In Jerry Pinto’s Em And The Big Hoom, Imelda Mendes, referred to as ‘Em’ by her two children is a mentally unstable mother. Her manic-depressive episodes create a vortex around which her husband and two children are tossed and turned. She is ‘mad’ enough to say ‘cock and cunt’ out loud in front of her children. She swings wildly between extreme suicidal tendencies and emotionally abusive mania. Her uncertain mental state is punctured at times by rare moments of normalcy....

Set in the Kerala of 1980s, Aruna Nambiar’s hilarious novel Mango Cheeks, Metal Teeth is partly a coming-of-age story and partly a social satire. Geetha, a young 11ish-year-old, is really psyched about her annual family vacation to Kerala at her grandparents’ house. Geetha absolutely adores joining her cousins on trips to the beach and visiting the local market to buy bangles, kites, and other knick-knacks associated with a typical Indian childhood....

Take Frank O’ Hara’s “Having A Coke With You,” for instance. The poet compares love and art and stresses how the former always plays the trump card. Just existing beside one’s lover is much more preferable “than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne.” The narrator’s lover makes the banal acts like wearing an orange shirt or loving yogurt noteworthy. They think that life in all its ordinariness becomes a transformative experience if unadulterated romantic love is part of the equation....

Self-Liberation For All(?) In Koa Beck’s White Feminism, she writes that the trope of the “white, depressed housewife” often overrides other cultural identities. Lack of financial autonomy, abusive marital dynamics, and prolonged stress and exhaustion are issues explicitly studied with respect to the ultra-feminine, dainty, middle-class, young white housewife. However, thanks to immigrant literature, this narrative is slowly changing. In Dominicana, Angie Cruz debunks this archetype of the white housewife being the ultimate victim of patriarchy by centering the story of a Dominican teenage bride named Ana....

In reality, the Library of Congress is very much a place you can visit, tour, and spend time in reading and researching. As an adult, I got a chance to move to Washington, D.C., and live a few blocks from the Library of Congress. Even if it wasn’t a library, the Library of Congress would still be one of my favorite buildings because it’s so beautiful. Reading outside the Library is lovely....

A single person can make a huge difference when they are diligent and organized. In Alabama, a woman’s local library had Mr. Watson’s Chickens by Jarrett Dapier challenged. This book features a same-sex couple who have too many chickens, but when they try to rehome them, they escape and need to be collected. She contacted the author to let him know what was going on in her community, worried that his book was going to be pulled from circulation....

The Gaff’s stand-up is hilarious, and also clean, based as it is largely around food and holidays and having lots of children, and you can watch clips with your parents without feeling intensely uncomfortable Louis C K I am looking at you and your ‘Suck A Bag of Dicks’ bit in particular. So it was with great delight that I accepted Gaffigan’s Food: A Love Story, but also great trepidation....

While finally preparing a newsletter to send out after months of radio silence, I checked my Goodreads account to write down a list of the best books I had read since May. As I considered what undoubtedly amazing reads they were – with The Vanishing Half, Cemetery Boys, and When No One Is Watching among them – I felt a bit…disappointed. I suddenly realised that the books worth mentioning had, for a long time, been on the radars of most of the people I was writing that newsletter to....

One thing Buffy was not, however, is diverse. The show has rightly been critiqued for its treatment of what few characters of color appeared in the course of its seven season run. The population of Sunnydale simply did not look like the California town it was meant to be. It is fair to say that most of the people of color who appeared on the show were either villains (Mr....

Without further ado, here are the lists! A post shared by National Book Foundation (@nationalbookfoundation) on Apr 1, 2020 at 10:13am PDT Fiction Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam The Index of Self-Destructive Acts by Christopher Beha The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett If I Had Two Wings by Randall Kenan A Burning by Megha Majumdar A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart The Great Offshore Grounds by Vanessa Veselka Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu From the New Yorker announcement: “The judges for the category this year are Cristina Henríquez, the author of “The Book of Unknown Americans”; Keaton Patterson, of Brazos Bookstore, in Houston; Laird Hunt, the author of “Zorrie,” who teaches at Brown University; Rebecca Makkai, whose novel “The Great Believers” was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; and Roxane Gay, the author of “Bad Feminist” and “Hunger....

I think we’ve had a good run. We’ve lived in seven different apartments together in nine years. Not many coffee tables can say that. Most go straight from their boxes at IKEA to a curb to a garbage truck to an I-don’t-even-want-to-think-about-where in a year or less. We’re good together. Thanks for continuing to lug me around, even though my paint is kind of chipped and it seems like I’m getting fewer and fewer compliments every year....

Whatever the situation, they are all to be commended. It’s hard to write a book, and doing it with another person takes coordination and teamwork. Here are 15 examples of great books with two authors. Chris Traeger voice: There are literally thousands and thousands more. This is just the teeniest tip of the iceberg. Tell us your favorites in the comments! Tiny Pretty Things by Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton The first in an intense young adult duology about the cutthroat world of dance in a drama-filled ballet school in New York City....

I was not a reader. Sure, I read what my teachers made me. Kind of. I mean, my dad read The Call of the Wild with me so we I could write about it for a report. That was it, really. Everyone talks about how they devoured books when they were a kid. It was all they could think, breathe, live and dream about. It did happen to me, that can’t sleep–hide it under your desk–read until 3AM–love of books....

Who is Ms. Marvel? The title of Ms. Marvel has belonged to a number of superheroes throughout the years, most notably Carol Danvers–now Captain Marvel–and now, Kamala Khan. Kamala is just a regular Pakistani-American teen living in Jersey City, writing Avengers fanfic, until one day she’s exposed to Terrigen Mist and gains superpowers. She gains the ability to polymorph and stretch her body in almost any way imaginable, embiggening herself or stretching her limbs to take down bad guys....

To address these questions, librarians around the world are betting that one part of the library of the future looks like a cross between a package pick-up locker and a deluxe snack vending machine, AKA automated library vending machines (ALVM’s). From Poland to California, ALVMs are expanding access to library services in a time when patronizing and staffing a physical library can be both a health risk and time-luxury that many people cannot afford....

One representative of the Jamestown Conservative group said, “They are trying to groom our children to believe that it’s OK to have these sinful desires… It’s not a political issue, it’s a Biblical issue.” The library lost the millage vote, meaning the library soon won’t have enough funding to stay open: it may close by fall 2023. When asked if the result was a “wake up call,” the library board president responded, “A wake-up call to what?...

So here are a few ways I’ve been reaching out to my students, I hope you find these useful and can adopt them to your library or school! #OneMinuteBookReviews Over on Instagram I’ve been running daily (Monday–Friday) one minute book reviews. These are fun for me and have generated some great comments. I have alerted parents of the students at the school I work at about this and they have also been watching....

Why all the quotation marks? Well, it is important to acknowledge that so much of what we think of as the Capital-C Canon is completely arbitrary, not to mention seeped in elitism. And racism, sexism, and a whole bunch of other -isms that are dominant in our culture. The canon as a selection of works aims to represent those that are the pinnacle of artistry in the literary tradition. It is often thought to include works like Shakespeare, Beowulf, Paradise Lost, Homer, and so on and so forth....

Joe Hill—the mastermind behind N0S4A2 and Locke & Key—has arrived at DC, curating his own cutting-edge horror comics pop-up! Hill House Comics will terrify readers with a smart, subversive and scary lineup of five original limited series. Hill House Comics debuted with Basketful of Heads, written by Hill and illustrated by Leomacs. The chills continued in the following months with The Low, Low Woods; The Dollhouse Family; Daphne Byrne and Plunge, from some of the biggest names in horror storytelling....

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