“I have sometimes wished for a bookstore organized not by genre but by feeling,” Ben Marcus writes in the introduction to the New American Stories anthology. “You could shop by mood, by emotional complexity, by the amount of energy and attention that might be required. There’d be a special section for the kind of literature that holds your face to the fire.” The Marcus-ammased anthology (seriously, read it if you haven’t already) cultivates a wide span of human emotions beyond the elementary happy-sad kintergarten prescriptions. Grief, self-consciousness, frustration with the limits of language, the ‘non-feeling’ of moments between the moments we …
Take an interactive journey from girl to woman, ancient lore to contemporary feminism, with Makeda Lewis’s new coloring book, Avie’s Dream. Scarp the old bildungsroman and join, instead, the young dreamer-protagonist as she drifts from female myths of warriors and domesticity, to blooming worlds of sea creatures and tropical flowers. It has the personal edge other coloring books lack, sleek line design and powerful themes – it’s the Afro-feminist coloring book you didn’t even know you needed! Book Buttons Embed ISBN: 9781558619388 Lewis’s coloring book offers a new direction for the lit-lacking but widely popularized genre. Rather than suppressing content and privileging …
Delight in today’s kitty obsession once more: David Brockington has just released the covers for his two debut Graphic Novels, Catstronauts: Mission Moon, and Catstronauts: Race to Mars! In Mission Moon, these kitties scale through space and dodge celestial space gunk on an assignment to set up a solar plant on the moon. In a collaboration of the world’s best scientists – our little blue planet’s sharpest bulbs – cats are the answer to saving the world from collapse and chaos. Image courtesy of Galley Cat. But wait, there’s more. Part two of the Catstronauts illustrated series takes our gang (gaggle, trove, litter?) …
We live in an age driven by aesthetics; there’s no doubt about it. The pursuit to innovate, recreate, and in the case of book covers, redesign, is constant. A book cover, often taken for granted, no thanks in part to the ageless axiom, ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, is beyond essential to the book itself. Sure, there’s the obvious mechanical component, a cover and spine holds a text together (and arguably creates the form) but it also serves as a representation of the story. Cover illustrations guide us to the interior of the book. Often in today’s milieu …
Trope: the word itself sounds like some creeping troll or gargoyle perched on the lip of a gargantuan mansion, but in reality, the meaning of the word is far more underwhelming than rep it gets of the phonetic-associations we may imagine. Simply put, and taking it back to high school grammar, a trope is something you see frequently in a piece of literature – a theme, motif, archetype, you name it, it’s a trope. Individual genres tend to cultivate their own peculiar breed of tropes and YA is no different. Some are pretty run of the mill, some clichéd, and …
