Book bans in prisons are nothing new. In fact, censorship thrives in the prison system. Whether the prison is public or private and part of a state-wide system or independent impacts the materials allowed to be sent to individuals (and the method by which they can be sent) and the materials allowed in prison libraries (if those libraries exist at all).

Now, Florida prisons have banned a book by a writer who formerly experienced incarceration about her experience.

Keri Blakinger is a reporter for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news source covering all things relating to the criminal justice system. Corrections In Ink follows Blakinger’s experience growing up as a competitive ice skater who, when her skating partnership ended, began experimenting with drugs. Nine years of instability in her life involved time living houseless and struggling with substance abuse, and just when she was about to pull her life together, Blakinger was arrested. She spent two years in a state prison, leaving sober. Corrections in Ink not only tells her story but offers insight into how she used her privileges as a white woman to help others who were in positions not dissimilar to hers.

The Prison Book Program attempted to send her book to a person inside a Florida prison at Okaloosa, and it was impounded. It is up to the Florida Department of Corrections’ Literature Review Committee to determine whether or not the book can be inside the facilities, but in the mean time, it is banned from every Florida state prison.

Once upon a time, space was only something that humankind could gaze upon and dream about. People wrote outlandish stories about what might be up there, but for most of recorded human history, no one actually knew. Sure, they could see stars and moons and planets, but no one could visit. That all changed in the mid-20th century, when we started actually being launched into the sky. The people who went to space were named astronauts, and as little kids, many of us have lofty goals of being one, but few actually get to touch the stars. That’s why reading about astronauts is so fascinating, hence this list of 30 great astronaut books.

Below, you’ll find stories by and about people who have flown in shuttles, walked on the moon, and visited space stations, as well as a few stories of the people who helped get them there. We may have only explored a fraction of space, but every story about it is exciting and new! There are also several great novels of space exploration, and several fun kids’ books on astronauts, too! The observable, explorable universe is finite, but you’ll never run out of books about space. And with this handy list, you’ll be flying among the stars in no time!

There’s a chill in the air, color in the leaves, and we’re all breaking out our blankets and sweaters. If you’re here, you like snuggling up with a good book especially as the weather turns colder, and comic books are no exception. There’s no better time to grab a hefty omnibus than when I have the padding of a blanket on my lap. As Jack Frost starts his work, I can read about heroes and villains with fire abilities to warm me up.

Of course, there are hundreds of comic book issues that come out every month and November is no exception. Most of them are the newest issue of a long- or short-running series, which makes them very hard to jump into. Continuity is both one of the greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses of comics. This list focuses on #1 issues, collections, and graphic novels.

November has it all in the world of glossies. Superheroes old and new, vampires, Eisner Award nominees, spies, and science fiction. Each one is either standalone or a great point to jump into a new series. Check this list and call your local comic book shop because you need these new comics in November on your pull list.

As you mark your calendar for November events, remember to have your plan to vote in place and a nice stack of books to read, or admiringly stare at. Collecting unread books is also valid — you do you! For this month I’ve got a wide variety of moods and crime books. I’m doing my best to keep up with publishing dates changing so you may remember a book from a couple months ago that got moved for real (hopefully) to this month.

There’s a lot of great reading to be had this November in many different tones and sub-genres! There’s the start to a new police procedural set in Colorado; a dark academia mystery; a short story collection set in countries around the world; a cozy mystery; a story collection with the theme of “witness” with proceeds going to a good cause, a page-turning murder mystery with plenty of suspects; a vigilante historical fiction; a true crime murder that looks at the ethics of genealogy companies’ privacy rules; a past campus murder mystery; a woman who returns home to help her tribe being threatened by frackers; a new Inspector Gamache novel, and two new entries in fun series: one a psychic paired with a detective and the other a loosely tied mystery series for fans of the genre and its tropes.

When I first heard this question, my gut reaction was an emphatic “Yes!” So many self-help/self-improvement books, business books, even some financial advice books are full of unnecessary fluff.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People easily lends itself to a numbered list with a couple-sentence description for each. Atomic Habits is focused around four main steps. Sometimes there are graphs and charts. It could be a zine! I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time could fit in a fortune cookie: “Be a woman who makes six figures at least, has a flexible job, and outsources most domestic labor.” Easy peasy! I know I may be hurting some feelings with this next one, but Brené Brown is really squeezing every bit of juice out of that vulnerability lemon.

My friends: if you have not caught on after your first two Brené Brown books, then I think you might benefit by picking fruit from a different tree in a distant orchard.

All of the above answer the question of “Can most self-help books be pamphlets?” but it doesn’t really answer the question in the title which is “Should most self-help books be pamphlets?” and that, dear readers, is a different question entirely.

Before I answer this question, you should know that I’m an avid self-help reader and I am writing this from a place of fondness. In fact, many of us who read self-help can be described as “avid.” It seems so rare that a person ever picks up only one or two in the genre, likes it, then never touches it ever again. We are serial self-help readers, some of us constantly searching for someone else to tell us to get our shit together, clean up our home, set boundaries, take a nap, and unfuck literally anything in a 10-mile radius. Maybe we are looking for that one book, that singular, special thing that will finally make everything in our lives fall into place.

“Undine Spragg—how can you?” her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid “bell-boy” had just brought in.

It strikes me as odd that the opening of Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel, The Custom of the Country, rarely appears on those “best first lines in literature” lists that go around every so often. The sentence has everything that makes the novel, and Wharton’s work in general, so great: vigor, voice, irony, detail. Through it, Wharton sketches a tense and dissonant world in which the colloquial and the bejeweled come into uncomfortable relation with each other. Dramatic and dynamic, this world nevertheless feels intensely claustrophobic. From the first five words of the novel, the reader is tied to a repetitive present tense that feels inescapable—no future, no past, just a boxed-in present (“how can you?” rather than the usual “how could you?”).

Each time we read the novel, it seems, the continuous present of the deliciously named Undine Spragg happens to us all over again. The Custom of the Country, many recent commentators have noted, feels uncannily up to the minute. Its heroine, the beautiful, social-climbing, rapacious, and empty-souled Undine Spragg, reminds us of a tabloid fixture or a reality television star; her currency as a figure who exemplifies the ideas about white womanhood in every era has remained constant. If the morality of divorce—the main “problem” in this 1913 “problem novel”—is perhaps no longer the most pressing social phenomenon to imaginatively explore, Undine’s grasping, financially speculative approach to personal identity and relationships still is.

Custom tracks Undine’s destructive rise from her life as the middle-class daughter of an upwardly-mobile businessman and his fluttering, matronly wife in the fictional Midwestern town of Apex City to the highest echelons of New York and French society. She chews through husbands and children in search of ever more money and ever better social position, marrying and divorcing like Goldilocks trying various bowls of porridge. In her treatment of each of Undine Spragg’s husbands (and their families), Wharton explores the textures of turn-of-the-century wealth: the prim Old New York dinner table (“the high dark dining-room with mahogany doors and dim portraits”); the musty Louis Quinze traditions of the stuffy French aristocracy; and the vulgar electric light illuminating the capitalist acquisitiveness of the American nouveau riche. As Undine moves through these various worlds of wealth, the novel highlights her comparative freshness within the contexts of their enervating gildedness, extending a sort of deep compass onto this substantially superficial character. The combination of compassion and sharply observed frankness is typical of Wharton’s fiction, which tends to love its characters without letting any of them off the hook.

Around the turn of the millennium, when she was twenty-three, the artist Dawn Kasper began picturing herself dead. Then a first-year graduate student at UCLA Arts, she was spending a great deal of time in isolation in her studio, and the rest of her time consuming material that revolved in some way around violence: video nasties, death-scene photographs by Weegee, Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster silk screens, etc. Eventually, a nagging thought set in: However many entries she slotted into her ever-expanding mental Rolodex of female death scenes—Janet Leigh bleeding out in a motel bathtub, or Sherilyn Fenn having her pretty head cracked open in a car crash; Teri McMinn’s slender shoulders being sickeningly thumped onto a meat hook, or the sister in Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl being slashed through with an axe—she would never have the opportunity to see her own death as a cinematic image. “I wanted to see what I looked like dead,” Kasper recalls in an email. “I began to feel afraid—not of my own mortality, but of never knowing how I might die.” It is not unusual for a first-year student, and a first-year art school student in particular, to be morbid. What was unusual about Kasper’s burgeoning obsession with death was her conviction that it might be possible to influence the circumstances of her own demise. She began to believe that if she could fake being killed in every possible scenario, she could cheat fate, as if anticipating all of death’s potential moves might neutralize them. “As a woman, I felt so out of control,” Kasper says of herself at that age. “I began to worry that I was crazy.”

I first heard about Dawn Kasper’s series Death Scenes via a fleeting mention on a podcast by the brilliant Irish critic Sean McTiernan. Curiously, I could find little in the way of documentation of the work online, save for a brief summary of the project on the artist’s Wikipedia page under the heading “Early work”: “For this series Kasper assumed a performative rigor mortis with a mise-en-scène reminiscent of B horror films and Weegee-eqsue crime scene photography.” The entry quotes art critic Rachel Mason: “For years, Dawn could be spotted, dead, at art events all over Los Angeles, in the tradition of Harold and Maude, sprawled out in an elaborate shrine to some horrific accident.” Kasper researched real accidents both as a means to ensure the visual and physical accuracy of her performances, and to exorcise her terror more completely. “I didn’t care so much about the audience,” she admits. “I wanted to feel; I wanted help. I guess looking back I was very selfish, because I just dumped all over them, and didn’t even look back or ask questions.”

If self-injury is in some way the ultimate use of the body as material, a rejection of personal safety and good sense in service of a higher and more significant goal, the act of dying (or “dying”) in public might be the most perfect and most crystalline expression of that impulse. Other artists have come close. The famous poet and performer Bob Flanagan—who suffered from cystic fibrosis, and who claimed that his passionate love of S&M was what allowed him to outlive his terminal prognosis by two decades—gestured to his imminent death again and again in his work, with coffins and obituaries and hospital beds recurring as motifs. In his ideal artwork, he informs the audience in the 1997 documentary Sick, “I’d be buried with a video camera … in a tomb,” with a connection from the camera to a video monitor. The piece would be called The Viewing, “and every so often someone [could] walk into the room and turn on a switch, and see how I’m progressing.” Doctors had told Flanagan that he would die at twenty-five, right around the age Dawn Kasper was when she first became obsessed with recreating her own hypothetical expiry. If her youthful mania was about prevention, Flanagan’s felt more like goading, a seduction. “I keep thinking I’m dying, I’m dying,” he wrote in his diaristic book of sickness, The Pain Journal. “But I’m not, I’m not—not yet.” Both artists have channeled a sense of terrible helplessness into a form of personal and creative empowerment, the results provocative precisely because they beckon something we are naturally inclined to avoid.

While every story in Meng Jin’s Self-Portrait with Ghost is eerie—as the collection’s title might suggest—the eeriest is the one about three babysitters. “Three women,” the narrator remembers, then corrects herself: “three girls,” though all older than she was. As a child she thought of them as the pretty one and the wicked one, both of whom she loved, and the boring one, whom she disdained. When she grew up and went to college, she found she couldn’t really see her own body except when she compared herself to other girls—whether “ugly or pretty, beautiful or gorgeous, if she was plain but sweet, if I wanted to look like her or not.” Boys, too, she evaluated by proxy: if his girlfriend was pretty, he was desirable. What she didn’t know was that, at the same stage of girlhood, her three original models were already vanishing into women—defined no longer by their own prettiness, wickedness, or dullness, but by the common objectification of their bodies, the varieties of violence done to them, and their differing abilities to stand it. 

—Jane Breakell, development director

I don’t scare easily, but the Latvian artist Julia Soboleva’s I have found the light in the darkness terrified me. In her monograph, which features paintings and collages made of old photographs, Soboleva conjures up an eerie underworld inhabited by birdlike creatures. In one image, a group of weeping doctors with bird heads gather around a surgical table and use pliers to operate on a bleeding human leg. In another, two creatures carry a dead body on a stretcher while a third one watches, smiling. But what’s most disturbing about the book is how, at times, these hybrid animals seem ordinary, even human. They give birth, dance in the park, make out, and meditate; they pose for pictures with their loved ones, and they seem happy. Soboleva’s rendering of this ghostly world in images is so clear that it’s as if these strange creatures have always lived right beneath our feet, and she is finally allowing us to see them.

I was almost done with a draft of my novel when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. Amid the destruction and devastation that followed, continuing with my novel felt impossible; I turned toward journalism, which had always been a part-time job for me. For seven months, I have been working as a war correspondent in Ukraine. I have found that I can only read war reports: I am constantly turning to On the Front Line by Marie Colvin. I have wondered about the role of literature, especially in wartime: Are we simply supposed to let documentaries and daily news take over? Or do we find—and provide—an escape from the unbearable?

I began to ask other writers these questions and was surprised by the variability of their answers. Five Ukrainian writers from the Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv regions—the areas devastated by the war—spoke to me about the genres they have been reading and writing during the war. In Kharkiv, a literature professor told me about his rare books being burned in the stove by the Russian military. He also told me about a Ukrainian officer seeking reading recommendations the day before being killed at the front. “I think that an epic work of literature will not come until after the war is over,” writes Serhiy Zhadan. On the other hand, says Lyuba Yakimchuk, “The task of poets is to put the unspeakable feelings in words.” Olga Kryaziach, whose apartment and books were also burned by the Russians, reads and writes on her iPad, taking notes for a different future.

Iya Kiva

I have started to become spatially disoriented because of the war. Once, as I was getting back to a rented apartment, I couldn’t figure out where I was or how I got there for hours. I lived in a Soviet project-style block of flats called khrushchyovka surrounded by identical buildings, and I couldn’t understand which one of those khrushchyovkaswas my home these days; I was shaking and I couldn’t breathe. In another one of my rented apartments, I was always hitting my head while entering. At home, I needed to turn left after entering, but in this new space I had to turn right.

Katherine Dunn didn’t really make a living from her fiction until 1987, when, at forty-two, she sold Geek Love, her third published novel, to Sonny Mehta at Knopf for twenty-five thousand dollars—a windfall that briefly swept away her persistent financial concerns. Dunn had relied on all sorts of ways to make ends meet while she was coming up as a writer. At eighteen years old, in 1963, she sold fake magazine subscriptions door-to-door in the Midwest until she was arrested in Missouri for trying to cash a client’s fraudulent check. As a college student, first at Portland State and later at Reed, she worked as a topless dancer, a nude model for art students, and a writer of fellow students’ term papers. She also hustled pool.

After her first novel, Attic, was published in 1970, Dunn got a gig in Manhattan writing scripts for Warner Brothers. She returned to Portland in 1976, after years of travel. There she tended bar at the Earth Tavern, a dive-bar-slash-rock venue frequented by hippies, bikers, and merchant marines. She wrote a question-and-answer column for Willamette Week, the local Portland alt-weekly, and covered local boxing.

But, mostly, as she struggled to make it as a fiction writer, Dunn waited tables, most notably at the Stepping Stone Cafe, a terrific Northwest Portland diner. When I stopped there last summer on a trip doing research for a biography about Dunn, it felt like it probably hadn’t changed much since she worked there in the seventies and eighties. Back then, the only day care she could afford for her young son, Eli Dapolonia, was a seat at the counter while she poured coffee and charmed customers.

18/04/2022, 14:28, CT Angiogram renal & abdominal

No vascular calcification.

No renal calculi.

The kidneys are symmetrical in size (right = 11.1 cm; left = 11.0 cm) and normal in morphology.

When I show up for New York Film Festival’s 9:30 P.M. opening-night screening of White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, the lobby is already swarming with television executives, publicists, and Lincoln Center benefactors. No one seems to have known how to dress for either the event or the weather. (Puffer coat and sheer tights? Sandals and spaghetti straps? Sensible backpack or Prada bag?) “They told me the vibe was black-tie,” a woman in a sequined gown says to her husband guiltily. He has very clearly been forced to wear a tuxedo. I watch some groups trying and failing to cut the line by flashing the branded wristband we have all been given. I find my seat and settle in for a Q&A with Noah Baumbach and members of the cast, including Greta Gerwig, Adam Driver, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Don Cheadle. They crack self-deprecating off-the-cuff jokes, as if there had not been two previous screenings earlier this evening. (At one point Baumbach says the “nine o’clock crowd” is his favorite yet. People cheer.) 

Finally the movie starts, and I take in Adam Driver as Jack Gladney, the chairman of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill, complete with gaudy button-down, receding hairline, and prosthetic paunch. The film is divided into three sections punctuated by the climactic “airborne toxic event,” which, as in the book, is also the most exciting and easiest bit to follow (a car crashes into a train carrying noxious chemicals; deadly smoke shrouds the sky). As the movie’s abrupt cuts and ecstatic colors make me mildly seasick, I notice some cast members appearing and disappearing into an opera box to glance at themselves on the screen. Perhaps taking their cue from the cast, several audience members trickle toward the exits around the time Babette, played by Gerwig, tells Jack she is afraid to die. (They miss the best part of the movie, which is the extended credits-and-dance sequence in the supermarket, set to LCD Soundsystem’s “new body rhumba,” written for the film.) The lights come back on and the actors again appear in the opera box, applauding and waving to the crowd.

A little after midnight, a group of white-haired men in newsboy caps wander down 66th Street toward Central Park, in the general direction of the after-party. “That Adam Driver,” one of them says. “Poorly cast. He just isn’t what you’d call an everyman.” A few women walk beside me, discussing the odds of getting in without a wristband. “What if Noah Baumbach tells us to leave?” A long line leaks out of Tavern on the Green: women in pearls and staticky shawls, men in sport coats over T-shirts and loafers without socks. Someone ushers me toward the front and soon enough I’m holding a miniature cheeseburger, a tiny tiramisu, and a free negroni. A famous DJ plays and red strobe lights flash across walls lined with rows of Campari bottles. I watch a group of women attempt to order spicy margaritas from the bartender, who throws his hands up in exasperation—he can’t serve anything except Campari-based cocktails. The liquor brand is proudly sponsoring the event. 

—Camille Jacobson, engagement editor

It was only a matter of time before the “Don’t Say Gay” bill of Florida and the wave of similar anti-LGBTQ+ bills passed throughout the country made its way to the federal level.

Congressman Mike Johnson (Louisiana) introduced the “Stop the Sexualization of Children” Act into the House this week. The bill would “prohibit the use of Federal funds to develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually-oriented program, event, or literature for children under the age of 10, and for other purposes.” The bill would disallow funding for any organization — from libraries to schools to medical facilities and more — offering any materials or programming related to “sexually oriented material” to people under the age of 10. The vagueness of this definition is precisely the point, as it would open the door for vast interpretation and would not only lead to censorship but would lead to the persecution of any individual who does not align with perceived notions of “appropriate.”

As writer Alejandra Cabarello points out, the provision within the bill for “Private Right of Action” is an open bounty for individuals to file lawsuits against anyone using federal funds, banning any and all discussion of LGBTQ+ people and topics wherein there might be children under 10.

This means a queer elementary school educator may be unable to do their job, simply because they are queer. Or because they show a film that one parent may disagree with and choose to interpret as sexual indoctrination.

It means a queer doctor in a public hospital could be sued simply for being queer. A logo that looks too suspiciously “like a rainbow flag” could trigger lawsuits.

In education there’s a distinct jargon used. Acronyms and idioms and particular turns of phrase. This isn’t unique to education, but ubiquitous in most occupations. While we do the best we can to reflect on our teaching processes and make corrections where necessary, sometimes we don’t even think about a term that needs to be examined because we’ve been using it for so long. This is not an excuse; it’s an explanation.

“Reluctant reader” is one of those terms. It’s still in use for a few reasons. One, it does describe people who are hesitant to read, and specifically, books or long passages. Two, it’s easy to remember and easily understood by non-educators. Parents, for example, understand what we mean when we call a child a reluctant reader. Whereas terms like 504 or scaffolding or IEP are not as accessible upon first hearing them. Finally, it’s alliterative. I don’t have to tell you that people who love literacy love alliteration.

It’s time for the expression to be closely examined and weighed. “Reluctant reader” does not have a positive connotation, for children or adults who identify with that term. In order to redefine reluctant readers, we first have to understand who they are.

It’s Monster Mash season, baby! My favorite time of year. Porches are decorated with pumpkins and ghouls, bowls of candy are everywhere you look, and the options for your costume are endless. And with that comes all of the scary movies, books, and comics just waiting at your fingertips. You want vampires, you’ve got them. You want aliens? You betcha. You want horror that’s also sad? Signed, sealed, delivered. Even for the scaredy cats, there’s lighthearted horror or the cozy aspects of the holiday. Hot chocolate and chocolate and sweaters to stave off the fall chill. There’s something for everyone at Halloween, that’s what makes it so great.

Sometimes working full time or taking care of a family makes it harder to get into the Halloween spirit. I love comics and audiobooks and even podcasts full of scares to get me in the monster mood. Comics and graphic novels are great to read during my lunch break or for 15 minutes before bed. I fall asleep with the images seared into my brain, gorgeous and gruesome in equal measure.

If you’re wanting more horror in your life, here are eight Halloween comics to read this scary season (or anytime really)!

I love big, sprawling, fantasy series as much as anyone. But for the past few years, I’ve also been craving more self-contained stories that don’t demand as much time and attention from me. Which is why I began reading standalones — and let me say that they are more than capable of telling complete and detailed stories with well-developed characters despite the shorter format. In fact, that’s exactly what makes them great reads for both fantasy newbies and genre veterans. We covered adult fantasy standalones recently here at Book Riot. So today I’m going to focus on standalone YA fantasy books.

A few things before we get to these amazing books. For today’s list, I chose eight great books with different kinds of fantasy elements. From mythology retellings, to mermaids, golems, witches, and even exorcists. There’s a book for everyone on this list! Plus, I chose to focus on more recent releases — the oldest one being from mid 2020. That’s because, now more than ever, standalone YA fantasy books are thankfully full of non-Western, non-white, and non-cis characters and settings. Which is something I wanted to focus on today.

So without further ado, let’s dive into eight great standalone YA fantasy books that are absolutely worth reading.