The 50 Greatest Apocalypse Novels “Apropos of . . . Nothing” I’m including this list here because, really, how could I not? How many of these have you read? I’ve read five, and I have two more on the top of my TBR pile. I think that’s pretty good, given that I usually avoid most […]
Mixing Genres Is All About Messing with Structure “Knowing what people are expecting allows you to subvert the trope. Expectation is its own red herring, built right into your reader.” Stuart Turton, author of the brilliant The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and newly released The Devil and The Dark Water, admits, “I’m obsessed by
The Best Time Travel Books Annalee Newitz is both a science journalist and a science fiction writer who uses science to spur investigations into the nature of human existence. Newitz says science fiction is “less teaching people about how science works, and more about teaching people how history works.” Newitz uses the version of time
Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times” Thirty years ago Judith Butler published Gender Trouble, a book in which she introduced the notion of gender as performance. The book has since become “a foundational text on any gender studies reading list,” and the question of whether gender is how
How the Pandemic Has Changed Our Reading Lives “Many of the readers who have more reading time are finding that the mental toll of current events is hurting their attention spans, or seeing their genre preferences shift and twist.” Leah Rachel von Essen “talked to authors, book bloggers, librarians, and general readers to investigate how
14 of the Scariest Books Ever Written Halloween reading season is upon us. Leila Siddiqui, declaring that “as readers, we love the sensation of being scared—it is adrenaline-inducing and addictive,” offers her list of reading material for the season. THE WOMEN WHO SHAPED THE PAST 100 YEARS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE This article from Smithsonian Magazine
J.K. Rowling’s ‘Troubled Blood’ is her most ambitious Robert Galbraith novel yet — and likely the most divisive I have liked J.K. Rowling’s mystery novels featuring Cormoran Strike—published under the pen name Robert Galbraith—very much. But Rowling herself has been criticized recently for transphobic remarks she made earlier this year. (This article contains a link
10 Mystery and Thriller Books Starring Older Women When Neha Patel decided to analyze the ages of female protagonists in contemporary fiction, she was surprised to discover that “glancing through all the books I’ve read so far this year, I was shocked to realize that almost all the leads were under the age of 45
When Mums Go Bad: How Fiction Became Obsessed With The Dark Side Of Motherhood “Motherhood and ‘mum noir’ is taking over the psychological suspense shelves, but some portrayals have come in for criticism. Author Caroline Corcoran looks into the trend…” I read a lot of psychological thrillers and mysteries, and women-centered stories have for several
Is the literary trend toward passive women progress? Maybe we’ve been misreading Lynn Steger Strong writes that Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy “broke open a new and surprisingly vital form: the novel of passivity.” Strong is happy to see that, for the last decade or so, women’s fiction has been recognized for probing what the novel—“forms
