Manuscripts

Banned Books Week launches Monday, September 19, 2022, and the American Library Association (ALA) has released the latest numbers on book challenges in a new field report. Pulling from information reported directly to ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF), news coverage, and public records, the data show a marked increase in censorship and 2022 is

Siyon was only trying to save his friend, not destroy the city. Sure, Zagiri is more of an acquaintance, but she is more reliable than most foppish nobles who moonlight as streetwise soldiers for hire in the city of Bezim. A petty alchemist, Siyon spends his time in the shadows, harvesting materials from other planes

Speaking of ways, pet, there is such a thing as a tesseract.  I had eye surgery at the very end of third grade. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to swim for six weeks of summer vacation, I had to wear this really fetching sunglasses-visor combo whenever I went outside, and, worst of all,

Renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog has written more than a dozen books and screenplays, but The Twilight World (3.5 hours) is his first novel. Translated by Michael Hofmann and short enough to qualify as a novella, it’s the fictionalized story of Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, the real-life intelligence officer in the Imperial Japanese Army who defended Lubang

Sci-fi can be intimidating. Let’s not pretend it isn’t. There’s a whole set of rules to the genre and a new vocabulary to keep up with. On top of that, sometimes sci-fi can feel unwelcoming to the uninitiated. Where do you even start? Don’t worry, I, a very casual reader of sci-fi, am here to

Sulari Gentill’s novel The Woman in the Library (9 hours) is an intriguing mystery-within-a-mystery, performed with a measured sense of menace by voice actor Katherine Littrell. Winifred Kincaid, an Australian on a scholarship, is at the Boston Public Library when she hears a woman’s scream. Winifred’s life becomes inextricably tied to three other strangers who

The National Book Foundation has announced the Longlist for 2022’s National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. This year’s Longlist includes graphic novels, novels, and memoirs that explore things like racism, sexism, gender and sexuality, and self-esteem. They take place everywhere from fictional, alternate histories to the U.S. and Pakistan. The Longlist contenders were chosen

Jordan Crane’s graphic novel Keeping Two, which took him 20 years to complete, pays very strict attention to form. Over the course of 300-plus pages, Crane rarely strays from a simple six-panel grid, arranging the action in neat squares that move down and across the page with an almost mesmeric energy and speed. With this

It’s still calendar and meteorological summer in the Northern Hemisphere, but before you know it, the calendar — and the leaves, the temperature, the weather, etc. — will begin their transition into autumn. We’ll be sporting our favorite hoodies with cozy leggings, trading in sunglasses for scarves, and enjoying a delicious warm pumpkin spiced beverage

In 2005, in order to pay off her student loans, Kate Beaton left her home in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, to work on the Alberta oil sands, a vast region in Canada that contains one of the largest deposits of crude oil in the world. During this time, Beaton began writing “Hark! A Vagrant,” a

The past two years has seen a rise in conservative propaganda against queer books in schools and libraries, so it’s not a surprise that Pride displays got hit especially hard in June. In one Illinois library, though, the fight began before Pride month had even started, and what happened offers a useful case study for

Comics artist Kate Beaton, creator of the award-winning satirical webcomic “Hark! A Vagrant,” demonstrates her remarkable range and storytelling prowess with her debut graphic memoir, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. With strong prose and striking art, she captures the complexities of a place often defined by stark binaries: the Alberta oil sands, one

Looking for Alaska was published in 2005, but it’s being banned and challenged now more than ever, the author shared on TikTok. Alicia Farrant, a candidate running for school board in Orange County, Florida — which includes the school John Green attended as a student — has campaigned partly based on banning Looking for Alaska

Allison Saft’s second YA novel, A Far Wilder Magic, is an enchanting fantasy tale about two young people, Margaret and Wes, who are drawn together in pursuit of a mythical fox purported to hold alchemical power. Throughout the story, Saft creates magic that feels astonishingly real. Here, she offers a deeper look at A Far

Kindle Unlimited is Amazon’s subscription service which gives readers access to over 2 million ebooks, alongside audiobooks, comics, short stories, and more, and this summer, Kindle Unlimited users were voracious readers. Amazon Prime users, who have access to about 3,000 books, short stories, audiobooks, and comics through their subscription to the service, were also busy

Mary Roach investigates the uneasy relationship that exists between humans and wildlife in Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. Traveling to India, Vatican City and other locales, she meets with a wide cast of characters that includes predator attack investigators, a bear manager and a human-elephant conflict specialist, all in an effort to understand how

If you’re a horror fan, or even if you’re not, the word possession often conjures images of an exorcism. You think Regan, taken over by Pazuzu right under her parents’ noses in The Exorcist or the subway scene in Possession. It makes sense, when these movies were, and still are, staples in the body possession

Ever since the publication of her first novel, Jack (1989), and continuing through her 2018 story collection, Days of Awe, A.M. Homes has focused with laserlike precision on some of the darkest corners of contemporary American life. It makes sense, then, that in her provocative novel The Unfolding, she would turn to a bitingly satirical

I always get excited for September — even though I’m long past back-to-school days, September feels like a new start, and it’s the time when I’m ready to learn a ton of new things. I’ve got my shiny new school supplies ready, and now I’m looking forward to diving into books that will teach me

When Orthodox Jewish teen Hoodie Rosen sees a girl dancing on the sidewalk outside the window of his yeshiva classroom, he has no idea that the connection they’ll form will lead them to question everything they believe and change both of their lives forever. Debut novelist Isaac Blum’s The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen

As someone with chronic depression and anxiety, wild mood swings are just a normal part of my life. Sometimes, I’m bursting with frenetic energy, barely hanging on for dear life as I do All The Things. Other times, I’m flattened by chronic fatigue, barely able to function. But a new emotion has been building up

Fifteen-year-old Yehuda “Hoodie” Rosen and his Orthodox Jewish family, along with many members of their community, have recently moved to Tregaron, Pennsylvania, because the cost of living in their previous town became too expensive. When Hoodie meets Anna-Marie Diaz-O’Leary, the daughter of Tregaron’s mayor, he’s instantly smitten. Yet after he and Anna-Marie are spotted cleaning

With a backlist of over a dozen novels and novellas, Colleen Hoover isn’t a new author. Since publishing her first novel in 2012, the romance writer has earned the loving nickname of CoHo and has worked to cultivate a huge following of devoted fans. She started a Facebook group in 2016 called Colleen Hoover’s CoHorts

Fox Creek Author William Kent Krueger’s Cork O’Connor is an unusual sort of protagonist, a fast-food restaurateur who doubles as a private investigator. One might not necessarily think that a man with those qualifications would find a lot of sleuthing work in rural Tamarack County, Minnesota, but one would be mistaken. In Fox Creek, the

I’ve written about my book club for Book Riot before. It’s been one of my favorite things for almost ten years. How our book clubs works, generally, is that each member takes a turn choosing a book. Everyone reads it, and then we meet once a month to discuss that pick. When you choose the

For 25 years, beginning with her National Book Award-winning story collection, Ship Fever, Andrea Barrett has devoted vast amounts of her creative energy to vividly imagining several generations of a family and their friends living in central New York. In Natural History, the publisher tells us, Barrett “completes and connects the lives of the family

Curious what it looks like to run for school board? Wondering if now is your time to step up and help provide governance for your local education system? Let’s dive in. It’s no secret that school board elections right now are crucial. It’s also no secret that some school board candidates — even in nonpartisan

Rachel Aviv’s first book explores questions of self-knowledge and mental health, subjects she’s previously examined in her award-winning journalism for The New Yorker. Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us is a stunning book, offering sensitive case histories of people whose experiences of mental illness exceed the limits of psychiatric terminology,

The America Library Association reported 729 book challenges in 2021 that impacted nearly 1,600 titles, the highest number of challenges the organization has recorded in 20 years. Despite this increase in challenges, only 43% of the librarians who took the School Library Journal’s (SLJ) 2022 Controversial Books Survey reported facing a formal book challenge— which

In his third novel, Brooklyn-based Cuban translator and author Ernesto Mestre-Reed delves into Fidel Castro-era Cuba in a beguiling, meandering story that unfolds in dense and dizzying prose. Though challenging at times, Sacrificio is an invitation to slow down and pay attention. The rewards are plentiful for readers willing to give themselves over to a