Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler “When you’re young, your life is determined by your blindspots.” So writes Stephanie Danler in her mesmerizing debut novel Sweetbitter. A pleasurable, contemplative meditation on food and service, friendship and love, Sweetbitter felt incredibly familiar to me. At its most basic, it’s a story about moving to the city without knowing anyone else and forging a new family, complete with drama and loyalty, betrayal and forgiveness....

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William Wordsworth: Poetry, People and Place – on now! “This free online course will explore the great poetry of William Wordsworth, with an emphasis on his writing process and the inspirational landscape of the Lake District.” No more wandering as lonely as a cloud because this literature MOOC promises to connect you with the landscape that inspired Wordsworth’s poetry. You’ll look at the Lake District through new eyes, learning more about his ideas of ‘Nature’, his manuscripts and the archive of his material at the Jerwood Centre....

Sam Chung debuted in All-New, All-Different Marvel Point One #1 (December 2015), an anthology book meant to promote the latest iteration of that thing Marvel does every 18 months where they cancel all their books and restart them all at #1. Sam was created by Charles Soule and Ron Garney to join the cast of their new Daredevil series, which launched two months later. (Note: technically Sam is the fourth Blindspot, but he has nothing to do with the previous three, so I’m not addressing them here....

For generations, the princes of Ilara have married the most beautiful maidens from the ocean village of Varenia. But though every girl longs to be chosen as the next princess, the cost of becoming royalty is higher than any of them could ever imagine . . . For fans of Three Dark Crowns and Ash Princess comes a new YA fantasy series intertwining politics, forbidden romance, and the power of sisterhood....

Annaleigh lives a sheltered life at Highmoor with her sisters. Once there were twelve of them, but loneliness fills the grand halls now that four of the girls’ lives have been cut short. Annaleigh becomes increasingly suspicious that her sister’s deaths were no accidents. The girls have been sneaking out every night to attend glittering balls, and Annaleigh isn’t sure whether to try to stop them or to join their forbidden trysts....

Recently, a tweet by an organization named Abolition Apostles received a lot of attention. It was calling for pen pals for its program connecting imprisoned populations with the outside world. They have a long, long waitlist of people who want to make connections, and not enough people writing. Receiving and writing letters accomplishes a long list of goals. It reconnects imprisoned people to the outside. It makes them feel less alone and less abandoned by society....

It all started when my wife found a new hobby. (Well, technically, the TBR problem started decades before that, when I first started hoarding books.) My wife has a recently reignited love of Dungeons and Dragons, or D&D if you’re in the know. After joining a virtual D&D campaign with some friends, she decided to figure out how to make her own dice sets using resin. I’m not personally a D&D fan, but as I understand it, a typical set of dice for the tabletop roleplaying game includes six different die shapes with varying numbers of faces: 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and the signature D&D die with 20 faces....

Since I’m also obsessed with books, it follows that a huge proportion of my podcast subscriptions are book-related. When I discovered the Book Riot Podcast in 2013, it became one of my favourites, opening the path to my ultimately writing for Book Riot from 2015. And I realised, a couple of years later, that I really wanted a British Book Riot — something that would tell me what’s new, cool, and worth talking about in the world of British books and reading....

Before the early ’90s, studies, according to The Scientific American, “concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper.” Later studies back this up. A study on kids’ enjoyment when they read ebooks vs physical books report “children showed a preference for print” despite the allure of a screen. Parents, too, reported their children “paid more attention” to a print book. A Norwegian study of 10th graders revealed those who read paperbacks scored higher on post-reading questionnaires than those who read on computer screens, both with informational and narrative texts....

Editing books can come through a variety of means. There are opportunities to edit books on the side of developing an anthology (i.e. you work with a publisher or independently but aren’t an employee of the company for whom you’re editing); you can be a freelance book editor (i.e. you help other people edit books independent of or as a preferred partner of a publisher or other industry professional); and you can also be an editor who works as an employee of a publishing company....

This last question has been a concern that has plagued me for over 15 years. When I meet authors whose work I adore at book signings or talks, I often feel my conversation skills go swiftly out the door. I admire them so much that I don’t know what to say. So after 15 years of struggling with this, here are some helpful hints. I won’t claim to be an expert at talking to authors and artists but I think my stories will be helpful to those of you who suffer from this problem....

via GIPHY Decor On top of your typical creepy or kitschy chic, throw in some homages to the show. Creepy thrift store puppets and porcelain dolls are great, freaky touches to get things going. A portrait of the infamous Dr. Vink is an obscure, but quirky touch. Make sure to pair that with a hand in a jar. Maybe add Mr. Sardo’s scarves and crystal ball. Maybe a lizard statue as an nod to the Chameleon episode....

I tend to be more critical of a book’s film adaptation when the book is still fresh in my memory, which wasn’t the case with Bernadette — it had been three years since I’d read the book and while I remembered the gist of things, I’d read a lot of other books in that time. I enjoyed it enough to watch it again with my mom once it became available to stream, which happened to be during the very first pandemic lockdown in March 2020....

One of my favorite characteristics in real life people is a passion for something particular. The more offbeat, the better. I will happily accept an enthusiastic account of your rock collection; not so much your investment portfolio. In real life, most of us have to have fairly mundane jobs that support our more arcane interests, but romance is another story. We’ve got some YA workplace romances if that’s something you enjoy, or take a tour through some of the best under-the-radar romances....

También de este lado hay sueños. On this side too, there are dreams. Lydia Quixano Pérez runs a bookstore in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She has a son, Luca, and by and large, they live a fairly comfortable life. But when Lydia’s wonderful journalist husband publishes a tell-all profile of Javier, the jefe of the newest drug cartel, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca are forced to flee. None of their lives will ever be the same as they join the countless people trying to reach el norte....

There are a million ways to write a book, a thousand and more prose styles. Some people like direct, straightforward, to-the-point writing. Some people like prose that’s funny, familiar, and inviting. Some people like plot-focused prose, and others like books full of long passages that linger on characters’ inner lives. If you don’t like lyrical books, or books that are full of description, that’s just fine. To every book its reader....

So, when I stumbled upon Princeless – Raven: The Pirate Princess by Jeremy Whitley, Rosy Higgins, and Ted Brandt, thanks to a column by the amazing Mey Rude, I was beyond excited. It’s hard for me to express just how much joy this comic has brought me, but I’m going to try. Raven Xingtao, also known as the Black Arrow (badass nickname, right?), is introduced in volume 3 of the larger Princeless series when she is rescued from a tower by main character Princess Adrienne Ashe....

I remember watching it over and over again on my tiny 13-inch TVCR; a VHS tape for which I didn’t have a real case, because I just…never returned it to my local rental place. (Sorry about that, Capitol Hill Video.) With the announcement of the upcoming Vampire Chronicles series from AMC, there have been a lot of comments about the first filmed version of the story — that same Interview With The Vampire, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt....

In 2019, Marvel Studios finally announced a Black Widow movie, nine years after Johansson’s take on the character debuted in Iron Man 2. And I thought: “Eh, pass.” Five years isn’t a long time at all, so it’s incredible to me how rapidly both Marvel and ScarJo burned through the enormous amounts of goodwill they had in 2014. Because I loved her Black Widow five years ago. [Spoilers for Avengers: Endgame below....