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The New Dark Ages
  • Published: 3 September 2026
  • ISBN: 9781807842871
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

The New Dark Ages

The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society

Formats & editions
Hardback
12 Jan 2027
EBook
3 Sept 2026
Audiobook
3 Sept 2026
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The decline in reading is the most important cultural shift of our time. The age of print is giving way to the age of the screen. The world we knew is passing away and nothing will ever be the same again. Welcome to the post-literate society

Books are dying. Across the world the number of people reading is in free fall. Literacy is declining or stagnating in most developed countries. At universities, students are unable to read the books assigned to them by their teachers. Addictive digital entertainment technologies have colonised our free time with infantilising ‘slop’. The golden chain of knowledge linking reader to reader through the centuries is breaking for the first time since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire ushered in the Dark Ages.

The New Dark Ages is an impassioned attack on the trivial and meaningless culture of the screen and a defence of the written word. Drawing on history and classic works of literature and theory, The New Dark Ages argues that reading and writing are essential for innovation, creativity and critical thinking.

Above all, the culture of print is essential to the functioning of modern democracies which require their citizens to grapple with ideas at length and in depth. And as print dies, we risk returning to the chaos, tribalism, and rage of a pre-literate society.
  • Published: 3 September 2026
  • ISBN: 9781807842871
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

About the author

James Marriott

James Marriott is a columnist at The Times. He presented the Radio 4 series How Reading Made Us about the history of literacy and writes the popular Substack newsletter Cultural Capital. Before joining The Times, James worked in the rare book trade. He was born and grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne and studied English Literature at the University of Oxford.
JM

Praise for The New Dark Ages

Superb. The best way to make the case for good books is to write one - and in this learned and highly entertaining jeremiad, that is precisely what James Marriott has done

Tom Holland

Anyone who wants to understand the world today needs urgently to read this book

Naomi Alderman

If our addiction to smartphones is sapping our ability to concentrate long enough to read a book, James Marriott’s clear, engaging and original prose may yet seduce us back to it, or at least slow our retreat from the page

Philippa Perry

In this bracing and breezy book, James Marriott explains why the world feels so loud, chaotic and angry - we have lost the reflection and empathy fostered by reading. Put down your phone and read The New Dark Ages

Helen Lewis

In this worthy heir to Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, Marriott makes an urgent and compelling case that the death of reading is accelerating and the consequences might prove worse than we feared

Cal Newport

Without any question the most important book of the year. This book is a flashing emergency light for our culture. I genuinely could not love James Marriott's writing and thinking more. Let me sign up to his literacy army right now - I would follow him anywhere

Marina Hyde

Pungent, learned and bang up-to-date… A spirited polemic on one of the most important cultural crises of all. Essential reading

Andrew Marr

The New Dark Ages…[is] an essential conversation-start about the imperilled future of reading

Bookseller