A Resonant Centenary for Strauss at the Vienna State Opera
In Die Frau ohne Schatten, the conductor Thielemann finds a work fundamentally consonant with his conservative values—both in the late Romantic tonalities of Strauss’s music and in...
How Stonewall Liberated Young Adult Literature
Two weeks before the Stonewall Riots, the first major young adult book to explicitly feature homosexuality hit the shelves. At the time, a book for teens...
Maria Kuznetsova Thinks You Should Go Ahead and Be Weird
In our monthly series Can Writing Be Taught? we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This time,...
Anne Shirley Was the Best Friend a Queer Brown Boy Could Have
The following essay is adapted from C.E. Gatchalian’s memoir Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty, and the Making of a Brown Queer Man. It was one noon hour...
All of the DC Ink and Zoom Comics Announced So Far
This year at BookCon, DC announced another batch of titles for their YA imprint, DC Ink. The new books look gorgeous, and I’m super excited by...
20 Books for People Without a Father
Since my father died in March, I have been dreading Father’s Day. Not the holiday itself, which has been, for me, about my husband for the...
How to Make Book Flowers
Reading friends, you might consider it blasphemy to cut up the pages of your old books, and I get it. But what if there were a...
Further Reading After Watching Ava DuVernay’s WHEN THEY SEE US
Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, now streaming on Netflix, is a brutal and illuminating look at the harsh reality that many black Americans face when dealing...
Addressing The Elephant In The Room: Everyday Idioms In Fantasy Worlds
Award-winning SFF author Fonda Lee recently tweeted about a ‘linguistic dilemma’ many fantasy writers face when the setting of their novel takes place in a secondary...
Can You Pass the Hardest Shakespeare Quiz?
As a literary nerd and eventual English major, I spent a lot—and I mean a lot—of time in high school and college studying Shakespeare. His collections of...
