Book Riot

  • Necessity of Truth

    Over at Book Riot, Hannah Engler discusses memoir, when the absolute truth is necessary, and why it is okay—even unavoidable—to fabricate facts: Fabrication is inherent in memoir writing. Number one, it’s impossible to have an unbiased view of your own life,…

  • The Keeper of Weirdness

    Our love of libraries is nothing new, but there are a particular breed of libraries less discussed—the college library. Book Riot has written a love letter to collegiate libraries and all the weirdness that lives there.

  • Fanfiction Can Be Literary Too

    For Book Riot, Vanessa Willoughby explores the benefits of writing fan fiction, and how notable works are often imitations of timeless stories: Literature that is unforgettable incites a dialogue at the very least, and a conversation at its best. Novels can…

  • Make Your Writing A Beautiful Mess

    A lovely and thoughtful argument for writing with a pencil. Hear her out before you decide.

  • The Whiteness of Literary Events

    It’s daunting knowing that you will be the only one of your kind at some of these events. When you’ve been made to feel your otherness so concretely in the past, it’s hard not to notice it. I can’t help…

  • Notable NYC: 11/7–11/13

    Saturday 11/7: Diana Hamilton, Kaveh Akbar, Shira Erlichman, Jason Koo, Katy Lederer, Matt Longabucco, and Angel Nafis celebrate the launch of issue 2 of Prelude. Baby’s All Right, 3 p.m., $10. Lee Ann Brown and Kit Robinson join the Segue…

  • On The Beauty of Words

    At Book Riot, Aram Mrjoian explores the question of what makes a sentence beautiful. He conjectures that our brain becomes overwhelmed when it sees words organized and used in a way that is beyond its imagination: Maybe, when words are amalgamated…

  • Let’s Talk About Abortion

    Book Riot discusses the lack of female protagonists who’ve had abortions in literature: For millions of women, abortion is not a statistic or a political platitude. Although public discourse around abortion tends to stick to abstractions, there is no one…

  • A Blurb of Beauty

    At Book Riot, Amanda Diehl brings an optimistic anecdote to the often-bleak conversation on the value of book blurbs (typically rife with accusations of corporatism, cronyism, and empty praise). If the form can rise to the artistry of Margaret Atwood’s…

  • The Women of YA

    S.E. Hinton, a woman, arguably pioneered the young adult genre of literature. So why is it that women are seen as secondary in this genre, and as less valuable as their male counterparts? Book Riot explores this question, and the…

  • Ernest Hemingway Was…

    You may have seen the recent series of UN Women ads using screenshots of Google auto-complete suggestions to educate viewers about sexist stereotypes. This Book Riot post does the same thing but with famous authors—for example, when you type in “Ernest…

  • Margaret Atwood’s Brilliant Book Riot Guest Post

    Did you see that guest-poster over at Book Riot? She’s some young upstart named Margaret Atwood with some crazy ideas about horror, terror, genre fiction, and literary fiction. To add to that, the complete Edgar Allan Poe was in the…