If you think of yourself as a writer, chances are you’re going to have more blank notebooks than you can fill in a lifetime, a grudge against at least one stationery store, and a ton of pens. This goes double if you are a writer who has ever tried to get into something like bullet journaling. While most of our favorite writers are not influencers per se, it is sometimes fun to bring a little something from their working lives into our own. No one believes, or no one would admit to believing, that this will actually have any real effect on your own writing except, perhaps, to get you to sit down and face it more often. Isn’t that why we really hoard office supplies?

I can already tell that working on this article is going to be dangerous for my office supply budget, which isn’t so much a number as it’s the idea that I should absolutely not buy any more office supplies. The spinning pen caddy I was influenced to buy by the women of The Home Edit will not fit any more writing implements and retain its structure.

Before we begin, I would like to note that the information is not as diverse as I would like it to be. It is very easy to find Neil Gaiman’s favorite pen (Gaiman has been active on Tumblr for so long that I could probably find his favorite brand of toothpaste if I wanted to), but there is an issue of who is often granted interviews at that kind of length. Whose writing tools get to become “legendary” in the same way as Virginia Woolf’s purple ink?

Let’s dive into the goods here, shall we? Here are some of your favorite authors’ favorite pens.

Book clubs have always been popular, but they boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic when people were unable to leave their homes to attend in-person meetups. It largely moved online since then, prompting many to launch their virtual book clubs. Many celebrities beyond Oprah and Reese started their own. Schools followed suit. Companies even developed book club programs for their employees. Book clubs also became a business by itself, with companies providing setup and logistics for other businesses.

And then brands big and small also jumped on the bandwagon. Media and tech companies such as Netflix and Apple started their own book clubs for their customers. Small businesses also took advantage of the trend by launching various virtual book clubs. In lieu of face-to-face meetings, they did virtual sessions via Zoom. Some businesses, however, went back to doing it in person, pairing their products, such as food and wine, with books and signing sessions. Some even charged tickets for these events.

This trend is not going away anytime soon.

Traditional book clubs like Oprah’s and Reese’s have their own audiences, which are typically adult females. However, there’s a new wave that’s capturing the attention of young people: celebrity book clubs for Gen Z.

A decades-long vegetarian writing about cannibalism in horror novels? That sounds like the start of a bad joke. Yet here we are. Cannibalistic horror is not a subgenre I’ve ever particularly sought out, and yet I’ve realized recently that it’s a subgenre I’ve read quite a bit, sometimes intentionally, often not. Maybe that’s because my philosophy with books is generally the weirder the better, and it doesn’t get much weirder (or more horrifying) than cannibalism. Most of these books incorporate a heaping helping of absurdism into their horror, so much so that some of these books could probably be considered more satire than horror. But don’t get me wrong: there’s plenty of horror to be had, too.

It’s probably obvious to say that these books all come with some major content warnings, but let’s just put it this way: there were a number of books I chose not to put on this list because they just went a little too far. All of these books incorporate cannibalism, which usually also comes with some blood and gore, not to mention murder. If you’re not up for that, this horror subgenre probably isn’t for you. Period.

Now, the real horror begins. Bon appétit!

If you’re a reader of kidlit, then it’s more than likely that you’ve heard of Kekla Magoon, prolific author of over 20 books for children and young adults. In addition to writing books for nearly every age and across a wide range of genres — from historical fiction to sci-fi to contemporary realistic to picture book biographies — Magoon has also garnered multiple awards and honors for her work. She’s the winner of the John Steptoe New Talent Award, the Boston Globe Horn Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award. She’s collected numerous Coretta Scott King Honors as well as being a National Book Award longlist and finalist author. In 2021, she received the prestigious Margaret Edwards Award, given by the American Library Association for a lasting contribution to young adult literature.

Across the wide-ranging genres and topics of her work, Magoon often writes about teens and kids facing injustice in everyday life while still dealing with issues that feel relatable, such as friendship drama, characters wanting to prove themselves, and the ups and downs of coming of age in a complicated world. Her work can run the range from serious to funny, but her larger-than-life characters ground her fiction and make them relatable to readers. When it comes to her nonfiction, Magoon tends to write about Civil Rights and American history in the second half of the 20th century, and she’s written seven biographies for very young writers about famous and influential Black leaders.

There really is no wrong place to start in reading Magoon’s work! One of her more recognized works is X: A Novel, co-written with Ilyasah Shabazz, which is a novel account of Malcolm X’s teenage years. That’s a great novel to pick up, but below are three books that showcase Magoon’s range as an author and are all excellent entry points into her work!

The 2023 Booker Prize Shortlist has been announced! Chosen from 163 novels, this year’s shortlist is comprised of six novels that span the globe and the decades. Notably, this year’s entire shortlist is by authors never previously shortlisted for the Booker Prize, including two debut novels — Western Lane by Chetna Maroo and If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery. Novels by Irish writers made up a third of the longlist for the first time in the prize’s history and two of those authors have gone on to make the shortlist, Paul Murray and Paul Lynch. Overall the shortlist is made up of two Irish, one British, one Canadian, and two American authors.

Putting Ballard on a master’s course list, as I’ve done a couple of times, provokes a reaction that’s both funny and illuminating. Asked to read Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition, the more vociferous students invariably express their revulsion, while the more reflective ones voice their frustration that, although the ideas might be compelling, the prose “isn’t good.” This is especially the case with students who’ve been exposed to creative writing classes: they complain that the books are so full of repetition they become machinic or monotonous; also that they lack solid, integrated characters with whom they can identify, instead endlessly breaking open any given plot or mise-en-scène to other external or even unconnected scenes, contexts, and histories, resulting in a kind of schizoid narrative space that’s full of everyone and no one.

This second group, of course, is absolutely right in its analysis; what’s funny (and, if I can teach them anything, reversible) about their judgment is that it is these very elements (repetition, machinism, schizoid hypermnesia) that make Ballard’s work so brilliant. Not only are his rhythmic cycles, in which phrases and images return in orders and arrangements that mutate and reconfigure themselves as though following some algorithm that remains beyond our grasp, at once incantatory, hallucinatory, and the very model and essence of poetry; but, mirroring the way that information, advertising, propaganda, public (and private) dialogue, and even consciousness itself run in reiterative loops and circuits, constitute a realism far exceeding that of the misnamed literary genre. If his personae are split, multiplied, dispersed, this is because they are true subjects of a networked and fragmented hypermodernity—ones for whom identification, if it is to amount to anything more than a consoling fiction, must come through man’s recognition of himself (as Georges Bataille put it) not in the degrading chains of logic but instead, with rage and ecstatic torment, in the virulence of his own phantasms.

While Ballard’s more outwardly conventional books may give us solider, more stable realities, what these realities often present—in, for example, Empire of the Sun, which is digestible enough for a blockbuster Spielberg adaptation—is a child (or childlike figure) frolicking against a backdrop provided by the destruction of an older order of reality that the world previously took for granted. It’s a cipher for his oeuvre as a whole: endlessly playing among the ruins, reassembling the broken or “found” pieces (styles, genres, codes, histories) with a passion rendered all the more intense and focused by the knowledge that it’s all—culture, the social order, the beliefs that underpin civilization—constructed, and can just as easily be unconstructed, reverse engineered back down to the barbaric shards from which it was cobbled together in the first place. To put it in Dorothean: In every context and at every level, Ballard’s gaze is fixed, fixated, on the man behind the curtain, not the wizard.

Ballard’s novels are radical in the true sense, in that they reach back to and reanimate the novel’s very roots. The presence of Robinson Crusoe in Concrete Island is glaring, as (I’d say) is that in Crash of Tristram Shandy, with its fascination for speeding mechanized land yachts and the springs of broken carriages, for the geometry of ramparts, trenches, culverts, all superimposed on Uncle Toby’s genital mutilation, his obsession with restaging assorted topologies of conflict. Or, for that matter, Don Quixote, with its hero’s obsessive reenactments on the public highways of iconic moments from popular entertainment, the triumphs and tragedies of those late-medieval movie stars, knights-errant. And doesn’t the same propensity for modulating and monotonously lullabying list-making run through Joyce, the Sinbad the Sailors and Tinbad the Tailors and Jinbad the Jailers parading through Bloom’s mind as he drifts into sleep? Doesn’t the same technoapocalyptic imaginary characterize Conrad’s bomb-carrying Professor, whose “thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction”? We could drag the literary cursor forward, through Ingeborg Bachmann, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker—or, indeed, all the way back to Homer and Aeschylus, to wheel-mounted wooden horses, flashing beacons, falling towers.

When I was first hired as a bartender by the W Hotel in Seattle, the brand was still owned by Starwood, an indistinct consolidated corporation that has since been subsumed into the ravenous belly known as Marriott. There was a lengthy process involved in getting the job. I interviewed twice: once in the HR office and then a second time downstairs with the manager of the hotel restaurant and lounge. After being hired, I attended a mandatory, introductory eight-hour job training that was quite similar to the one I’d experienced prior to beginning a regrettable stint at Starbucks. I was stuffed into a room with about twenty other new hires—everything from housekeepers to sous-chefs to servers to maintenance workers—and we were each inundated with Starwood history. Starwood business policies. Starwood subsidiary family trees.

We watched videos. We read dense packets filled with glowing customer surveys and reviews. We broke into small groups, and we were quizzed about the things that we learned. We won prizes—Starwood-engraved keychains, W Seattle pens, and the like—for each answer we got right. These gifts would be tossed about the room by the two HR workers who gave these training sessions, and they would clap with absurd enthusiasm each time. Their gusto was on brand with that of a game-show host or some seasoned motivational speaker as they shouted into their blouse-pinned microphones.

“And you get a prize!”

“And YOU get a prize!”

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. D. A. Powell’s “As for What the Rain Can Do” appears in our new Fall issue, no. 245.

How did this poem start for you?

This poem began as a silence of wishing. As one does when falling silent. One wishes a something that isn’t happening. Or a something that is happening but should happen (one wishes) differently. In this case, I was in my kitchen nook. Outside it was raining. But raining in that dire way—trees falling, streets flooding. And endlessly so. San Francisco was at the bottom of what meteorologists were calling an atmospheric river. In thirsty California, rain is so often wished for. And now here I was, wishing it away. I didn’t want to be against the rain.

Was there a certain word or image that catalyzed your writing?

What’s your favorite Dawn Powell book? I’m beginning this way because critical essays on Dawn Powell always emphasize her obscurity, her failure to achieve fame or fortune in her lifetime (1896–1965) despite her enormous output. Just once, I want to skip that part. Let’s pretend I’m writing this from a parallel universe where Dawn Powell is the literary legend she deserves to be, where everyone knows the story of the Ohio-born New Yorker whose sparkling, lacerating fiction distilled the spirit of the city. And maybe you really do have a favorite Dawn Powell book. Mine is A Time to Be Born (1942), no question—the other day I was rereading it in the park and attracting stares because I kept laughing at its farcical scenes and snappy one-liners (“They couldn’t have disliked each other more if they’d been brothers”). But you might instead be partial to The Locusts Have No King (1948), or to her luminous short-story collection, Sunday, Monday, and Always (1952). Or maybe you prefer The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965, which weren’t even written for publication (they weren’t printed until 1995) but rank among her funniest work. If you love those diaries and have a trollish sense of humor (which, if you love Dawn, you probably do), you might give me a joke answer: Your favorite Dawn Powell book is Yow.

Yow was Dawn Powell’s first and only children’s book project—as she put it in her diary, “a story to be read aloud.” All its characters were cats; the conceit was “a complete cat-world with humans as pets.” She wrote it in 1950. No, 1952. Actually, 1954. Make that 1955. Okay, 1956. Just kidding. Yow doesn’t exist. Or, rather, it exists only in the diaries, as a project that Powell is constantly on the verge of starting. She spent the final sixteen years of her life resolving over and over—for real this time!—to write “the cat book.” Even on her deathbed, Powell refused to give up on Yow. “Drying up, weak, no appetite,” she wrote in one of her last entries ever. “Will take liquid opium plus pills I guess. God how wonderful if I could get some writing done—if, for instance, I could knock off the cat book just for fun.”

Heaven knows it’s not unusual for writers to have ideas and not follow through on them. (You should see my diaries.) But it fascinates me that Powell was so utterly defeated by a kids’ book about kitty cats, because writing usually came so easily to her. From the twenties onward, she published a new novel every other year, in addition to ten plays and around a hundred short stories in her lifetime. On the side, for extra cash, she churned out book reviews and the occasional Hollywood screenplay. She did all this while managing her institutionalized son’s medical care, her husband’s alcoholism, and her highly active social life in New York City (and, relatedly, her own borderline alcoholism). Powell had many problems, but writer’s block was never one of them. On February 14, 1962, she recorded the death of her husband: “Joe died at about 2:30.” Five days later, she wrote: “Fatigued, numb, brainfogged yet must reassemble novel. … Must have it done by Monday.” And she did.

Yet Yow wouldn’t come. Hubris, it appears, was at least partly her downfall: she assumed that a children’s book would be easy to write, a mindless hack job. Her diaries are full of self-reminders to get Yow over with, as if it were a dental cleaning. On April 2, 1950: “Remember to do cat book for Julia Ellsworth Ford juvenile prize.” July 15, 1954: “Plan to finish Eva story, also ‘Yow’ story over weekend, maybe.” December 16, 1961: “Will do the Scrubwoman story and ‘Yow.’ ” March 15, 1965: “Getting excited and clarified on novel. Would like to rush it—also do the lovely play and the ‘Summer Rose’ one and the cat one.” Even in that deathbed entry, “the cat book” isn’t a grand plan; it’s something she hopes to “knock off.”

Pick up Chloe Aridjis’s Dialogue with a Somnambulist and open it somewhere shy of halfway and find a piece of writing called “Nail – Poem – Suit.” It is only one page long. Read it. Ask yourself what it is that you just read. A story? A prose poem? An essay? A portrait? When is the last time you couldn’t quite answer that question when confronted with a piece of contemporary writing? In our world of literary hyperprofessionalization it is not a question that comes up very often, and you may have to reach back into literary history to remember the writers who once provoked a similar uncertainty in you. Writers like Borges, writers like Kafka. Or even further back, to the undefinable and uncontainable prose of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, or those slivers of Sappho. Writers who thought of language as painters think of paint: not as means to an end but as the precious thing in itself.

Within this single page of Chloe’s three things collide—that nail, a poem, a suit—and all within one man’s consciousness, although this consciousness is rendered externally, by a voice that comes from who knows where. But describing Chloe is hard: Why not read the whole thing for yourself, right now?

A man walks down the street trying to recollect the final lines of an unfinished poem he had been composing two nights ago when the phone rang. It was his seventy-four-year-old mother calling to remind him of the suit she’d ordered for his birthday, now ready for collection at the tailor’s, although it was likely alterations would have to be made. He reaches the corner and treads on a large corrugated nail that goes rolling off the pavement and into the street. The man’s first thought is that this nail has fallen out from somewhere inside him; his second thought is that it dropped out of the woman wheeling a bicycle a few metres ahead. His third thought is that the nail fell out of the teenager with the pierced lip who delivers the post each morning. Unable to draw any conclusions, the man casts one final glance at the nail now lying parallel to the tire of a parked car and returns to the matter of the unfinished poem, which, should he ever complete it, will surely fit him better than the tailor-made suit.

I lay motionless for a long time by the little quicksilver stream that even now, at the end of summer, ran constantly down over the last granite steps of the valley floor, with that proverbial babble familiar to me from some dim and distant past, only to give up the ghost without a sound on the beach and seep away.

—W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo

The pebbles, rocks, and boulders that can be found in the stream that runs down into the Bay of Ficajola, Corsica, share a waypoint but not an origin. Some have been dislodged from adjacent hills and mountains by rain and conveyed downstream until friction and gravity curtail their transport to the sea. Some preexist the flow of water, their geological makeup stubbornly resisting any attempt to shift or dissolve them. Others have been placed there deliberately, to serve as stepping stones or to dam the stream and divert its course. They differ in age by millennia. But there in the riverbed, the ragged edges of their cleaved histories worn smooth by the agency of the current, the stones share a resemblance.

Every summer, my mother would take me and a friend to Salisbury Amusement Park to eat fried dough with cinnamon and powdered sugar and go on the roller coaster until we were sick and then get our minds blown by the 2001 Space Oddity dome, which spun us around in complete darkness while a narrator intoned about galaxies and time warps. But best of all: every hour, on the hour, the Solid Gold Dancers jogged out of a pit in the center of the fairgrounds and, sweating under the August sun in full gold lamé, would kick, spin, leap, and boogie for fifteen minutes while disco music boomed (those loudspeakers carried barely any treble, which made for a peculiar version of disco). Sunrays glinted off the sequins and I was hypnotized. It all jumbled together in my mind, the sensations, the nausea, the ecstasy. That gold-flecked feeling of 1979 faded away until thirty-five years later, when my French husband, Bruno, took me to the nightclub in Montmartre that started it all: the Moulin Rouge.

I walked through red velvet curtains into the past and straight onto the set of the sweetest magical movie flop of my youth, Xanadu! Roller skates, a swimming pool rising up out of the stage where we could see women dancing underwater. In costumes made of diamonds and skin. I was in heaven. The show lasted two hours. It had everything: a fantastic light show and sound system, constantly changing sets—a castle, a pirate ship, a circus, a London street corner at the turn of the century, a … a Chinese opium den?

Even though the women had naked boobies, they still looked like angels. I think angels do have naked boobies, now that I’ve seen this show. And there were so many of them! A teeming flock or herd. Singing and kicking and dancing. Costume changes for every act. A personal favorite was the giant red-feather puffballs with legs sticking out. No arms, no head, just a big red puffball on legs. One act featured good-natured Siamese twins, another strongmen who balanced whole humans on a single elbow, wow! At the Moulin Rouge, clowns are bare-breasted along with the angels. And I shouldn’t have been surprised that in France, one clown act per nightclub experience was not enough … there had to be two.

 

We are thrilled to announce that The Paris Review has won a 2023 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges wrote:

For seventy years and counting, The Paris Review has remained wonderfully distinctive and sophisticated, never short on chic art direction, impeccable curation, or international flair. The interviews make you ache to have been in the room for the conversation. Readers will find exceptional work by feted writers in every issue, but The Paris Review does not rest on its legacy: it deftly employs its footing as the standard bearer for American literary magazines to uplift talent that hasn’t yet gotten its due.

We are deeply grateful to the Whiting Foundation for providing the literary ecosystem with vital funding and support, and we congratulate our fellow 2023 winners: Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Mizna, n+1, Orion, and Oxford American.

Sometimes, as the Review’s print deadline looms, I catch myself fantasizing about a return to university life. I should clarify that, in this fantasy, “university” is a quiet, spartan room, with a bed, an armchair, and a constant supply of paperback classics. It is entirely lacking in lectures, academic conferences, or tenure-track infighting, and also bears no resemblance to my actual experience as an undergraduate: a fog of nervous smoking, romantic dysfunction, and tearful struggles to conjure up an essay on, say, doorframes in the work of Henry James.

Sadly, there is, to my knowledge, no program or job at which reading is the sole responsibility—and, of course, nothing complicates a love of books like the attempt to build a life around them. Not one but two pieces in our new Fall issue suggest, for instance, that even too much Shakespeare can have side effects: in Rosalind Brown’s “A Narrow Room,” a conscientious student on deadline for an essay about the Sonnets finds herself continually waylaid by an erotic triangle of her own invention, while Ishion Hutchinson recalls his undoing as a homesick sophomore alone in a windowless yellow closet in Kingston, Jamaica, obsessing over local folklore, Crime and Punishment, and Hamlet. And in Munir Hachemi’s rollicking “Living Things,” translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches, four arrogant, well-read young men spend the summer after graduation working in the South of France, searching for that “hazy, ill-defined thing that we coined experience,” only to find that their education has in no way prepared them for the outside world, with its onslaught of corruption, exploitation, and force-fed chickens.

My tendency to romanticize university likely originates from those moments when getting through the assigned reading became an almost mystical interlude. I sometimes think of the night I spent with The Book of Margery Kempe, the fifteenth-century text usually considered the first autobiography in English. A visionary with a less-than-kosher approach to the saintly life, Kempe had run a brewery that went bust and given birth to fourteen children before she persuaded her reluctant husband to join her in a vow of chastity and embarked on a whistle-stop pilgrimage—much to the irritation of her fellow travelers, who quickly tired of her God-given gift of tears. I’d loved Margery, her shameless grandiosity and the frankly sexual tone in which she wrote about God and his Son, and I’d forgotten about her until a few years ago, when I came across Robert Glück’s ravishing, funny, heartbreaking novel Margery Kempe (1994), which interweaves her story with that of his all-consuming affair with a younger, richer man. As Glück tells Lucy Ives in his new Art of Fiction interview, he, too, first discovered Kempe as an undergraduate, while studying medieval literature at UCLA, and was drawn to her precisely “because she set everyone’s teeth on edge,” but it wasn’t until he found himself in anguish over a breakup that he realized he could set his midlife crisis alongside hers. The novel broke over me as what Kempe would call a “revelacyon,” and turned me—as it has many others—into a proselytizer for Glück, who has a knack for conveying the religious power of desire. “When people would ask me—and sometimes they did—to write about them,” he tells Ives, “I’d reply, ‘First, you have to break my heart.’ ”

Glück, incidentally, is not a believer in the “short story”; he prefers the conte, the tale, or the piece of gossip. We’ll leave you to ponder the differences—I’m not sure I can always tell; it’s possible that my mind was somewhere else during that particular lecture—as you read this issue, which also includes an Art of Theater interview with Lynn Nottage, poetry by Bei Dao and D. A. Powell, and debut fiction by Liam Sherwin-Murray.

The Diary of Virginia Woolf brings into sharp focus the question of what to do with one’s life. I’m referring not to the text, to the content, to anything written on the pages, but to the objects: the books, the five published volumes.

The first bit of Woolf merch I ever bought, in Woolworths in about 1975, was a beautiful Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Waves. On the cover was a portrait of the author by someone called Vanessa Bell. I couldn’t read what was inside, gave up after about five pages, and never tried again. Around the same time, I bought similarly lovely editions of To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, both of which I did get through, under compulsion, at university, though I struggled with the preciousness, the sense of someone walking—writing—around on tiptoe. That was pretty much it for me and Woolf’s fiction until the pandemic when I was nudged toward it by an unlikely enthusiast from the American West. In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen Larry McMurtry writes of how, after a serious illness, he found, for the first time in his adult life, that he couldn’t read fiction—unless it was by Proust or Woolf. I picked up the novels again and, despite McMurtry’s lobbying, failed to make any progress.

Which was surprising because I had, by then, come around to Woolf in several ways. In 2003 I’d gone to see Patti Smith perform at Charleston, the home of Virginia’s sister, Vanessa. This was one of several rustic hubs of Bloomsbury life, and it’s obvious, as you are shown around the bright rooms with their painted furniture, the sanctuary and liberation this place offered from the oppressive dreariness of English life between the wars. The handmade look is like a precursor of the make-do aesthetic I was familiar with from London squats in the eighties, which remains my ideal of interior design. This fitted in well with Smith’s performance when she read passages from The Waves, which sounded much better as Virginia’s clipped English “yellow” became Patti’s New Jersey “yellah.” If it sounded almost impossibly cool and contemporary that was because in places the original had given way seamlessly to Smith’s stream-of-consciousness improvisations.

Shortly after that I read plenty of Woolf that I could relish: A Room of One’s Own, the essays in The Common Reader, the essays on almost everything, in fact, and, crucially, the Selected Diaries and Selected Letters, published by Vintage and bought in Delhi in 2010. For me, then, Woolf fell into that subsection of writers whose minor works or private writings I preferred to the major ones. The closest comparison was with John Cheever, whose work can be arranged in an ascending order of importance, which is an exact inversion of the generally accepted hierarchy of merit: novels, stories and, at the peak, the posthumously published Journals. There’s also an overlap with D. H. Lawrence, much of whose best writing after Sons and Lovers is scattered across essays, travel books, dashed-off poems and letters. We’ll come back to Lawrence a little later.

Happy X-Files anniversary! *sings* It was thirty years ago today / Agent Skinner taught the band to play… Okay, so Skinner didn’t show up until the 21st episode of the first season, and I can’t sing, but you get the idea. I’m excited for the anniversary of The X-Files! It was three decades ago, on September 10, 1993, that one of the most iconic duos in television history made their first appearance on screen. The FBI recruited Agent Dana Scully, a skeptical, by-the-book doctor, to partner with Fox Mulder, a conspiracy-loving loose cannon whose sister went missing when they were young. From their unglamorous office in the basement, the pair investigated stories of sewer monsters, ghosts, aliens, vampires, murderous insects, psychokinetic teens, cults, and more. And then there was that black goo. (Oil, that is. Black gold, Texas tea…)

Like with many successful sci-fi franchises, there are dozens of tie-in novels (including by author Ben Mezrich), and books about the show. And the two stars, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny, both have written books themselves! This post is about fun books with aliens and creatures for you to enjoy if you’re an X-Files fan, or if you just love books about aliens and creatures. So grab one of these books, kick back, relax, and try not to think about Eugene Tooms staring at you through your window or heat vent. I want to believe…that you’re going to love these books!

Banned Books Week is less than one month away, but for those of us who’ve been engaged in the anti-censorship movement over the last several years, it’s far from the only time to highlight and emphasize the growing power of book banners. Although it draws attention to the reality of censorship in America, ultimately, Banned Books Week — all capitals — is a marketing campaign. Whether or not it empowers the everyday person to engage in anti-censorship efforts the other 51 weeks of the year is hard to say.

Although Banned Books Week can be as annoying as it is important, it can and should be reframed as an opportunity to revisit library policies and procedures to ensure that the First Amendment Rights of every individual within a community are being considered, addressed, and honored. Build those good banned book displays and provide information to users about how to push back against ongoing censorship, but also turn the lens inward toward your own institutions to ensure you’re living the values expressed over the course of the week.

This applies whether you work in a library or are a library user. You have the power to speak up and help codify the rights of all to see and be seen within the library, its programs, its books, and all of its services.

Libraries of all stripes — public, school, and academic — should have strong policies around how they build their collections, the types of materials they include, where and how items are removed (generally following the MUSTIE guidelines), and where and how people can challenge those materials/ask for reconsideration of their inclusion (hereafter referred to collectively as “collection policies”). Not all libraries put this information directly on their websites, though that is good practice, but it should be available to patrons if they ask to see it. Libraries who do not make these available on their websites might want to consider the implications of that choice. Many of those demanding book bans do so under the guise of libraries trying to hide an agenda, but by making those policies and forms readily accessible, book banners can’t as easily fall onto that belief. Be as transparent as possible.

Though there are numerous examples of robust collection policies out there to help in modeling and strengthening current policies — or developing them if none exist — one element missing from even some of the best policies is one that deserves to be included: the explicit naming of identities and beliefs protected under those policies. Too few policies state that their collection policies are crafted with the belief that people of LGBTQ+ identities, of varying abilities, of a range of racial and cultural backgrounds, all ages, and an array of religious beliefs are at the heart of the decisions made about the materials acquired for the library. Simply stating “all people” feels inclusive, of course, but without explicitly naming who “all people” two things can happen.