Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

★ Ruby Fever In Ilona Andrews’ Hidden Legacy series, the world is dominated by magical families known as Houses. Catalina Baylor is the Deputy Warden of Texas and a Prime, an extremely powerful magic user. She’s moving her House and her fiancé, assassin Alessandro Sagredo, into a new compound when an important politician is killed

The winners of the 2022 Hugo Awards were announced Sunday, September 4th in a ceremony at the 80th WorldCon— named ChiCon this year— in Chicago, IL. The event was hosted by authors Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz. The Hugo Awards, science fiction’s most prestigious award, were first presented in 1953 and have been presented

The titular character of Mazey Eddings’ Lizzie Blake’s Best Mistake is dealing with some very rom-com-appropriate problems—namely, that her two-night stand with a hot Australian guy resulted in an unexpected pregnancy, and she’s now trying to platonically cohabitate with him. But alongside all the tropey hijinks, Lizzie also gains a better understanding of and more

Author Peter Straub died this past Sunday in Manhattan due to complications of a broken hip. Straub, born in Milwaukee on March 2, 1943, was a popular horror novelist with a somewhat unorthodox pedigree— before turning to writing about the fantastical, he had published short collections of poetry. Although he was reluctant to label his

Lizzie Blake knows that she’s a lot. A lot of energy and enthusiasm. A lot of creativity and vibrant warmth. But also a lot of mess and chaos. Her attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder can make things difficult, given that she lives in a world built for people whose brains don’t function like hers. After a lifetime of

I love eating! To me, food is a comfort, and it’s maybe a blessing and a tragedy that I seem to plan everything in my daily routine around meals. When I go on vacation, I wake up thinking about the plan for the day, and when and where we are going to stop for eating.

Poet and author Ander Monson has seen the 1987 movie Predator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger on the run from an alien in a Guatemalan jungle, 146 times. To explain why, he wrote Predator: A Memoir. Through a scene-by-scene exploration of the film, which he describes as “satire wrapped in gun pornography,” Monson reckons with his lifelong

There were too many times when my mother would catch me reading a book with a flashlight under my sheets, demanding I go to sleep already. I can’t say that romance was ever my go-to genre as I was (ironically) falling in love with reading as a kid. I loved fantasy, mystery, and historical fiction,

Banned Books Week is coming, which means that waves of displays in libraries, classrooms, and bookstores are also incoming. We’re already seeing many, and while they are useful for highlighting the reality of censorship across America to those who are not as tapped into the news about it, too many banned books week displays are

Barbara Ehrenreich was an author, journalist, and activist who published more than 20 books, including Nickel and Dimed, which documents several months she spent working the lowest-paying jobs in the U.S.A. and trying to survive on that income. She wrote articles and book reviews for a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times,

The much-awaited series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is premiering today at 6 PM PT / 9 PM ET on Amazon Prime with two episodes. Fans of Tolkien’s Middle-earth—or curious newcomers—can sign up for a free 30 day Prime trial to watch the new series. The Rings of Power takes place

The legal comedy She-Hulk: Attorney At Law is officially adding Megan Thee Stallion to their long list of cameo and guest appearances. The role comes after her guest appearance on the show P-Valley. In She-Hulk, Megan Thee Stallion will be represented in a legal case by attorney Augustus Pugliese, who is being played by Josh

A new Missouri law has made it a misdemeanor for a school employee to provide “explicit sexual material” to minors, which could come with up to a year in jail and $2000 in fines. The law applies to images only, such as in graphic novels, and does not apply to material with “serious artistic significance,”

The story is performed in the Inverted Theater, which exists outside of time and can only be visited while one is dreaming. An unnamed spectator sits in the audience and is told that this story is a love story. It is summer, as it always is in the Old Country, and one fateful night, the

In case you missed it, at the halfway point of the year, Goodreads made lists of the overall best books of the year so far as well as the most popular books in several genres, including historical fiction. These books were selected because of positive early reviews from Goodreads users as well as the number