I take pride in my disabled life, an existence full of joy and wonder. But sometimes, moving through the world as a disabled person can feel overwhelming. At every turn, there are reminders that this world wasn’t made with disabled people in mind. But when I pick up books by disabled authors, it’s like reading an encouraging note from a friend reminding me that there are a whole host of other disabled people trying to go about their lives just like I am.

2023 was a year star-studded with incredible works of disability literature. There’s a wealth of poetry, memoir, essays, and researched nonfiction. There are people who have been disabled their entire lives and people new to their lives as a disabled person. It’s one of the first years I can remember having to struggle to keep up with all of the books by disabled authors being published — what a great problem to have!

I’ve gathered together some of my favorite books by disabled, chronically ill, Deaf, and neurodivergent authors. There are some of my old favorites — like Jen Cambell, Samantha Irby, and Jenn Shapland — and some new-to-me favorite authors, including Tara Sidhoo Fraser, Janine Joseph, and Ashley Shew. Whatever kinds of books you enjoy, there is sure to be something on this list for you!

Head Above Water: Reflections on Illness by Shahd Alshammari Written from the perspective of a Palistinian-Bedouin woman living in Kuwait, Head Above Water is one of the first disability memoirs written in English by an Arab woman. When Shahd was on the verge of adulthood, her doctor diagnosed her with multiple sclerosis and explained that he didn’t think she would live past her third decade. But Alshammari becomes determined to prove him wrong.

Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit by Jen Campbell In her most recent collection, Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit, Campbell examines a childhood growing up as a disabled girl who spent much of her time in and out of hospitals. Reading this poetry collection is like a walk into Campbell’s past of hospital operations, rejoining her in the present filled with fertility clinic waiting rooms and years spent shielding herself during the ongoing COVID pandemic.

In response to the events unfolding in Palestine, as the death toll reaches horrific levels, I wanted to put together a list of fiction written by Palestinian authors.

A quick note: nonfiction and memoir are important, and I don’t want to take away from those. I encourage all those interested to educate themselves by reading nonfiction through reliable online sources and nonfiction books. Haymarket Books, in particular, has an excellent collection and has recently been giving ebooks on Palestine away for free on their website.

But fiction can be an accessible way of forging empathy and connection. We read and put ourselves in the shoes of the protagonists, see through their eyes, and understand their experiences and lives. These eleven books shine light on the experiences of violence, displacement, disillusionment, and hope of the Palestinian people. Please dig into these books with an open heart.

As always, please note that while I took great care to list content warnings where I could, things can fall through the cracks. Please do additional research on the recommended titles if needed.

Salt Houses by Hala Alyan From 1967 to the present, this multi-generational novel tells the story of a Palestinian family. It’s a rich, poetic book about whole generations being displaced, adapting, struggling. A generation is forced from their homes while another generation struggles with not having any connection to their history or their past. It’s a fantastic, emotional story of generational trauma and family drama that all begins when Salma reads her daughter’s fortune in coffee dregs on the eve of her wedding and finds herself being forced to lie about what they predict.

What are psychological safety books? According to Amy Edmondson, who coined the phrase “team psychological safety” and wrote one of the books below on the topic, it’s an understanding that it’s okay to express your ideas, ask questions, and admit mistakes without “the fear of negative consequences” in group settings like a family, a workplace, or a friend group. Improving psychological safety in a group can increase engagement, improve decision-making, and “foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement,” according to Edmondson.

In a McKinsey article, social scientists believe psychological safety is a “prerequisite for people to be at their best in all aspects of life.” Improving psychological safety doesn’t just impact your workplace performance but also your personal life, too.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a priority for many people in leadership roles or organizations as a whole. According to a McKinsey Global Survey conducted during the pandemic, psychological safety and the behaviors that promote it, like establishing a positive team climate or setting up leadership development programs to improve open dialogue, were limited at modern workplaces despite how important it seems to be.

If you’re looking to learn more about the concept or make your workplace better in whatever way you can, read these eight psychological safety books to get started!

The Fearless Organization by Amy C. Edmondson Full of examples of the consequences of organizations that have poor psychological safety practices, The Fearless Organization is a great starting point for those new to the concept. Edmondson provides a toolkit for building up psychological safety in workplaces for leaders, too.

In my earliest childhood memories—the big blur we will call the gear shift between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—Schenectady, the city I was born in, is a distant star. Fuzzy, soft, a blurred edge that feels so far away in the way that childhood always feels so far away. Schenectady, the city I was born in, is a small upstate city between the rivers Mohawk and Hudson. Home of the perfect 12345 zip code. The location of the General Electric Power headquarters. Girls wearing low-rise jeans to rent VHS tapes at the Hollywood Video on Balltown Road. Street names: Brandywine, McClellan, Union, Glenwood Boulevard, Nott, Van Vranken. A white clapboard church hovering atop a hill on a rural route—I used to take modern dance classes there. An ice-skating rink next to an Air Force base where the pilots flew to Antarctica, always flying so low when they went over my house. NXIVM ladies planning their volleyball trips to Lake George. My parents knew the exact address of where the Unabomber’s mother and brother lived, in a historic district called the Stockade. And as for me, I do not remember when I first registered that Kurt Vonnegut lived in Alplaus, a small hamlet in Schenectady County, named after the Dutch expression aal plaats, which means “a place of eels.” (There were no eels that I am aware of.) I think it was in high school. I think my hair was cut short. I think it was when I was a virgin. I think it was when I got a job as a bookseller at the Open Door on Jay. I think I was probably sixteen.

I already loved Kurt when I found out that for a few years after World War II he lived an eight-minute drive from the house I grew up in. As a teenager in Schenectady, I read not all but most of his books. It was because of my father, who also loved Kurt. He gave me a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, and it was the first time that I fell in love with a novel, because it was brutal and hilarious and weird and terrifyingly sad. Slaughterhouse-Five is set in Dresden and Luxembourg and Outer Space and also Ilium, New York. Ilium, it is argued by most Vonnegut readers and scholars, is probably Schenectady. It appears in several of his other books. Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, and a few different short stories. Here is how Ilium is referenced, in one passage of the Slaughterhouse-Five: “Billy owned a lovely Georgian home in Ilium. He was rich as Croesus, something he had never expected to be … In addition he owned a fifth of the new Holiday Inn out on Route 54 and half of three Tastee Freeze stands.”

Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five and a guy who will live in a human zoo later in the novel. Unlike Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut did not own a lovely Georgian home. He was there, in Schenectady, because he got a job at General Electric’s corporate campus, working in the publicity department. Working at GE got him into writing science fiction. “There was no avoiding [writing science fiction],” he said in an interview, “since the General Electric Company was science fiction.” During his time at GE, he wrote Player Piano, his first novel. His thing is that he wanted to just do that full time. Write books. But he wasn’t ready to do that full time yet, thus the job. So Vonnegut moved into the house, not far from the GE campus, in Alplaus, a middle-class hamlet on the Alplaus Creek and Mohawk River. 

In August, I decided to drive to the house for the first time. I did this with my father, because he was the one who gave me Slaughterhouse-Five, and also because he’s now semi-retired and agreed in advance that it would be “funny,” and “cool,” to accompany his twenty-seven-year-old daughter on a “reporting trip” four miles down the road from his house. “Did you know he lived in Schenectady before you moved here?” I asked my father. “No, I don’t think so,” he responded. Out the window: my former elementary school and preschool, the Chinese Fellowship Bible Church, anonymous corporate campuses, new housing developments that when I was a kid were huge, empty fields.

Our new Fall issue includes an excerpt from Bei Dao’s book-length poem Sidetracks, translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang. In Sidetracks, Bei Dao reflects on his turn to making ink-dot paintings like the one here.

In April 2012, while with his family on a beach in Hong Kong, Bei Dao suffered a stroke that severely affected his language abilities. After a month of trying to learn how to read all over again, he was assessed by a speech-language pathologist to be at only 30 percent equivalency. Daily conversation was difficult; the words he depended on for his life and art would possibly never return. It was an unprecedented crisis that he later compared in an essay to being “like an animal trapped in a cage.” (I’m reminded of these lines Bei Dao’s friend Tomas Tranströmer wrote after a paralyzing stroke, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton: “I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case.”) While recovering in the hospital, Bei Dao started to doodle and brush calligraphy, and when he returned home, he started to paint, channeling the lyric impulse from the void of words into physical images. Thirty years had passed since he’d last painted a picture.

Bei Dao’s first paintings in this period were composed of repeating lines that formed an abstract landscape resembling surging hills or waves. Feeling he lacked the necessary skill and technique to manipulate the plastic line, he abandoned it and turned to one of the most fundamental elements of Chinese painting: the ink dot. A longtime photographer, he compares the ink dot to the pixel of a photograph. In his book-length poem Sidetracks, which will be published in English by New Directions in 2024, he describes the creative process of ink-dot painting like this:

nebular ink dots on rice paper—in accord with the cosmos painting pictures makes me euphoric ink dots cluster disperse depending on the flow of random scattering forest beyond the borders of language good fortune depends on disaster / disaster conceals good fortune I am aimless freedom listening closely to the whispers of snowflakes guarding the vortex of day and night at the center of the mysterious river

“I want to wrap / my face tight with a silk scarf and spiral    down /    a Cinque Terre highway in an Alfa Romeo,” writes Olivia Sokolowski in her poem “Lover of Cars,” which appears in the new Fall issue of the Review. And who doesn’t, when you put it like that? In celebration of Sokolowski’s poem, we’ve commissioned writers to reflect briefly on cars they’ve loved, struggled with, coveted, and crushed on.

 

My parents both worked, and they both made good money, and I needed a car. It all felt very incidental. They had this image in their heads of an ideal weekend—the two of them driving around the Texas Hill Country with a large, iced drink in the cup holder. They’re sitting in the front seats, vintage-by-way-of-long-term-ownership Ray-Bans strapped on tight, and the top is, of course, down. After some searching, they found a fairly cheap used Mercedes-Benz CLK 320—convertible, two doors, soft top, black paint, black interior. They said I could drive it when they didn’t want to, which turned out to be basically every day.

I often forget that this can sound pretty cool. Not only the notion of having a car at sixteen, being able to get around or away if I needed or wanted to, but also that the car was a murdered-out drop top. It is cool to have wheels, especially in Texas. We lived in a suburb outside the Austin city limits, but my parents both grew up in small towns, one in South Texas and the other in the Panhandle. Getting a car, for them, had been the first notion of a kind of promise to leave those small towns. Leaving was, of course, the coolest thing a teenager could do—that great cliché articulated to me when my dad played me Bruce Springsteen songs. My parents saw this car and saw themselves having left, and they saw me in it, years later, as a kind of Ferris Bueller—loud, omniscient, and abjectly capable.

Translated by Imogen Taylor

One stifling hot night in early August, I dreamed, as I always do when I have a fever, the old, familiar dream: the earth opens up before my feet, a gaping pit appears, and into this pit I fall, then clamber straight back out, as eager as a cartoon character, only to fall into the next pit that suddenly yawns before me. An endless obstacle course engineered by some higher power, an experiment going nowhere, the opposite of a story. This dream has followed me since childhood and is probably as old as the realization that I will, one day, end up in a pit forever. As a piece of drama, it is extremely simple, and yet it’s an effective dream and no more unoriginal than that of my friend Sibylle, who told me over breakfast a few days later that she has regular nightmares of being swept away by a vast, tsunami-like wave.

I was reminded that of all the arts I would like to master, lucid dreaming is at the top of the list: you sleep and dream, fully aware that you are asleep and dreaming, but the real skill lies in being able to intervene in the events of your dream and steer the plot in your favor. As a lucid dreamer, I could, with no trouble at all, see to it that the steam train hurtling toward me was brought to a halt by, say, a lady-chimp passenger with the presence of mind to interrupt her grooming and pull the emergency brake. I could arrange for my missing child, lost in the fairground throng, to reappear, bright and chirpy, on the broad shoulders of a gently smiling nurse. I could even have a burned jungle returned in dizzying time-lapse to its former chlorophyll-drenched glory and commandeered by a raucous and triumphant menagerie. I could rewrite my nightmares with every narrative device available to me, draining them of the horror that resonates deep into waking life. All the signs, all experience, all probability notwithstanding, I could make everything end happily. I could transform leaden impotence into mercurial superpower with daring and ingenuity, unafraid of even the most implausible twist.

Midpoints, Sibylle explained to me—she was plotting out a streaming series and had papered one side of the hall in her apartment with Post-its—midpoints are what screenwriters call those decisive events that change the course of a film’s action and send it heading toward a new destination on the plot horizon. Tipping points, I knew from the science pages of the newspapers, are those critical moments when climate and ecological systems shift from one state to another—decisive but elusive events that have such a huge impact on the environment that conditions are thrown off-balance. Ecosystems, for example, are so severely weakened, or populations of individual species so seriously depleted that they no longer recover but collapse, tip over, leaving behind them what, in the drastic vocabulary of Sibylle’s screenwriting theory, is known as the point of no return. A simple enough phrase, but what it means to reach that point where there is no going back defies not only imagination but terminology and narrative patterns.

In childhood, books have a smell. Not an actual smell: I’m not talking about the sweet mustiness of a Knopf hardcover circa 1977, or the creaking sawdust odor of a Bantam paperback. I mean that, in childhood, books have the hunch of a smell: the way, later in life, you might suspect that each thing has a noumenon, a reality independent of our apprehension of it. In childhood, a given book’s particular smell—though it might actually smell, like snow, of absolutely nothing—emits a kind of hovering mysterious message: here is something you can give yourself up to, it seems to say; here is something you can give yourself over to, and at the same time never quite reach. In this sense, in childhood, books are more serious than they’ll ever be again.

In childhood, you find a book in the library, or you’re handed one—in my case, my reading program circa 1990 was shaped by a saturnine and pinchingly generous librarian named Cynthia, who noted our shared inclination toward what I might now call optimistic gloom and gave me, at the age of eight, a children’s series on environmental disasters: Chernobyl, Bhopal, Three Mile Island, Love Canal. It was Cynthia—alarmingly old, nimble, with fraying hair, and whose face seemed to shatter when she smiled (a wonderful moment in itself, though it was scary to see her face reassemble into its usual austerity, like watching the breaking of a water glass in reverse on VHS)—it was Cynthia who gave me Robert Cormier’s 1977 YA novel I Am the Cheese.

The cover of the book was promising, I saw. It showed a boy, such as I both thought and wished I was, maybe twelve years old, with a wistful, reluctant look, big ears, and sharp elbows; he’s in the gray wash of a prison cell with cracked concrete walls, a wood pallet for a bed, a key (weirdly—why the key?) on a peg behind him. And I had a hunch of the book’s smell, certainly: it was something contiguous to the feeling of a fall morning, and to the horizon looking south, out of town; contiguous, too, to the brackish salt sense of future adulthood, of workdays and money fear, of someone, someday, mysteriously wanting to kiss you. In it I sensed some shadow of the future—as adulthood is, for kids, both inevitable and impossible; as childhood can be intuited, when you’re a kid, as the long shadow of your own adult body cast back onto your child present. I Am the Cheese contained a message for me, I felt. I read the whole thing in one go, one morning in the back of our Datsun Maxima, headed to the mountains, probably, the Oregon Cascades, with the ever-present smell of cut grass and gasoline in the car from my father’s landscaping work; I read the whole thing as though goaded to—whipped on like a dog in a pack of dogs behind the musher of the book.

It’s a paranoid book, and desolate—written, I now understand, at the end of the Vietnam War, around Watergate, the grimmer surfaces of world order newly visible in the first hints of Cold War melt-off—and it was hypnotizing. I dread descriptions of plot, blow-by-blow accounts, but suffice it to say here: I Am the Cheese involves a family swept up in the nascent witness protection program via the father, a small-town-journalist-turned-whistleblower to the violent excesses of government corruption. The book unfolds through the consciousness of the family’s only child, a quiet boy named Adam, and it takes place in the fall, in New England (itself a thrill: me, who had never left Oregon except to visit, once, Fresno). And it is threaded through with references, tightening my ignorant heart to anticipation: references to jazz; to Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel; to petty shoplifting; to the perpetual haunting of the father; to shabby motels, diner hamburgers, pay phones; to conspiracies, details, forms of love and betrayal organizing like ice crystals just behind the surface of things.

“I want to wrap / my face tight with a silk scarf and spiral    down /    a Cinque Terre highway in an Alfa Romeo,” writes Olivia Sokolowski in her poem “Lover of Cars,” which appears in the new Fall issue of the Review. And who doesn’t, when you put it like that? In celebration of Sokolowski’s poem, we’ve commissioned writers to reflect briefly on cars they’ve loved, struggled with, coveted, and crushed on.

“Okay, fine,” I said, when we saw the price of train tickets from Paris to the wedding we were attending deep in the South of France. “I’ll drive. But we’re getting a Citroën Cactus.” I had not driven in Continental Europe before, and had, by quirk more than anything else, only ever driven a succession of Cactuses; first my mum’s, then a different rental, then, finally, my own.

The Cactus is essentially a four-door, five-seat car, but one of deeply muscular proportions—when I sent a photo of my gray model to a friend who could barely believe that I drive, let alone own, a car, he replied, “It’s, like, a 4×4?” Then there is my favorite feature—unique, as far as I know, to the Cactus—a strip of “Airbumps” lining each side. Said to act as a buffer on collision-prone Parisian streets, they make the car look a little like it’s kitted out in a North Face jacket. Cactuses are not flashy, nor are they known for their reliability. Say the word Citroën to any man who is invested in cars and he will shake his head and start talking about “those French cars and their electrics.” But I have never loved anything because it is functional.

So if I was going to drive for hours on the wrong side of the motorway, I wanted a Cactus. Europcar, however, had other ideas.

“What is this car?” I said, when I saw the word Renault on the rental forms in Europcar’s Charles de Gaulle office. “We selected the Citroën Cactus.”

$2.99 How To Survive Your Murder by Danielle Valentine Get This Deal

$2.99 The Minus-One Club by Kekla Magoon Get This Deal

$1.99 The Black Queen by Jumata Emill Get This Deal

$2.99 The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass Get This Deal

$3.99 She’s Too Pretty To Burn by Wendy Heard Get This Deal

$2.99 Jack of Hearts (And Other Parts) by L.C. Rosen Get This Deal

$2.99 Mirror Girls by Kelly McWilliams Get This Deal

$2.99 Girl Forgotten by April Henry Get This Deal

In recent months I have been listening to Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No. 2 (1945) and trying to describe something, anything, about it. Describe seems too weak a word when there exist long formal analyses of the piece: nevertheless, analysis seems easy, and description much more difficult.

It might be a vocabulary and grammar and syntax issue: I’m not sure we have any of those for music like this. Mervyn Cooke says of the first movement: “The overall effect … is highly unusual.” This is the reassuring resignation of a music writer.

***

Roland Barthes: “Music, by natural bent, is that which at once receives an adjective.”

Book Riot and EveryLibrary have teamed up to execute a series of surveys exploring parental perceptions of libraries, and our first data sets were released at the end of September. These specifically explore the ways parents perceive public libraries. Looking at the results gives a sense of deep tension — 92% feel their children are safe at the public library, and most parents (66%) report not having their child borrow a book that made them uncomfortable. In the ongoing exploration of this data, let’s take a look at the cross tabs of one specific question that, while concerning, also showcases opportunity. What do the people who do not know how librarians select materials — that’s 53% of the responses — think about other topics related to contemporary book banning? I’ve isolated the respondents to the question in order to look at any potential trends among the rest of their responses. This is the second in a series diving deeper into the data. The first explored what else parents who believed librarians should be prosecuted for the materials in their collections thought.

The demographics of this subset of respondents are close to those of the overall sample. Most are white (70%), followed by Hispanic/Latinx (9%), Black (9%), Asian American (6%), Native (2%), and another race (3%). The vast majority, 85%, were between the ages of 27 and 58. This demographic tended to have less political party affiliation as republican or democrat than the overall sample (18% vs. 14%), and they also tended to choose independent affiliation more frequently (25% vs. 21%). Democrat and republican affiliations in this subset were nearly identical, but the “none” and “independent” affiliations differences are higher. Social media use mirrored the overall survey, with the most frequently used being Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.

One noteworthy find in the basic information section, given at the end of the survey, was this: those within the subset of being unaware of how librarians selected materials for the collection were more likely than the full group to say book banning was not an issue important to them (45% of the subset vs. 36% of the full survey). In other words, people who don’t know how librarians select books are more likely not to care about book bans. In some ways, this makes sense. It might also be reflective of some overall messaging around book bans and the ways that this issue has been seeded within the democratic and republican parties, especially given that this subset is more likely to consider themselves independent or non-affiliated. We know this is not a partisan issue, but perhaps it is perceived as one.

This subset of users was only slightly less likely to have visited a public library in the last 12 months (91% to 93%), but they visited less frequently (on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 indicating using the library all the time, the subset ranked a 5.7 and the overall survey a 6.6 — not significant, but noteworthy). They were also less likely to have a library card, with 88% saying they did and the overall survey indicating that 92% had a library card. Again, this data tracks: those who are unfamiliar with how libraries operate are likely those who visit less often and do not have a library card. But again, these differences are not significant ones.

Bigger differences emerged, though, when it came to whether or not these parents had children with library cards. Among the subset of respondents who did not know how librarians select materials for the collection, 52% stated their child had a public library card. In the full survey, 60% of parents said their child had a public library card. This stark difference appeared within another option in this question: 19% of these parents said their child did not have a public library card, while the full survey had this response only 14% of the time.

There’s nothing a good bookworm loves more than a fictional character, be they from a book or a movie or television series, who shares our love of reading. It’s a good 90% of why Gilmore Girls remains as perennially beloved as it is. But as fans of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper series know, Rory Gilmore simply packing a book with her everywhere she goes cannot even hold a candle to Isaac (Tobie Donovan) on the Netflix adaptation. This boy is seen reading in almost every frame of film he appears in on Heartstopper.

Naturally, our fellow readers got to work on documenting every book that Isaac is seen reading in season 2 of the beloved queer teen romcom. Heartstopper only continues to grow in popularity, especially among young adults, so it might even come to pass that, in time, it will become more influential than Gilmore Girls, at least in terms of literature. Sure, Instagram nostalgia accounts love to get their Rory on by reading their way through her own reading list from that series. But as an equally devoted fan of Gilmore Girls, I can attest that the Rory Gilmore reading challenge can be as boring and pretentious in a way that the series managed not to be.

The premise of Heartstopper revolves around the messiness of growing up, which can get even messier with queer kids. In a nice homage to the message of the series as a whole, Isaac’s books are about as gay as they could possibly be, at least on a show as gay as Heartstopper. As we chronicle each book that Isaac is seen reading throughout season 2, not only do they reflect some of the challenges the characters face in this latest installment but also a clear foreshadow of Isaac’s realization in the season finale that he might be asexual — a criminally underrepresented letter of the LGBTQIA+ alphabet.

Isaac — who, as dedicated fans of the series will know, replaces the character of Aled Last from Oseman’s graphic novel series — was more of a wallflower throughout the first season. He’s still sticking to his comfort zone for the most part in the second season, but we are soon privy to learn that there might be something more to his seemingly antisocial behavior as he repeatedly gazes around the room at romantic couples, appearing apathetic and returning to his book. Things start to get complicated when James (Bradley Riches), another young queer student, starts displaying feelings towards Isaac.

Oseman, who writes the Netflix adaptation of her graphic novels, was clever to start sub-textually suggesting that Isaac might be grappling with queer feelings during the second season by way of the books he’s seen reading. After all, the wallflower characters deserve a storyline of their own as well. One book he’s seen reading in the first episode of season 2 is I Love This Part, Tillie Walden’s YA graphic novel about a budding romance between two teenage girls. It is an obvious ode to Tara and Darcy’s (Corinna Brown and Kizzy Edgell) romance, of course.

With NaNoWriMo starting at the beginning of November, now could be the perfect time to invest in a new app that promises to help you finally finish your novel. tome. was established in 2022 and promises to make writing more accessible to everyone. The program teaches you how to plan and write your novel and gives you the tools to motivate yourself to get it done.

But if you’re interested in trying out tome., you kinda have to go all-in. The app, unlike a lot of other apps in the market, does not offer a free trial. If you buy the app, you get access to it for life, but you do have to throw down around $100 right off the bat. So before you take that leap, you might want to know: Is tome. the kind of app that’s going to suit my needs? Will I really be able to finish writing my novel if I get this product? Will it help me come up with ideas? Spark my creativity?

Let’s take a closer look at the app and what it can and can’t do. Then you can decide if it’ll work out for you and your writing goals!

Whether you already have a draft or you’re just starting out with your writing project, tome. promises to create a custom program designed to help you take your writing to the next level. After you purchase tome., the app guides you through a series of questions to get an idea of where you’re at in your project and what you need the most help doing. Do you need more ideas? Creative prompts? More motivation to just sit down and write? tome. has got you covered.

What do you picture when you hear the term “tentacle manga?” Sure, I can imagine that images of really extreme hentai and the “squid porn” stereotype may come to mind. And while all that certainly does exist, don’t be too quick to judge!

From the very tame to the very spicy, from horror to comedy to erotica, tentacle manga can run the gamut. Unfortunately, our choices do become significantly more limited when just looking at what’s licensed and available in English, but you can certainly get an adequate sampling. As something of a primer, I’ve collected a few tentacle manga picks from various genres here to get you started. Admittedly, your mileage may vary, especially when it comes to the smutty titles, but all I ask is that you don’t jump to conclusions before giving it a test run yourself. So, without further ado, please enjoy this introduction to tentacle manga!

As a quick note before fully diving in, please do be sure to take care when dipping into the more sexually explicit tentacle manga out there, as you may find yourself running into some content that could be questionable based on your personal comfort levels. I’ve included some key content warnings on titles here to hopefully aid readers when getting started.

Knights of Sidonia by Tsutomu Nihei Thousands of years ago, Earth was destroyed by the Gauna, a race of tentacle-y, shape-shifting aliens, forcing humankind to flee on numerous huge spacecraft. The Sidonia is one of these — and one of the last remains of human civilization. It is defended by Gardes, mechanized weapons made to be able to destroy the mysterious Gauna and piloted by young recruits. Nagate Tanikaze has recently been drafted as one of these pilots, just as the threat of the Gauna is rising once again.

The arrival of fall always sends me running toward the kitchen. Summer is all about meals that do not require heat — sliced tomatoes on good bread, limey cucumber salads, bagels piled with pickled onions, scallions, and herbs. Despite the abundance of produce, summer is not my favorite time to cook. That distinction goes to fall, with its blessedly cool days and crisp nights. Fall awakens the cook in me again. Suddenly, I find myself craving complicated baking projects, warming soups and stews, and afternoons spent making elaborate meals for friends.

All this cooking excitement often leads me to new cookbooks. Fall is a big season for new cookbook releases, as illustrated by the books on this list, which are just a tiny fraction of all the cookbooks that have just been released and are still coming before the end of the year! My own cooking (and eating) tastes are wide and varied, which means these cookbooks are, too. I’m drooling over new books that delve into the cuisines of Taiwan, Nigeria, and Iran. Two of my favorite bakers also have new cookbooks coming out. I can’t wait to make some of the hearty feasts in Adeena Sussman’s Shabbat, and I already know that Simply West African is going to introduce me to many new favorite recipes. I hope these books inspire you toward your own kitchens. I can’t wait to get cooking.

Shabbat by Adeena Sussman Some of my most cherished food memories are of Shabbat dinners. In her newest book, Adeena Sussman shares dozens of beautiful recipes perfect for every kind of Shabbat table. She highlights meals that are easy to prepare, mostly in advance, including roasts, bakes, make-ahead salads, and more. Accompanying the recipes are the stories of many of the home cooks she has come to know in Israel, who share their own beloved Shabbat traditions.

Made in Taiwan by Clarissa Wei with Ivy Chen In her first cookbook, Taipei-based journalist Clarissa Wei celebrates the cuisine of Taiwan through recipes, photographs, interviews, and essays. Taiwanese food has long been considered a flavor of Chinese food. Wei makes it clear that Taiwan has its own culinary history and traditions and that its rich food culture should be recognized separately from Chinese cuisine. She includes dozens of mouthwatering recipes, tips, and techniques alongside stunning photos and meticulous research.

Crave by Karen Akunowicz I absolutely love the idea behind chef and restauranteur Karen Akunowicz’s newest cookbook. Cravings are usually intense and personal, and often they’re associated with a texture or flavor and not a specific food. This book is split into sections that describe different kinds of cravings, such as Crispy & Crunchy or Sweet & Lucious. I am already hungry.

Autumn is my favorite season, and while I love the early fall, with the colorful leaves and the subtle shifts in weather, the later fall/early winter has become an unexpected favorite time as well. I say unexpected because a lot of times, this is when the doldrums can set in: the trees start to become bare, things go colorless, and sometimes it can get bitter cold, and we’re all still getting used to darkness at 5 p.m. But it’s also a time to come home to a stack of books, make some hot chocolate, throw on some fleecy sweats, and grab a blanket to hunker down and read as the wind howls outside the window.

Lucky for you (and all of us, really), there’s no shortage of great books being published this month, especially in nonfiction. There are so many great books coming out this month, and I couldn’t possibly get all of them in one list. On said list, we have an entertaining look at a doll fandom, an exploration of race and culture alongside a major sports figure, and a mother-son road trip, among others. I’m also keeping my eye on books like former Rioter Rebecca Renner’s Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades (November 14), End of the Hour: A Therapist’s Memoir by Meghan Riordan Jarvis (November 14), Cacophony of Bone: The Circle of a Year by Kerri ní Dochartaigh (November 14), and The Boy From Clearwater: Book 1 by Yu Pei-yun (November 21).

So many books, never enough time. So let’s get started!

Dolls of Our Lives: Why We Can’t Quit American Girl by Mary Mahoney and Allison Horrocks (November 7) I’m old enough to know the American Girl brand as Pleasant Company when they only had three dolls available (Kirsten forever!), and so while I feel like I don’t quite get much of the AG obsession, it does bring back nostalgic memories. In this book, Horrocks and Mahoney combine travelogue, memoir, and history as they explore the history of the brand, look at the products themselves and what they meant to a generation, and talk to collectors and fans to find out why the brand has endured, why it’s come to symbolize so much, and the complicated parts of the fandom. It’s a fascinating look at a childhood favorite.

Jumpman: The Meaning and Making of Michael Jordan by Johnny Smith (November 7) As a Tar Heel, I will always read anything and everything about Michael Jordan. That’s just the way it is. Smith, a sports historian, has written a book on Jordan that explores MJ’s place in American culture and how it was shaped by race, politics, and “likeability.” Combining immersive sports writing with incisive social and cultural commentary on the ’90s, this is a new look at a sports figure who’s symbolized many things to many people.

Welcome to November! It’s hard to believe that the end of the year is approaching. Halloween has passed, Daylight Savings Time ends, and we have Thanksgiving to prepare for. My daughter’s 6th birthday is right around the corner as well! It’s going to be a busy month.

Publishing tends to slow down for November and into December, but I still review many excellent titles on this list of November children’s book releases. Several are continuations of popular series, like a new Questioneers picture book featuring the teacher — Lila Greer, Teacher of the Year — and Sail Me Away Home, a middle grade historical fiction and continuation of a series that began with the award-winning novel Show Me a Sign. Several books, like Books Make Good Friends and The Story Orchestra: The Planets, would make excellent gifts over the winter holidays. Usually, my new book release lists tend to include only books for picture book and middle grade readers, but this list of November children’s book releases also consists of a board book, reader, and chapter book. Many center diverse character experiences, from disabled heroines to LGBTQ+ families and Muslim Americans.

There’s a book for every age and every type of reader on this list of November children’s book releases.