Last edition of the Washington Post Book World  section – Feb. 8, 2026

NOTE: Feb. 21, 2026 — It was a bittersweet night at the iconic indie bookstore Politics and Prose in Northwest DC as the Washington Post’s recently shuttered Book World section was both celebrated and mourned. There was laughter and there were tears. I went to pay my respects and to memorialize what once was. This post originally appeared on Sub Stack, where I welcome you to also subscribe to my occasional rants and ramblings.

It was billed as a tribute to Book World, which The Washington Post had “sunset” earlier this month, as it also ingloriously laid off 375 journalists in an unprecedented purge of unprecedented talent. But at times, it felt more like a wake.

The setting was Politics and Prose, the iconic independent book store in Northwest Washington, co-owned by my former Post colleagues Brad Graham and Lissa Muscatine. Brad said we were there “to mourn the recent decimation of The Washington Post.” I arrived 40 minutes before the scheduled 5 p.m. event, and the place was already packed. I managed to score a seat off to one side in front, but it was mostly standing room only all the way to the front of the store, with an estimated 200-250 mourners for the loss of the Sunday section, about which Katharine Graham had said, “A major newspaper needs a flagship book section. A major newspaper without one is like a ship without a compass.” She’d said that to Marie Arana, Book World’s editor-in-chief for 11 years, from 1999 to 2000 and the master of ceremonies.

Marie called it a now “vanished gem… snuffed out.” She felt a “profound sense of loss and no little outrage.” The outrage was palpable among the half dozen speakers whose literary works and work lives had intersected with the section that had died once before, only to be revived three years ago and now, in the paper’s inelegant word, “sunset.” There was Carlos Lozada, now with The New York Times; former poet laureate Rita Dove; “Watergate” Bob Woodward; non-fiction critic Ron Charles, now writing feverishly on SubStack; Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist Michael Dirda, who logged 44 years at Book World, having left a a tech job because “there was no future in computers” and newspapers seemed like a sure thing (to laughter).

Woodward called the “loss of The Washington Post and Book World one of the tragedies of our era. Let’s hope there will be a comeback from this dilemma we live in… Put a smiley face on our future. We are the comeback people.”

Messages were conveyed from Don Graham (“I am bookish”). Katharine’s son, he was the publisher from 1979 to 2000. Marty Baron, the executive editor during the first hopeful eight years of the Post under the ownership of billionaire Jeff Bezos, said the shuttering of Book World was “difficult to contemplate and hard to forgive.”

Nora Krug, with 20 years at Book World as writer and editor, wore red because that is the color of the Newspaper Guild that represents Post editorial workers. Her last article, interviewing people at random about what books they were reading, had appeared a few days after she’d been laid off and begged the editors to run it anyway. The layoffs had come with “such swift indifference,” she said.

Ron Charles, Book World’s fiction critic, came to the podium, at first tentatively. “I don’t know why I’m so nervous, what are they going to do, fire me?” he said. He had moved from Boston to Washington to work for Book World in 2005 and had developed a large following he is hoping will follow him to SubStack. When he arrived to work, he was given a desk so isolated from the rest of the staff it had “the raucous atmosphere of a Christian Science Reading Room.”

But he persevered, and there came a time his wife answered their phone. The caller was Robert Pinsky, then the poet laureate of the United States, who said, “Bob Pinsky. Hi. Is Ron there.” Well, working for Book World of blessed memory did have its perks. Said Charles, “It maybe is the only time my wife has been impressed by me.”

A personal note: My first book Maryland Lost and Found was favorably reviewed in Book World in 1986 (by no less than acclaimed novelist Anne Tyler). Book World also reviewed my Chesapeake Country book in 1990. Both (and a third and foujrth) launched at Politics and Prose. In 2011, after the first demise of Book World, I helped found the online Washington Independent Review of Books (www.wirobooks.com). Each year we hold a Washington Writers Conference, with panels and agents for aspiring authors. We are celebrating our 15h anniversary in 2026. Book World is “sunset.” WIRoB lives on.