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A warning: These craft projects are all made using old books. If the idea of ripping up a book makes you feel squeamish, turn back now. But in my opinion, upcycling books is a great way of breathing fresh life into something that may otherwise only find its way into the dumpster. I found the three books I used for this project in a Little Free Library, and all of them had enough aging and water damage to make them unlikely candidates for finding readers....

Figure Out Where You Want To Work Are you only interested in finding work at your local branch? Would you consider working in the next county or state? Or are you adventurous enough to move cross country for the perfect job? The first thing you’ll want to do is figure out where you’re willing to work. Then… Do Your Research If you’re hoping to find a job at your local library, head to their website and search for their open employment listings....

Some authors have employed the em dash non-traditionally to their own tastes. It’s pretty much agreed that there’s not really a wrong way to use an em dash—or rather, most ways in which people are naturally inclined to use it are acceptable. James Joyce used it to set off dialogue because he had a particular antipathy for quotation marks. (Passions have always run high when it comes to punctuation issues, it would seem....

I found it much harder to visualise the older stuff, an issue which has persisted into adulthood. Tenochtitlan sounds fascinating but I struggle to understand what it might look like. It’s easy to picture the Pyramids at Giza — after all, they’re still there — but what did the people who lived under them experience day to day? How many films about Pompeii have I seen? Those films have informed my thoughts for decades and I’ve never looked beyond it too much....

I now have a running list (and trust me, it keeps on growing) of indie publishers I love who consistently publish phenomenal queer books across a range of genres. I keep my eye on Arsenal Pulp’s catalogue because I know it’s going to be chock-full of LGBTQ+ stories I can’t wait to get my hands on. I follow Coffee House Press and The Feminist Press online so that I don’t miss it when they announce new titles....

One thing that has invited connection without leaving the house, or tugging on pants, is my virtual two-person book club. Co-founded with my soul sister, this marks my first time book clubbing. While we certainly aren’t the first twosomes to two-person book club, it feels like a balm for the times. For more than 15 years, my reading partner and I have been bibliophile-ing together. Our origins include Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters and Richard Siken’s Crush....

Being a Harry Potter fan has been a part of my identity for as long as I can remember. I loved the books as a kid, and that only increased as I grew older. Harry Potter introduced me to world of fandom. I made some of my closest friend through discussing it, and I waiting more than 12 hours in line for the last book and movie. After the series ended, I continued to revisit the series....

Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding creator Hideo Kojima has always been a voracious consumer of movies, music, and books, igniting his passion for stories and storytelling, resulting in his groundbreaking, iconic video games. Now the head of independent studio Kojima Productions, Kojima’s enthusiasm for entertainment media has never waned. This collection of essays explores some of the inspirations behind one of the titans of the video game industry, and offers an exclusive insight into one of the brightest minds in pop culture....

I’m not entirely sure when it was that I first heard about people who eat people (sings are the luckiest people in the world.) But my first real memory of reading about a person eating human flesh was this one rainy weekend at a family’s summer camp when I was 8, where I devoured a stack of totally inappropriate books for my age, including Alive, about the plane crash in the Andes....

Cheap Old Houses shared the listing for a former library currently on the market for $79,000 in Northern Minnesota near the Boundary Waters, roughly four hours from the Twin Cities. The 1938 building has three stories and nearly 29,000 square feet of useable space. The ground level served as the former library for Ely, and the building itself was constructed as part of the Public Works Administration program using a variety of locally sourced material....

The biggest inspiration behind this forbidden romance trope is obviously the play Romeo and Juliet, which…spoiler alert, is not a romance. (At least not a romance in terms of how we understand the genre today, which requires a happily ever after or a happily for now ending.) I decided to focus on contemporary YA books with this trope but that have a happy ending for our couples (so popular book Frankly in Love by David Yoon is unfortunately out)....

However, the short story has a lot to teach us. It uses page space, narrative, and character with an urgency that we often lose when writing a longer form. The short story has a sense of the primal: it calls back to an oral tradition where we only had a short time to tell an entire story. The short story is also the form of the outsider. From Isaac Babel to James Joyce to Sandra Cisneros, the short form is also the place where people tell painful truths, even if they don’t seem to fit into the mainstream....

A nineteen year old girl, studying abroad for the summer. Her entire cohort has traveled by bus to the town of Rimini, a popular beach resort town, to celebrate the end of the term. After checking into the hotel, her roommates change into their swimwear and prepare to head down to the beach, urging her to come along. She refuses. You see, she has about sixty pages left in The Time Traveler’s Wife, and she just wants to be left alone to finish it....

Choose from plans that allow your loved one to receive hardcover books in the mail or recommendations by email, as a one-time gift or year-long subscription, and sit back while our Bibliologists do the rest. When your recipient redeems their gift, they’ll complete a profile to tell TBR about their reading preferences and what they’re looking for, and they can even connect their Goodreads account! Then we’ll match them up with a Bibliologist who will handpick recommendations just for them....

From bestselling author of She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders and human rights activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, Good Boy is a memoir about the transformative power of loving dogs. In her New York Times opinion column, she wrote about her relationship with her beloved dog Indigo, and her wise, funny, heartbreaking column went viral. Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs shows how a young boy became a middle-aged woman—accompanied at seven crucial moments of growth and transformation by seven memorable dogs....

These guys are small but mighty. Mighty, innovative, inclusive, and really, really good at what they do, which is compile a catalog in which any comics fan would be happy to immerse herself. They don’t seem in danger of losing steam any time soon. Oni’s creator-loaded panel at Rose City Comic Con focused on new and upcoming books, and bad news, friends, your TBR piles are going to expand exponentially by the end of this post....

Here are this year’s winners! Check out the Cybils website to see the judges’ reasons for selecting each of these winners. You can also see the full list of finalists in each category. Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.

The thing about the ban, though, is that it’s a solution in search of a problem — not only is critical race theory not a subject in Florida schools to begin with, it’s not really something you teach to students anyway (at least not until graduate school). It’s something you teach with, just as you might also teach content through the lens of feminist theory, New Criticism, psychoanalysis, or a number of other theoretical frameworks....

One romantic pairing that has been a point of conflict and contention for romance readers and people who engage with media across the board is the idea of the student/teacher relationship. While I never want to yuck yums, as someone who has worked in a high school and done instruction at other levels, those are usually hard limits for me, with some exceptions — they’re both consenting adults and there are no power dynamic issues....