to Oaks', you can see the full picture: what was lost, who lost it, and what a different Britain could still become.
- [The Healing Power of Poetry: A Medicine as Old as Writing Itself](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/the-healing-power-of-poetry-a-medicine-as-old-as-writing-itself): The history of poetry and the science behind poetry therapy, from Ancient Egypt to modern expressive writing studies and why verse heals what prose cannot. Poetry has treated grief, trauma and loneliness for four thousand years, and modern research now shows exactly why it works.
- [Ulrich Brugger's Eternally New Is a Contemplative Answer to the Self-Help Industry](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/ulrich-brugger-eternally-new-aphorisms): After more than sixty years of writing, the founder of The Ojai Retreat has published a collection of aphorisms that sets itself against the formulas of modern self-help.
- [Christian Hurst Wins IPPY Gold as the Lily Starling Series Grows Into a Universe](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/christian-hurst-ippy-gold-lily-starling): Since April, Christian Hurst's Lily Starling series has added an IPPY Gold Medal, a Kirkus recommendation and an audiobook, with two more novels on the way.
- [Dr. Latrece Wright Shares the Health Scare Behind The Uninvited Pebble](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/latrece-wright-uninvited-pebble-health-scare): In The Uninvited Pebble, Georgia minister Dr. Latrece Wright writes about the weeks of waiting after a routine mammogram found a solid mass, and the faith that carried her through them.
- [Traci Slatton spent nine years making HEROIC and found that hope is a discipline you build ](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/traci-slatton-spent-nine-years-making-heroic-and-found-that-hope-is-a-discipline-you-build): Traci Slatton spent nine years filming HEROIC, the documentary on Sabin Howard's National WWI Memorial, on hope, legacy and building things that last.

## Reference
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