Because I write about sex for a living—and because I maintain an online database of sex ed resources for parents and other caregivers—publicists often send me stuff that is sex- and sex ed-adjacent. You know. PMDD devices. Lazy eye lifts (?). Every CBD product known to man. (Seriously. Stop sending me CBD pitches.)

On top of all these, there are also the middle grade novels with themes around sex ed or puberty or menstruation. In the past, I’ve rarely read them, as I don’t often include fiction in the Guerrilla Sex Ed database. But as my child has hit the tween years and has started to read chapter books (I mean, primarily Warrior Cats and Wings of Fire, but still…), I’ve taken to flipping through them, screening them to see if they might be appropriate for my child.

In doing so, I’ve realized what, deep down, I already knew: fiction has a lot to teach us, and some of those middle grade novels totes count as sex ed.

A publisher recently sent me Ali Terese’s Free Period, a middle grade novel about menstrual equity. It was absolute fire.

When I first cracked it open, I did so with the intention of possibly saving it for my 9-year-old. After all, some kids start menstruating at that age. But then I got super into it, and I realized this book deserves to be in my database of sex ed books…which means I should probably consider other fiction titles, too.

Creating D&D campaign ideas from scratch can be exhilarating, fun, and also nerve-wracking. On the surface, there appears to be so much to think about, plan, prepare, and envision. However, in reality, as a D&D Dungeon Master (DM), you do not have to have a 500-page novel laid out before you sit down with your players. Yes, some DMs prefer to have most of their ideas, plot hooks, villains, and encounters all set and ready to go.

However, there are other schools of thought out there that posit it’s better to go session-to-session. This is based on the improvisational nature of the game and the unpredictability of players, if you plan TOO much, as a DM, you run the risk of railroading your players into scenarios that fit your story, not theirs. And it’s important to remember that a good D&D session should disrupt your carefully laid out plans as a DM. You shouldn’t have any idea what they are going to do and will need to act accordingly.

That said, there are some ways for you as a DM to create a framework of ideas that will help you be prepared. You can have a loose set of campaign ideas to get things started. We cover some D&D campaign ideas to get you started before your next adventures!

You, of course, can create your own library. I made one for our players, which I called “The Revelation.” It was a place where players could have maps made, conduct research on their downtime (for a fee, of course), and meet interesting and strange NPCs.

When I read Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, a novel about an interpreter at the International Court of Justice, I found myself underlining every page. Perhaps the identity crisis of the narrator—“I was repulsed, to find myself so permeable”—had transferred to me. Or perhaps the clarity of her sentences left me defenseless. I was instantly immersed. Like all of Kitamura’s fiction, Intimacies is about the psychic effects of inhabiting another person’s mind. The novel explores the narrator’s complicity as she voices the words of a war criminal and the personal crises of those around her. Can channeling others shape (or erase) our sense of self? And how does private grief deepen or prime a precarious selfhood? Even when she interprets the words of a victim, she concedes “the strangeness of speaking her words for her, the wrongness of using this I that was hers and not mine, this word that was not sufficiently capacious.”

My poems in the Winter issue of the Review grapple with the boundary between self and other, image and reflection. I wrote “Echo” not long after finishing Intimacies. Echo, whom the goddess Hera silences, is left repeating the last words of the object of her love, Narcissus. The effect is a kind of trailing-off, a depreciated self. Though Kitamura’s narrator also feels depreciated (“I realized that for him I was pure instrument”), the novel’s stunning end reconstructs the first person. Intimacies is that rare novel that, fittingly, reverberates in your mind.

—Callie Siskel, author of “Narcissus,” “Echo,” and “The Concept of Immediacy”

I came back from London on a miserable winter day, feeling fluey and gray, filled with an end-of-year, end-of-era angst that I saw reflected in the heavy skies and the mountains looming, gloaming, above Geneva.

In her Art of Poetry interview in our new Winter issue, Louise Glück expertly captures the psychodynamics between older poets and their perennially youthful students: “The younger person is reminding the older one of the early ferocity of their vocation,” she observes like a practiced analyst, while “the older person is a representative of stubbornness and persistence and sometimes a kind of majestic fatigue.”

Glück may not have assumed an air of majestic fatigue when I was her student in college three decades ago, but my classmates and I certainly all vied, often without success, to impress her with our ferocity. She was wry, unfazed by the world’s peculiarities—as I imagine she was in the first workshop she ever taught, at Goddard College in the sixties. “Goddard had a naked dorm and the class was held there,” she tells her interviewer, Henri Cole, “which didn’t mean my students were naked, but that the students who lived there were. When my class met, we would keep our clothes on, but it was weird to see these naked bodies going back and forth, not all of them fabulously beautiful, I might add, though they were all young.” I like to imagine the future Nobel laureate looking up from a page where some student had bared their soul to see others baring their bottoms out the window.

You can eavesdrop on the kind of advice Glück would give young writers, at once metaphysical and down-to-earth, in this issue: “Always, one thing to do, if you’re stuck, is to ask a ques­tion in the poem,” she reminds us. “A question shifts the mechanism of the poem.” For more insights into how poems happen, you can read our Making of a Poem feature with Farid Matuk, whose poem “Crease” you’ll also find in the issue. (“That near rhyme of love and of was tricky for me,” Matuk confides.) Or check out our Making of a Poem with the translator Aimee Chor, who brought Nadja Küchenmeister’s “feathers and planets” to our pages: “The English is in some ways very unlike the German,” Chor notes. “Wäscheständer does not sound like laundry rack, and quark is not really the same thing as cream.”

Also in our Winter poetry mix: more laundry, in Alice Notley’s “The Answer Is Awe”; three poems by Callie Siskel, another student of Glück’s; “defective goods” in Zheng Xiaoqiong’s “Water Becomes Water,” translated by Eleanor Goodman; a dead bird on a doorstep with “something / Moving inside of it,” brought to us by Dorothea Lasky; leporine fisticuffs, courtesy of Angela Ball; and an unsettling posthumous contract signed by Harryette Mullen, which concludes (hint hint) with the speaker’s promise “to pay tribute with offerings that confirm my commitment and extend my status as a faithful subscriber.”

It was 1990, and the man I loved had died. I was out all the time. I just couldn’t stay inside, and I was writing in a notebook in places where I could sit for a spell. A new shop opened on Broadway, a bakery that was also a café in the low eighties or maybe the seventies, on the east side of the street. You could sit there with a coffee and maybe—after God knows how long—you would also buy a muffin out of obligation and shame.

The owner hated his customers because he’d created the wrong kind of flock in us. We were a band of deadbeat loners, off whom rose different kinds of sadness that united us into a force. The owner was a loud and theatrical gay man I also felt for because he may have been as lonely as we were, and he was trying to establish a business. I don’t remember if he had a boyfriend. I remember the startling freedom of his contempt for us—and by us, I don’t mean the customers who came and left in a timely fashion and didn’t turn his place into a campsite. He would thrash about, sighing and slamming down the cups he bussed after one of us moved on. It was theater. The boss staged his show, and we were the audience.

In the spring of 2002, Geoff Dyer published a piece in The Threepenny Review called “The Despair of Art Deco.” It’s a wonderful piece about nothing, really, meaning it’s my kind of writing, in which for seven pages or so Dyer recounts a recent visit with his girlfriend to South Beach, Miami, where he plans to write about the art deco hotels that attract visitors. Instead, he sees his first dead body, or at least the soiled socks of a woman who has jumped from a balcony to her death on the sidewalk, careful to avoid landing on anyone.

Earlier on the visit, Dyer and his girlfriend are asked to take a photograph of a couple standing in front of the house where Versace was gunned down. The patch of sidewalk has become a site of what I would call “dark tourism.” Dyer doesn’t call it that, but he understands there is some attraction people feel to standing in proximity to where something gory and grisly has taken place, in order to feel the double thrill of not yet being dead and also being reminded that every life goes in only one direction.

Billows and soft extensions, the cream lapping through there, between solid graymass and float down to sea, and above that gray, more light, and off to the left, white light, then ruffles, and above, more and more gray. In another direction, blue with acrobatic twists, spreadings. Is that the aither high above that the Greeks thought divine?

Mountains uplift, spray down to water, cream’s reddening, blocks it off to the right.

Bastions, mirth, huge extensions, structures of no hand, silver too is penetrant.

[Maricao, Puerto Rico, September 4, 2004]

Here is Norman Mailer in his fine black boots, high-cut and shiny and very snug on the ankle, like something you might pick out if you were the prop master for an expensive production of Richard III. Sweating a bit under the TV lights, he seems to be doing an imitation of a scowl, as if to gesture toward his reputation as a guy who goes around scowling. He sits angled toward the host, Dick Cavett, who bends slightly away from him, as do the other two guests. One of them is Gore Vidal. Like Mailer, Vidal is doing an impersonation of himself. He strikes various languorous attitudes as the camera begins to roll, reclining deeper into his chair as Mailer leans forward, toying idly with his glasses and smiling as Mailer yaps and bares his teeth. A cat and a dog.

Compared to these two, both positively radiant with the excitement of showing off, the third guest seems to have been invited on by mistake. She is, basically, an old lady. She wears white gloves and a neat skirt suit, with a scarf knotted at her neck. She doesn’t say much at first, waiting patiently as, according to the description on the YouTube clip, “the infamous feud between novelist Norman Mailer and writer Gore Vidal comes to a head in a battle of wit, sarcasm, and condescension with the audience and Janet Flanner”—that’s her—“(reluctantly) in the front row.”

This is all wrong. First, if you have come to this old episode of The Dick Cavett Show to witness an invigorating exchange of white-hot barbs, you are in for a disappointing half hour. It’s not so much a mighty clash of intellect as two exceptionally vain men seizing the opportunity to come out with bons mots they have been practicing in the mirror for weeks beforehand. These include zingers like “intellectual cow.” It never really rises above this level and is often even more mortifying than that—five minutes in, Mailer affects an air of fascination as he wonders if Muhammad Ali “came out of a good (bleep) or a bad one.” He repeats this a couple of times, his delight in himself so childlike it is almost touching. Second, the suggestion that Flanner is a reluctant participant, in fact barely a participant at all, is inaccurate. She is evidently having fun, making droll remarks and winking at the audience; she, at least, is aware of the silliness of what is unfolding. She maintains her good humor for a solid fifteen minutes as the two men toss their dignity to the far winds, finally interrupting Vidal just as he is about to respond to Mailer’s accusation that his work smells of “intellectual pollution.”

It’s very odd, she says, that the two of you act as if you’re the only people here. “Aren’t we?” Mailer burbles. She gestures to the audience and says, “They’re here.” She points to Cavett—“He’s here.” She points at herself, doing a funny little mime of indignation—“I’M HERE, and I’m becoming very, very bored.” The audience bursts into laughter and applause. She blows a kiss at Mailer, and the applause increases. Mailer’s shoulders shoot up even higher, and he can’t rid his voice of a disconsolate note as he assures Flanner that he wouldn’t hit her, because she is “intellectually smaller” than he is. Flanner laughs uproariously.

I knew nothing about F. Scott Fitzgerald when I stumbled on Tender Is the Night in 1962. I didn’t know he’d struggled with the book for almost nine years, and that during his lifetime it never settled into a finished version. I was a naive and ignorant twenty-year-old, studying English and French literature at the University of Melbourne, an unawakened literary snob who had hardly read anything twentieth-century American in her life, and was weighed down by the mighty eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and European novels and poetry that we were to study for final examinations. I pulled the Fitzgerald off a shelf in the bookshop where I had a summer job. It was so delicious and joyful to read, I could canter through it with such bright and sudden pleasure, that it felt almost criminal. Secretly I knew it was way too enjoyable to be literature.

Two years later, practicing for final exams, we were given a page of prose to translate from English into French. I was a lazy student, barely keeping up, and I dreaded these exercises. I turned over the sheet of paper and was staggered to see that the passage was from Tender Is the Night.

On the shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stood a large, proud, rose-coloured hotel. Deferential palms cooled its flushed façade, and before it stretched a short dazzling beach. Now it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; in 1925 it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April; only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water-lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away. The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows.

Deferential palms cooled its flushed façade? The bright tan prayer rug of the beach? I looked up at the lecturer, a scornful Frenchwoman in her forties. A sardonic smile crossed her face. I put down my pen and lowered my forehead to the desk. Did she think I was regretting all the classes I’d missed, the afternoons I’d spent down in the city watching Westerns and Bergman movies, or drinking and shouting in the beer garden with the architecture students? She was right: I hadn’t a clue how to translate these images—but faced with the impossible task, I was struck dumb for the first time by their depth and richness. She couldn’t have known what a gift she’d handed me. My boxed-in ideas of whose writing could be taken seriously had just been blown sky-high. She probably thought I was panicking, about to cry, but I was taking off my hat and bowing low. I was humbled, freed, and giddy with jubilation.

Besides Britney, bottled water is Kentwood’s biggest export. Across most of Louisiana, this town is more famous for the water than the woman. “Why are you going to the water bottle town?” the man sitting next to me at the bar asks. I’m in New Orleans, on Carondelet Street.

I’m eating at an oyster counter near my grandfather’s former office. Not his favorite, the Black Pearl, where he used to eat a dozen daily on his lunch breaks, grading each one on a scale of 1–10 in his notebook. He died at the start of spring this year, smack in the middle of Carnival, the ambulance stuck in parade traffic for an hour. When I tell the man next to me I’m going to Britney Spears’s hometown to see her house, he says he saw her perform before she became Britney Spears, when she was still Britney from Kentwood, at a concert called Louisiana Jukebox. She was there with her mother, answering audience questions after the show. A childhood friend of my mother’s was there, too, and had incidentally emailed me about it the night before. It was disturbing, she remembered; Britney was so young, but her “song was so sexual, and in person, she looked like the girl next door who every man wants to devirginize.”

The next morning, the drive through St. John the Baptist Parish is mostly swamp. Highways on thick stilts through the cypress glens; the long, low bridge over Lake Pontchartrain. Two men fishing, smoking, laughing. Once you cross into Tangipahoa Parish, you’re mostly on dry land, which means Bible billboards and fast-food spots.

On the off-ramp into town, I see the water tower emblazoned with the Kentwood logo, familiar from plastic bottles. I drive down the town’s main street, past buildings with drooping awnings and wilting, cantilevered roofs, an abandoned white brick structure that reads “Kentwood Glass” in faded, sky-blue letters and a boarded-up bar called Sip Some Daiquiris. I stop at a red light next to This & That Pawn Shop, across from a café called The Cafe, which does appear to be an accurate moniker. It’s the only one in town. I knew Kentwood would be small—the cottage industry of Britney documentaries all describe it as a sleepy town, and a denizen of a Britney message board I’ve browsed periodically for years returned from their own trip here only to post that the area had a “southern gothic vibe” and note, appalled, that “there is NO WALMART, MCDONALDS, or HOSPITALS.” A visiting reporter once observed that Britney was forced to “travel an hour to shop at her nearest Abercrombie and Fitch.” I pull into a spot at the Sonic for sustenance and Diet Coke. Britney was repeatedly followed here and photographed and the resulting images posted to gossip sites. I remember scrolling the zoomed-in shots of Britney and her sister fingering fries, avoiding the camera’s eye. Britney had one hand on the wheel, the other headed for her mouth. Thanksgiving 2010.

The new Winter issue of The Paris Review, no. 246, includes an Art of Fiction interview with the Chinese writer Yu Hua, the author of novels such as To Live, Brothers, and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. We asked Yu to contribute a syllabus to our ongoing series, and he obliged with a list of recommendations that he’s provided to his students—but, as he says in his interview, remember not to be narrowly focused on reading lists: “Literature is not the only thing in my life. I encourage my students to think this way, too. Recently, I told one of them, ‘Let’s meet this afternoon to talk about the story you wrote,’ and he said, ‘Professor, I’m going clubbing tonight.’ I said, ‘All right, have fun.’ ”

I am a professor of creative writing at Beijing Normal University, and with few exceptions, most of my students have no experience writing before enrolling in my course. We begin with short stories before transitioning to novellas, a literary form uniquely popular in China—works of fiction between thirty thousand and a hundred thousand Chinese characters. Julio Cortázar’s “The Southern Thruway” and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach are both excellent examples.

When recommending literary works to my students, I base my suggestions on two principles. The first is to avoid works that are already extremely well-known in China, which most of my students will have read during senior middle school or high school. (The Old Man and the Sea, which I ask them to reread, is an exception to that rule.) The second principle is to tailor my lists to students’ individual writing goals.

This is the fourth in a series of posts that will offer insights and calls to action based on the results of three recent surveys conducted by Book Riot and the EveryLibrary Institute. The surveys explored parental perceptions of public libraries, parental perceptions of librarians, and parental perceptions of school libraries. The first post in the series emphasized how data overwhelmingly supports libraries and library workers. The second looked at how what’s happening in school libraries is foreshadowing the future of public libraries. The third on why library workers need to be their own advocates of the library.

85% of parents trust librarians. Librarians, both in schools and in public institutions, are among the top-ranked professionals alongside doctors, nurses, and teachers. There is, however, a difference in trustworthiness between school and public librarians. Where public librarians garner trust from 91% of parents, school librarians garner 80%. Given the ongoing battle over “parental rights” waged against schools, this 11% difference is not surprising. The popular discourse certainly impacts perceptions of school librarians, but so, too, does the fact that most parents have never met their school librarian. Only 41% state that they have, even though 96% of parents state that every school should have a school librarian.

There are myriad reasons why parents have likely never met their school librarian. First — and perhaps most important — is that it is likely there is not a full-time school librarian. In the 2020-2021 school year, 3 out of every 10 school districts in the country did not have a single librarian in any of their schools. The downward trajectory of the profession became apparent in data exploring school librarians between 2010 and 2019, where 20% of full-time school librarian jobs were eliminated. All signs point to this trend continuing through the pandemic, and it’s not because of reductions in school staff overall; indeed, in districts that reported losing school librarians, half gained teachers, 40% gained school or district administrators, and 33% gained instructional coordinators. This structural devaluing of the profession, unfortunately, aids in the perception that school librarians are not fundamental in the schools themselves, even if parents claim they want school librarians.

If schools do have a librarian, chances are that they are part-time. As of 2019, of the schools that employed a school librarian, 61% were full-time.

School librarians, who might also go by titles such as teacher librarian or media specialist, are highly trained, skilled, and credentialed professionals.* But the lack of jobs and, therefore, lack of visibility makes awareness of their expertise challenging to not only articulate but to literally see. They work school hours in the school building, but most of the time, they do not have their own regular class to teach. Instead, they serve as a teacher for all students, including those who might have teachers scheduling regular classes with the librarian or periodic sessions prior to a class project to help students find, evaluate, and understand the resources available to them. They’re there before class begins, during lunch periods, and after classes end to help students find and borrow materials that support both their education and their recreational needs. Though school librarians may try to have contact with parents, it isn’t going to be as easy or as frequent as teachers. Even at open house or back-to-school nights, it’s likely that parents are not prioritizing meeting the librarian in the same way they are their students’ classroom teachers.

While authors often work in different genres or mediums, sometimes moving between novels and poetry or screenwriting, the majority of fiction writers are, first and foremost, exactly that — writers. Authors can become famous in their field, but, unsurprisingly, they are usually known for their stories. However, there are several well-known figures who you may be surprised to learn have also dabbled in writing, despite becoming famous — or infamous — for very different work.

Celebrity authors have been part of the publishing world for many years, most often working with ghostwriters to produce their novels. Some, like chef and baker Nadiya Hussein, have published contemporary adult fiction, while others, such as Madonna and Tom Fletcher, have branched into children’s literature. While the rise of celebrity authors adding a published novel or two to their brand has caused controversy, in part because of the impact on traditional authors, there are some celebrity writers who are unusual even within their particular field.

On September 20, 2022, Spotify issued a press release about a much-requested inclusion to its catalog: audiobooks. Starting that same day, U.S. listeners were able to purchase audiobooks directly from the app. Over the following months, users in several other countries, such as Canada and the UK, had the same opportunity.

Just over a year later, on October 3, 2023, they announced that audiobooks would become part of the Spotify Premium package. This made Spotify a one-stop destination for just about all listening needs: music, podcasts, and now audiobooks.

But is it worth it? Let’s find out. If you have decided it is, in fact, worth it, but you’re struggling to figure out how to actually make a purchase or listen to an audiobook on Spotify Premium, let’s go over that too.

A note: Spotify audiobooks are only available in little more than a handful of countries, so check that yours is one of them before continuing.