Manuscripts

We’re almost halfway through 2023, which means booksellers, reviewers, and book lovers of all kinds are taking a moment to celebrate some of the amazing titles released so far this year. Every summer, bookselling titan Barnes & Noble joins the fun by releasing their “Best Books of the Year (So Far)” list. Last year’s list

I don’t know about you, but in the last few years, my attention span has shrunken to an abysmal size. Or as author Ann Patchett put it: my “attention span has shrunken like a sweater accidentally thrown in the dryer.” I went from being able to read a hundred pages in one sitting to reading

This week, book banners showed up to the Douglas County Public Library board meeting in Colorado to protest books in the system’s collection. It is not the first time they’ve done it, and it’s also not the first time counter protestors have shown up to push back. None of this is news nor is it

This week, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón in conjunction with the Library of Congress announced that NASA’s Europa Clipper will be launching on its mission in October 2024 with “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.” The poem, written by Limón, will travel 1.8 billion miles through the galaxy. It will be engraved on

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is finally coming to theaters on June 2! The computer-animated superhero film is the highly-anticipated follow-up to the 2018 film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It’s been way too long since we were invited into the world of Miles Morales and the many parallel universes of Spider-Men/people/pigs/etc he explores. But what will

For some people, the childhood memory of book fairs coming to their school is a fond one, full of precious anticipation and exciting purchases. For others, it’s bittersweet — there was the joy of looking through bright and shiny new books, but there was also that constant, nagging knowledge of not being able to afford

Maine is an interesting case study in book banning. Ranked in the top 10 least populated states in the U.S., it has also been among the states seeing big leaps in population since the beginning of the pandemic — 20,000 new residents moved to Maine between 2020 and 2022. Since mid-2022, the state has seen

A children’s book titled The Sweet and Sour Animal Book, written by Langston Hughes and illustrated by Elmer W. Brown, has resurfaced in Cleveland, OH and is being given a platform it never had. Hughes and Brown met in the ’30s in Cleveland’s Karma House, the oldest Black theater in the United States. Once their

This June, Susanna Kaysen’s acclaimed memoir Girl, Interrupted—which was later adapted into a film adaptation starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie, winning the latter an Academy Award—turns 30 years old. The novel was a New York Times bestseller in both its hardcover and paperback editions, 11 weeks in the former and 23 weeks in the

Crossword puzzle fans and passionate readers are a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap. But even the most seasoned Saturday New York Times crossword connoisseur will bump into clues they’re unfamiliar with. So what should you study if you want to be the best of the best? Crossword Solver analyzed 6.3 million newspaper crossword

Ahoy, book lovers! Do I have some exciting treasures in store for you. And by treasures, I mean books. Because, really, is there any other kind of treasure we’re interested in? If you were raised on the Pirates of the Caribbean movies like I was, you probably have a soft spot for SFF pirates. I

You might be in a YA low fantasy book if you turn the corner to get to your locker and come upon a daemon. They contain everything odd about high school and literalize it with fantasy. Here is a must-read list of YA low fantasy books for genre lovers and novices alike. Fantasy has a

Whether we’re consciously aware of it, most of us have some sort of bookish goals and/or habit. These can range from wanting to read more, to read more diversely, or finally start trying to make a dent in an established TBR pile. Whatever the goals are, they’re there. I know I’ve mentioned some of mine

When you gaze at the quilted cover of A Flag for Juneteenth, you will want to reach out and touch it. The artwork depicts a girl wearing a fuchsia dress and kerchief standing proudly in front of a flag, the bright colors of her outfit vibrant against the flag’s soft yellows and greens. The girl’s

For My First Popsicle: An Anthology of Food and Feelings (7 hours), actor Zosia Mamet (“Girls,” “The Flight Attendant”) has gathered a who’s-who of creative folks, including fellow actors like Busy Philipps, musicians like Patti Smith, writers like David Sedaris and chefs like Kwame Onwuachi. Each contributed an essay about food or a food-related memory,

I’m a fierce defender of the idea that books don’t have to be hard to be good. I understand writers might prefer to take a deep literary approach when working on their manuscripts, but being hard to read doesn’t always reflect a more meaningful work of literature or worthy read. In certain circumstances, especially in

There’s wit, honesty and insight in Madly, Deeply (19.5 hours), a collection of Alan Rickman’s succinct yet keenly observant diary entries spanning 1993 to 2015. The late actor’s journals reveal a palpable lack of pretentiousness and a go-with-the-flow attitude (even after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer), as well as a compelling contrast between his two

Anti-censorship advocates and activists have shouted from the rooftops that it is essential to vote. That it is essential to show up to school and library board meetings and speak up about/write those who sit on those boards against book bans and censorship. Advocates and activists have been on the front lines in their respective

The Washington Post released their analysis of book challenges they had obtained from PEN America researcher Tasslyn Magnusson. These 1,065 challenges, which were filed during the 2021-2022 school year, extended over 153 school districts and 37 states, and totaled 2,506 pages. They also tended to target books with similar content, specifically LGBTQ+ topics. While a

What could be better than Greek mythology romance books? Mythology retellings have been in the lexicon for as long as the myths have existed. Most famous among them are the Greek myths: stories of gods and goddess interfering in mortals’ lives, acting out their every whim, their petty interactions with each other. Drama began here

Honoring the finest works of translated fiction from around the world, the International Booker Prize has announced its 2023 winner, Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov and translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. The winner was announced at a ceremony at Sky Garden in London that included remarks from the judges and the winning author and

A K-8 school in Florida has banned Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb” for its elementary students. In March, the Miami Lakes school received a complaint from a parent of children at the school, Daily Salinas, about the poem as well as four other books. In the complaint, which Gorman tweeted below, Salinas

When I realized my childhood Barnes & Noble was closing, I was devastated. I’m an indie bookstore lover, but growing up, there were no indie bookstores in my town: only one gorgeous, cozy Barnes & Noble. We went to book clubs there as kids, met there as teens basically every Friday night, studied for the

The Color Purple by Alice Walker was published in 1982, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction for that year. In 1985, it was adapted into a movie starring Whoopi Goldberg directed by Steven Spielberg. In 2005, it was also adapted into a musical. The 2015-2017 revival won a

Martin Amis died Friday in his Lake Worth Florida home from esophageal cancer. Amis was born to a novelist father, Kingsley Amis, in 1949 Oxford, England, and won the 1974 Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel, The Rachel Papers. He became a big part of the literary scene in London in the ’80s and

New Jersey’s democratic senators proposed new legislation May 22 which would ban book bans from public schools and libraries across the state. The bill, drafted by senators Andrew Zwicker and Teresa Ruiz, alongside Assemblywoman Mila Jasey was inspired by librarian Martha Hickson, who has been at the center of several attempted book bans and who

The social horror genre takes societal issues and exaggerates them, turning them into a major source of horror in the story in order to make it all the more obvious how broken society is. This can include things like sexism, racism, or other oppressive systemic issues facing the protagonist(s) and the world they live in.

Young adult fiction has a certain reputation with people who don’t normally read it. Since the books are about teens, the themes must be juvenile, right? What literary adult wants to read about whiny teenagers with their naive problems? Admittedly, some YA books are wall-to-wall with whiny teenagers. That isn’t what defines YA, though. In

I’ve seen the term “disaster girl novels” floating out there in the ether. In particular, BookTokker Mari (mynameismarines) used the label to describe one of her recommendations, Luster by Raven Leilani. Luster is about a young Black woman who gets involved with an older white man in an open marriage. And it’s messy. The book

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic circa 2020, there came the rise of virtual book clubs. With the strict adherence to social distancing rules, many started virtual book clubs in schools, libraries, or even just among friends. These virtual book clubs work in a similar way as those from Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon.