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People of all ages — from all eras and cultures — are drawn to the magical worlds of these same stories. And so, storytellers adapt the tales for varying audiences. Based on their continuing republication, interest doesn’t seem to be waning. According to fairytale expert Marina Warner, a common thread between the stories is that they express hope in ways that are both familiar and amazing. As she writes, “The agents who bring about miracles of hope in the stories vary from place to place, as they rise from local belief systems which belong to tradition....

When people start talking about magical food, they tend to refer to a select few amazing — but dated — works. Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate is a fave (and for good reason!), despite the fact that it was originally published over three decades ago. Slightly newer (but still from the previous millennium) is Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices. It’s no wonder that readers continue to return to books like Esquivel’s and Divakaruni’s....

Luckily, my kids inherited the parental love of superheroes (I admit, we steered them in that direction, but now that they’re old enough to choose their fighters, they’ve continued down the path with great aplomb) and DCComicsKids has stepped in to fill a 30–45 minute void each weekday which, while it may not sound like much, has saved my literal life on several occasions over the last couple of weeks....

The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World by David Malouf (Pantheon) All those new year’s resolutions we’re attempting to make good on right now really boil down to one thing: the desire to be happy. Happy with how we look, how we feel, how we relate, how we live. Research indicates that we humans are not so great at predicting what will make us happy; Malouf goes the other way around to root out the causes of our stress and trace the evolution of our definitions of happiness and contentment....

I like these memoirs so much because they’re a bit of a rebellion genre. Funnily enough, tales of women abandoning modern conveniences for a more traditional and self-sustaining way of living is a form of thumbing one’s nose at what has become the norm. Who knew that living like it’s 1930 could seem like such a renegade choice. You raise bees? You get up at what time? You BAKE your own BREAD?...

The highly anticipated sequel to Melissa Albert’s beloved, New York Times bestselling debut The Hazel Wood! In The Night Country, Alice Proserpine dives back into a menacing, mesmerizing world of dark fairy tales and hidden doors. Follow her and Ellery Finch as they learn The Hazel Wood was just the beginning, and that worlds die not with a whimper, but a bang. We’re giving away five copies of The Night Country by Melissa Albert to five lucky Riot readers!...

Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid and Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn When I saw that Nicole Dennis-Benn had written a new book, I was very excited. Her debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, is a stunning tale about a queer sex worker in Jamaica and how she negotiates power, family ties, and colonialism. I had never read anything else like it, so when I saw Dennis-Benn had written a book called Patsy, I grabbed it as soon as I could....

I live in Pittsburgh, a city that has recreated itself multiple times, most recently in the last decade. Pittsburgh is a crossroads built at confluence of three rivers, populated by a convergence of people and cultures and histories. Anything can happen hereabouts and almost everything has at one time or another. We have a lot of stories. Here are a few of my favorites, along with the creative teams I would choose to bring the graphic novels and comics to life if I were in charge of this imprint....

There have been multiple instances when I have been held hostage by the words on a page. At 15, when I whiled away an entire day on the couch with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, or at 20 in a college dorm, staying up into the early morning hours because I wanted to know how Persuasion ended. Growing up, I was a picky reader, and the only books that made it through to me were the ones that pulled me in often from the very first page (and the ones with magic)....

The Basics: How Does Kindle Unlimited Work? If this all sounds good to you so far (and why shouldn’t it?!), let’s get into some of the grittier details. What do you need to be able to use Kindle Unlimited? To enable 1-Click: Under “Your Account,” go to “Your Content and Devices.” Click the “Preferences” tab. Set up your 1-Click payment method under the first heading, “Digital Payment Settings.” Is Kindle Unlimited free for Prime members?...

In How to Astronaut, Col. Terry Virts—a former astronaut and International Space Station commander who spent 200 consecutive days in space—answers questions you didn’t even know to ask! There’s how to survive that first brush with weightlessness (in the so-called Vomit Comet); the nearly indescribable thrill of a first blastoff; managing the daily tasks—eating, bathing, doing chores, going to the bathroom— that are anything but ordinary when you’re orbiting the earth at 17,000 miles per hour; how to don your spacesuit and head out to work on a spacewalk; and what it’s like to return to Earth....

Earlier this year, I read Severance. Then I made some changes. Quitting My Day Job The day I finished Severance, I quit a job I’d depended on as a primary source of income for years. This wasn’t a direct cause-and-effect situation. I’d been planning on quitting the job for a while to pursue writing full time. Planning on quitting that day, in fact. But every other time I’d tried to quit, I’d found myself caught in a loop....

The short answer is, of course, “it’s complicated.” Behind the Math Book and file size, however, is infinitely more variable. Books themselves have a hugely variable number of pages; translating that into file size requires taking the cover, table of contents, and any illustrations into account. One can easily go down a rabbit hole, from which one can only escape by climbing up on the ever-growing TBR pile. This requires parameters if one is ever going to get anywhere....

But have we looked at this from the opposite side yet? Just how much money do these challenges steal from schools, which are already underfunded? Let’s do a little back of envelope math. Note that every figure here, unless otherwise noted, is an estimate. I’m aiming low on all estimates for the sake of simplicity and the sake of as much equity across schools country-wide. We know some states fund their schools better than others....

I don’t remember everything about my childhood, but I remember that I absolutely loved stories. Even before I could read, I lived for bedtime stories. Seriously, I would be at my best behavior at all times so that my mom would read to me before I went to sleep. But I digress. What I do remember clearly are the books my mom read to me before bedtime. I had three that were my favorites: a Disney princesses book, one that had fables and stories like The Velveteen Rabbit, and one that told religious stories for kids....

PEN America, an organization dedicated to human rights and freedom of expression in literature, recently published an in-depth report on the rise in book bans. They found that, between July 2021 and March 2022, 86 school districts across 26 states banned titles, impacting over 2 million students. Of the over 1,100 books singled out in these bans, 41% star BIPOC characters, 22% directly address race or racism, and 33% include LGBTQ+ themes or characters....

In order to write the article, Anderson has to find a guy to date and then act in ways that are sure to make any man lose interest in a woman. It is evident that this movie came out in the ’00s because, like many romantic comedies of the time, I doubt that the premise would work well in the 2020s; while one of the off-putting ways women make men lose interest is related to wanting to advance too fast in the relationship (Anderson’s best friend told a guy she loved him after having sex for the first time, Ted Mosby style), several of the behaviours that end up putting men off are created by women simply existing....

What’s more, language is loaded with symbolic meaning, such as in its vernacular, dialect, irony, and unsaid truths. What’s even more, language is unique to the community that speaks it. It’s as unique as each unique individual who claims that unique language as a mother tongue. A Story in its Original Language Versus When it’s Translated Language isn’t just phonetics and sounds, because it captures the soul of a people, and literature is one of its greatest vehicles....

My mom might say that these “fictional” romances hold no weight in the real world and that she wants me to put myself back out there. That a year-long self-imposed exile from men is more than enough (a direct result of having my heart torn out/chewed on/ etc. I’ve written about it, I’m sure there’s a google alert you can set at this point). It’s not that I didn’t want to try!...

If you’re doing the math, here, then small talk plus a reading hobby equals the inevitable question, “got any book recommendations for me?” or “read anything good lately?” And it’s meant well. It’s a natural progression of the topic of conversation. But, I can’t be the only one who dreads questions like that, can I? This stems from a few different things, I think. First, I’m one of those “bad” readers who can’t remember books after I finish them....