After a heyday in the mid-aughts, chick lit has, as a genre, mostly stopped being a thing people talk about, along with new adult as a category outside of romance; I believe the two disappeared together because they largely existed together. That’s not to say that they’re entirely gone, but we mostly don’t use those words to describe them. There is a new(ish) trend in romance novels: trade paperbacks with illustrated covers....
The bookish internet — and I don’t exclude myself from this — tends to respond to bigotry with reading lists. When we hear about a disaster happening, we try to find books that give background information. When someone is targeted for their race, we try to lift up authors of that race. When a famous author uses their platform to spew hate, we try to counteract that by sharing recommendations for diverse authors....
For its June 30th print edition, New York Times invited ten Asian American YA authors to write original stories, inspired by vintage images from the paper’s photography archive, as part of the Viewfinders section. According to the Viewfinders preface by Veronica Chambers and Jeff Giles, each author selected from around six different images. The preface goes on to explain: “After each writer picked the image that captivated her or him most, we asked that they disregard whoever the real people in the photographs were and even the true-life locations if they preferred....
The last five years have been a difficult time for libraries. Among issues of online surveillance and questions of safety of marginalized communities in libraries, librarians have had their fair share of issues to deal with. Leaders in the field such as Alison Macrina, founder of The Library Freedom Project and the Abolitionist Library Association have begun advocating for patrons’ digital privacy and safety, championing libraries as both democratic institutions and safe spaces for communities everywhere....
To start, if you look for a corresponding table of “men’s fiction,” you won’t find it. Search online for lists of recommended reading for men, and most of these novels can be found in the “classics” or “literary fiction” section of the bookstore. This misogynistic way of looking at women’s stories limits our understanding of what these stories can be, who they are about, and who is reading them. In 2017, Rioter Trisha Brown wrote about the many issues she has with women’s fiction....
If you ask me for my favorite book, I will go quiet. “Favorite book” is a hard ask for most book lovers. How are we supposed to pick? But as much as I hate playing the favorites game, I do have a favorite series. No matter how many other series I fall in love with, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga will always be my favorite. It’s the series that made me a sci-fi reader....
Of course, another bonus is getting lots of cheap and free books. Not to mention all the friends I made along the way! Introducing Spartacus Books Spartacus Books is a local collective in my city with a complex history. It is a nonprofit, volunteer-run bookstore that specializes in anarchism and building an activist space in our community. We carry LGBTQ+ studies and lit, Indigenous studies and lit, socialist theory, ecology, poetry, graphic novels, kids books, radical fiction, and more....
So apologies in advance for any headache I’m about to cause explaining all of this. Oh God, What Have I Just Signed Myself Up To Read? NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are essentially “tokens” (AKA anything electronic but are usually JPEGS) that people spend a lot of money to own. They’re traded via the blockchain and contain a little bit of information within their code, usually info that says you own it and how much you bought it for....
The average person might not recognize an author on the street, but for us book nerds, they are the most exciting celebrities we will meet. It’s easy to build up in our minds the mythos of an author. They’ve won brilliant awards, Obama has read their books; what must it like to be them? One of the best parts of being in the book world, as a book reviewer and writer myself, is getting to know authors....
Increasingly, I’m finding that “just jump in” is the way to go with comics, and I was delightfully reminded of that when I had a look at Groot #1 by Jeff Loveness and Brian Kesinger. In this book, the adorable Groot and his best pal Rocket are on an intergalactic road trip, and they get into all kinds of shenanigans. You don’t need to know anything else. You don’t need any background....
You may panic as you place your hand on the wrapping paper, ready to tear. You realize this person knows nothing of what you like to read. Maybe you hate family sagas and they’ve gotten you a copy of The Corrections. Maybe you’re on a sci-fi kick and they’ve gifted you a self-help. Maybe it’s just a book you’ve tried and failed to connect with. So, what do you do?...
Black Adam: One-Shot Wonder Black Adam was created as a villain for Captain Marvel (now known as Shazam) all the way back in 1945 in The Marvel Family #1, published by Fawcett Comics. Basically, he was Shazam before Shazam shazamed into Shazam. The problem was, ol’ Teth Adam (his real name) fell into the old trap of absolute power corrupting absolutely. Adam was Egyptian and decided to kill the pharaoh and take his throne....
But who was Nora Ephron? Born in New York City on May 19, 1941 to playwrights and screenwriters Phoebe and Henry Ephron, Nora and her three sisters grew up in Beverly Hills, California. (Her sister Hallie is a journalist and crime novelist, and sisters Delia and Amy are screenwriters.) Nora was named after the main character in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. She attended Beverly Hills High School and dreamed of being the next Dorothy Parker, but a teacher inspired her to pursue a career in journalism and she graduated from Wellesley College in 1962 with a degree in political science....
The INC began, according to organizers, with a chat among friends. Founders Amrita Somaiya, Anuradha Parikh, Sangita Jindal, and Ashwani Kumar discovered their children were reading in English. Thus, they were missing out on many Indian-language classics. “A series of conversations around reading, books and the curious case of the missing Indian translations soon led to the formation of Indian Novels Collective.” The INC’s first job was to identify these 100 “classic” novels....
Really, reading fiction is often an even better method of learning to write than any formal class or workshop you can take. Which is not to say that classes and workshops are not useful. Classes can point you towards clever models to study, and they can give you a source of instant critique that can help you grow as a writer. But ultimately it is reading that teaches writers, among other things, the shape of a plot, the expectations of their future readers, how to pace their work, how to convey a tone, set a scene, and build a character....
Eventually, I decided to stay in South Carolina after graduating, and while I tried for years to adjust to my new home, it wasn’t until I began reading Southern literature that I finally started to truly understand the region. Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones makes the Mississippi delta region come alive on the page as we watch her characters prepare for hurricane Katrina. Attica Locke’s Bluebird, Bluebird took me on a road trip across Texas....
The poet Ravi Shankar writes about his own collaborative experiences in Mess and Mayhem: The Plural Histories of Collaborative Writing. He says, “In many fundamental ways, collaboration is the quintessential modern artistic practice . . . Though on the surface it might not appear to be the case, writing also has always been deeply dialogical, whether consciously or unconsciously engaging with other texts or more explicitly, if our work is being edited or we are incorporating the comments from other members of a writing workshop into our own creative practice....
Sprayed edges are in fact so popular, and relatively easy to do on a small scale, that it’s not entirely surprising a little cottage industry has sprang up offering this service. Just enter “sprayed edges” into the search bar on Etsy, and you’ll come up with tons of shops offering limited runs of certain popular YA books or even offering to spray the edges of books you already own — and many shop owners are taking it to the next level by offering gorgeous stenciled and hand-painted art on top of these sprayed edges....
