You shouldn’t be feeding your rabbit many carrots at all, regardless of what Bugs may say. And yet, there is one rabbit–fictional, clearly–who not only eats them but thrives on them.

Atomic Rabbit #1 was published by Charlton in 1955 at the height of America’s fascination with nuclear power and fear of the supposedly immoral influence of comics. The latter situation explains this note that appears on the book’s first page.

It’s wholesome!!

Al Fago, who identifies himself as the executive editor, also created, drew, and, wrote this comic, so this is entirely his baby. Let’s see if he can live up to his promise of delivering “the highest quality of wholesome entertainment.”

Our first story, “The Discovery,” begins in Rabbitville, where The Fox (is “The” his first name?) is the mayor. Seems like that might present a conflict of interest, but anyway, a poor starving rabbit comes to town and begs a carrot from the former mayor’s wife.

But there’s something funky about this carrot.

The Empyrean series has finally been dethroned from the #1 spot on the Goodreads Most Read list this week—can you guess by which book? Still, Rebecca Yarros continues to claim three of the top five spots. We also have a new title on this list this week: the latest romance from Abby Jimenez, Say You’ll Remember Me. You might recognize Jimenez from her very popular novel Just for the Summer, her other romance books, or even from the Food Network!

In case you’re curious, the StoryGraph most popular list is pretty similar to the Goodreads list, though Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green and Fearless by Lauren Roberts make it to the top five there. The StoryGraph also has a few more authors of color in the top 50, at least, including Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, James by Percival Everett, and One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad.

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker Crime scene cleaner Cora Zeng has seen truly horrifying messes at her job, but nothing comes close to witnessing her sister being pushed in front of a train. The trauma continues to play over and over in her head, especially the words the murder shouted at her before fleeing the scene: “Bat Eater.” She fights to set these thoughts aside to prepare for the Hungry Ghost Festival, when the gates of hell open. Still, Cora can’t seem to tell the difference between fiction and reality anymore, and she keeps finding bat carcasses at crimes scenes. It’s almost like a message waiting for her. Horror author Paul Tremblay calls Kylie Lee Baker’s new novel “a compelling, gory, ghostly romp.” — Emily Martin

I’m doing some spring cleaning with my Check Your Shelf notes. I’ve found a bunch of announcements, lists, and resources to help you with your reader’s advisory work, whether you work with kids, teens, adults, or all of the above! Divorce memoirs? Passover picture books? A James Patterson & MrBeast collaboration? We’ve got all that and more, including a sneak peek of some bonus content!

New Book Announcements

Hoda Kotb announces her next book, Jump and Find Joy, out in September. Lucy Foley is writing the first full-length continuation of Miss Marple. Penguin Press is publishing Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir. Pelicot became headline news when she waived her right to anonymity against her husband and the 50 men accused of her sexual assault.Terry Brooks is passing on the Shannara series to Delilah S. Dawson. This book goes to 11: A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap is on the way!YA author Ayana Gray is making her adult fiction debut with I, Medusa, coming out in November. Fellow YA author Nic Stone is also making her adult fiction debut with Boom Town. Grammy-winning producer Mark Ronson is publishing a memoir in September. Salman Rushdie is publishing a new story collection in November. James Patterson and MrBeast are cowriting a thriller together, and honestly, what is even happening in this timeline? The Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde who urged Trump to “have mercy” during her National Prayer Service sermon in January, will have two books geared at younger readers coming out this year. Both are adapted from her 2023 book, How We Learn to Be Brave.

Readers Advisory & Genre Resources

Queer historical romance novels: a starter pack. The (bad) sisterhoods of crime fiction. The state of romantasy. A growing number of romantasy novels are featuring relationships between human women and non-human males. But really, where have all the non-romance fantasy books gone? Vulture looks at the recent popularity of the divorce memoir. A look at the popularity of animal memoirs. Passive book promotion to teens.

Book Lists for Kids & Teens

10 books designed to get kids moving. Inspiring children’s books starring female athletes. Picture books to help kids prepare for Passover. Children’s books that celebrate Muslim culture. Picture book biographies about women in STEM. 12 garden-filled picture books for spring. 6 terrific books for young basketball fans. Age-appropriate romance reads for tweens. 15 great nonfiction books for tweens. 22 contemporary YA fantasy books that have the best of both worlds. 10 YA books with pirates. 18 YA books featuring competitions. 13 YA books for the coming vampire renaissance. It’s the end of the world as we know it: Dystopian books for YA readers. 23 YA books featuring love and romance with Asian characters. YA books to read if you loved Heartstopper.

January 16, 2025, marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. The New York Public Library celebrated with a party, following a special performance of the Broadway musical adaptation of the novel. Simon and Schuster recently released a new audiobook with an introduction by Jesmyn Ward.

The novel’s theme of reinventing oneself is timeless. The ideas of living a lie by reinventing yourself and wealth making people callous are equally resonant today. How did this novel become so influential, especially on other American novels, and a fixture on high school syllabi? Was it always a bestseller? What aspects of Gatsby hold up, and which ones have aged terribly?

Horror fans, we’re just hitting the second quarter of 2025, but the book news heading into 2026 is already piping hot. You might have your TBRs set for the rest of this year, but get ready, because we’ve got a whole slew of new horror books that should definitely be on your radar in 2026.

These might not have specific release dates or cover reveals just yet, but we already know everything we need to know to get excited for these spooky books.

The Grass is Always Bloodier by Jeneva Rose — Jeneva Rose’s first horror novel is coming from Mira in the fall of 2026. The novel tells the story of a family who moves to a new home only to realize the house might be haunted and something about their neighbors is strange. The author shared on Instagram “Fun fact, this book actually started out as a novella titled ‘The House Across The Street’ but has turned into so much more and obviously needed a new title, especially after that satire thriller show released on Netflix a couple years back.”

In This City, Where It Rains by Lyndsey Croal — Luna Press Publishing will release Lyndsey Croal’s gothic horror novella. Set in an alternative version of Edinburgh, this novella follows a woman named Maggie who is haunted by ghosts she only sees when it rains. Croal says the novel is influenced by Scottish folklore.

In The Blood by April Henry — April Henry’s 2026 horror novel tells the story of a horrifying ancestry. Eighteen-year-old high school senior Tessa has always wondered about who her biological parents are. But when she uploads her DNA on GEDMatch, she’s horrified to learn that her father is a mysterious man known as “The Portland Phantom,” a serial killer who strangled 17 women.

Françoise Sagan, who crashed and flipped her fabulous Aston Martin DB2/4 at high speed en route to Saint-Tropez, did not die despite getting her skull crushed beneath her British-made hatchback in Fiesta Red. She did not drown in a yachting accident on the Riviera some four years earlier, nor did she immediately go bankrupt after becoming so consumed by roulette that she personally asked the French Ministry of the Interior to ban her from domestic casinos. Her mutant capacity for indulgence, combined with her other cosmopolitan hobbies (whiskey, morphine, tax evasion), made her so much the poster girl for sixties Gallic glamour that a French newspaper once gave her the topline “un charmant petit monstre”—though a death drive that well oiled could have used something more like what Susan Sontag said about the self-destructive: “Dying is overwork.”

Sagan’s writing seems to mime the choreography of her darker impulses and lives on just as deathlessly as its author did. Her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, published in 1954, is a disturbing little speed read about the motherless seventeen-year-old Cécile, who holidays happily with her father, Raymond, in the South of France. Quickly, the story becomes a nasty chamber play—Cécile and her daddy have this total delicious connection until a stranger threatens to ruin her paradise—and directors from now both sides of the millennium have tried to commit the catastrophe to film. The first adaptation of the book, by Otto Preminger in 1958, stars peppy Jean Seberg as our tricksy prima donna; this May, the director and screenwriter Durga Chew-Bose reanimates her by way of the hypertelerotic Lily McInerny, whose gift for the languid, googly gaze might suggest something about the way this new film is concerned not with the way things move but with how things look.

Tristesse is, to both Sagan’s and Chew-Bose’s credit, an eyeful. This is one of those French stories that lives for the sensuous and elemental—filled with the usual subatomic lustful vibrations of summer, the secret viciousness of young women, beautiful bikinis, buttered toasts. The camera watches dad and daughter pad around barefoot in their seaside rental alongside his sexy mistress Elsa—the coconut-scented bohème—until woman no. 3 in Chanel No. 5 arrives with her chilly-chic hauteur. This is Anne, friend of dead mother, menace to harmony, and here played by Chloë Sevigny. With her best WASP-y restraint, the actress reminds us that she is not from the Lower East Side but from Darien, Connecticut, blinking impassively at the Mediterranean from kitten heels on the veranda. “I knew that once she was there it would be impossible for any of us to relax completely,” Cécile says in the novel. In the film, the scenes that follow should grow tenser, make us sore—instead, the triangular dynamic of the three women grades softly in Cécile’s nisus toward vengeance. The days disappear by a sort of melting process.

It’s finally spring here in the northern hemisphere, and I’m already thinking about summer books. I keep a running list of upcoming queer book releases I’m excited about, which means I’m always living a few months in the future, at least in terms of my TBR. So, I thought I’d share five of the queer books out this summer I’m most looking forward to. Publishing has a funny way of defining seasons, but I’m counting books out from June to August.

It includes an F/F multiverse love story, a trans satire about volleyball players, toxic lesbian vampires, a dystopian graphic novel with a trans guy main character, and a bi4bi genderqueer apocalyptic YA thriller.

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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

Announcing The 2025 PEN America Literary Awards Finalists

What an amazingly odd line-up of awards and finalists PEN offers up every year. In terms of adding things to my persona reading list, I think the PEN/E.O. Wilson finalists for literary science writing have the highest matriculation rate. But with dedicated categories for essays, debut fiction, and even poetry in translation, it has a wider range of literary-minded prizes than anything after. The PEN/Stein Award is probably the most prestigious (and certainly the most lucrative), but does not have nearly the same cache as Pulitzers and NBCCs and so on (at least to me). Part of that may be the confusing X/X branding, but some of it has to be the description: “To a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact, which has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence.” It’s not a straight-ahead “for oustanding achievement in X” but rather a mishmash of originality and “strong potential for lasting influence). This line-up of finalists, pretty much from top to bottom, eschews the titles that have been making regular award season appearances. This, I think, it one reason the PEN honorees are always interesting, but then somehow forgotten (when was the last time you saw a PEN award sticker on a book?).

The Most Challenged Books of 2024

The ALA released their “State of America’s Libraries” Report, and there’s a lot going on. In past years, the list of the most challenged books would have been the headline, and maybe it still is, but the table of contents exemplify the wider truth: libraries are under siege:

Anne Imhof’s DOOM: House of Hope, a three-hour, influencer-studded “blockbuster” performance of Romeo and Juliet, presents a variation on the talent show more akin to a talent situation. Imhof invents a world in which artistic talent might emanate at any moment, unprompted, from the ranks of a psychically bonded skater mob. Staged around a cavalcade of Cadillac Escalades parked at random diagonals across the Park Avenue Armory’s fifty-five-thousand-square-foot hangar, the show began with a wolf’s howl ringing out from the darkness. The Jumbotron suspended overhead started counting down from 3:00:00, instilling a Hunger Games–esque sense of urgency while a crew of youths, their clothes emblazoned with DOOM in varsity lettering, trickled in to mount the industrial-beam platforms attached to the Escalades. Projecting defiance or disaffection, the actors stared down at us, pantomiming tears trailing down their cheeks.

Finally, the metal gate around the periphery was lowered, and we were free to infiltrate the scene.

Cool kids continually forked off from the clique to launch into choreographed performances, recitations of found texts, or miscellaneous scenes from Shakespeare’s play. Their blocking traversed the Escalades, multiple conventional stages, a semi-secluded white room, and the spotlit center court. The audience was left to roam the hangar but generally gravitated toward the moving center of interest. More intimate moments, like monologues or the dripping of candle wax on naked skin, were filmed on a phone and broadcast in real time on the Jumbotron. Meanwhile, background players kept on gesticulating from the car stages, covertly making out or tattooing one another in the trunks.

My favorite moment was an eloquent speech by a pianist character about the feat of writing about performance from memory. In the carnivalesque House of Hope, all talents are venerated, even the critic’s! I felt seen. Reading the playbill later, I learned that her speech comprised excerpts from famous critics’ obituaries, and the warm feeling faded. The volume of talents on display (rapping, calligraphic skin decoration, contortionism, poetry, ballet, industry-plant rock and roll) gave the show a consistently high entertainment value. Yet DOOM never felt as sprawling or multifarious as the format might have allowed. The audience was never aggressively divided or engaged with directly (no Sleep No More–style kisses on the mouth). No one knew if it was passé to clap after the musical acts.

While Kelly Jensen is off this week, editors Danika Ellis and Erica Ezeifedi are covering censorship news. The first two stories are from Danika and the last two are from Erica.

Among the most recent censorship news includes a list of the 10 most challenged books of 2024, the ALA suing DOGE over gutting the IMLS, Nevada lawmakers introducing a bill making it illegal to harass librarians who are doing their jobs, and more.

2024 had the third highest number of challenges since ALA started tracking in 1990, but the organization emphasizes that book bans and challenges are underreported, so this number is likely higher. Many libraries are also now restricted in the material they can bring in and/or are practicing self-censorship by not acquiring titles that could be challenged.

“I know the story well,” says the Snow White of Robert Walser’s Schneewittchen, “about the apple, the coffin. Be so kind as to tell me more. Why does nothing else come to mind? Must you hang on to these details? Must you forever draw on them?” In Stanley Schtinter’s 2024 adaptation of Walser’s 1901 dramolette, characters from the Grimm fairy tale exhaust themselves and their images in a recounting of the story in which they are inscribed. The film is a complete performance of the English translation of Walser’s text, which picks up where the Grimm tale leaves off. The queen, who has tried to kill Snow White twice, wants her daughter to forget everything. Under her orders, the hunter, her lover and Snow White’s would-be assassin, reenacts the attempt on Snow White’s life. There is discussion of the desire for death, springtime, fresh garden air, kisses, snow, and sleep. The characters chastise each other for telling fairy tales, rehearsing scripts, making use of “gesture and technique.”

Schneewittchen is a shot-for-shot remake of another experimental adaptation of Walser’s text, João César Monteiro’s Branca de Neve (2000). As in Monteiro’s version, the drama takes place in complete darkness, against a sonic ambience of rain, wind, and birdsong. We hear, but do not see, the characters. Punctuating the darkness: brief shots of a blue sky, sometimes clouded, sometimes unclouded, blinding in the black theater, scenic breaks in which we find ourselves, with Snow White, “immaculately watching an immaculate sky.” But Sean Price Williams’s skies are less saturated than Monteiro’s. The environmental sound, by the artist Joshua Bonnetta, is louder in the mix. The flute and piano are gone.

Schtinter’s version premiered in New York on the occasion of Disney’s 2025 live-action remake of their 1937 animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In the spirit of Disney, Schneewittchen has also been merchandised: at Anthology, Schtinter cheekily offered Schneewittchen snow globes (empty) and Schneewittchen T-shirts (blank). Like a proper Hollywood remake, Schneewittchen has an A-list cast (Julie Christie is the queen; Stacy Martin is Snow White; Hanns Zischler is the hunter; and Toby Jones is the prince). These glossy professionals deliver blocks of dispassionate dialogue as though shrink-wrapped, their high-budget polish contrasting humorously with the film’s starkness.

Aside from sky and the red curtain of the opening and ending credits, the sixty-seven-minute film contains only two other images. The film opens with a sequence of black-and-white stills of Robert Walser lying dead in the snow outside the Switzerland asylum where he’d been living, a scene originally captured by a police photographer on Christmas, 1956. His unseeing face turned skyward, Walser is the picture of his own Snow White, who “long[s] for that open coffin, laid out as this frozen image.” Where Monteiro uses the widely circulated photographs of Walser’s real corpse, here Schtinter himself plays Walser, restaging the “dear winter scene” on location in Herisau. The effect is slightly comic, Schtinter’s younger figure slightly too photogenic, too clean. Finally, Monteiro’s film closes with a beguiling shot of the director standing in front of a tree; Schtinter shows us only a tree.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Nora Fulton’s poem “La Comédie-Française” appears in the new Spring issue of the Review, no. 251.

 

How did this poem start? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

I wrote this poem in September 2024, but it was a reflection of a three-day seminar I’d attended the month before. The seminar, organized by two brilliant friends, Matt Hare and Sam Warren Miell, was about the French film production company Diagonale, and focused on the work of its central director, Paul Vecchiali. Of the films we watched, Encore and Corps à cœur were especially on my mind while writing. Both are romantic melodramas, but they undercut that tendency in lots of interesting ways—I think I find them moving precisely because they undercut that part of themselves. The seminar focused on the way that Diagonale functioned as a collective of people who would take up different roles in each film, both in front of and behind the camera. This was likened to the troupe established by Molière, to which the title of this poem refers.

Were you thinking of any other poems or works of art while you wrote it?

Occasionally, when we were small, our father spoke to us of geography.

Daddy is from a place called Palestine, he said, in a lesson captured by my mother on the family’s camcorder. In the footage, my father sits in a small rocking chair, brown eyes intent, a little shy. My younger brother and sister are absorbed by the array of blocks on the floor, but I am close to my father’s feet, my fluffy blond head thrown back, mouth pink and agape. He holds up a globe, his fingers sliding toward a sliver of brown and green. He tilts it toward me to reveal cramped lettering: Israel/Palestine.

I hop up to look, my nose nearly skimming the painted plastic as I squint at the hair-thin ink. I am vaguely aware of a thing called countries, loosely grasping that these are places full of people that are like—but unlike—me. There is no mention, today or any day that I can recall up to that point, of the first half of that forward-slashed name, that thing called Israel. There are no tales of shed blood, no wistful tributes to a lost homeland. My father simply hops his fingers, jumping decades and tragedies. Due south, he points to an orange oblong slab of land. That’s Saudi Arabia. That’s where Sittoo lives. My father uses the فلاحي word sittoo—honored lady—our dialect’s term for grandmother. I squint again, trying to see her.

My grandmother, like these countries, feels important and vague. It would be one year before she came to live with us and two years before we uprooted and moved to Jeddah, her adopted city by the sea. In our lesson, my father did not linger, did not try to bridge the difference between Jeddah and Palestine. Instead, the video shows him smiling, rolling the world to my left. He lands on a green sprawl labeled the United States. His finger taps another dot, Chicago, which clings to a lake shaped like a tear.

A painting in Blair Hobbs’s new exhibition features a cut-out drawing of Flannery O’Connor in a pearl choker and purple V-necked dress. She’s flanked by drawings of peacocks and poppies; a birthday cake on metallic gold paper floats above her head. It is titled, like the exhibition, Birthday Cake for Flannery. The number 100 sits atop the frosting, each digit lit with an orange paper flame—marking O’Connor’s hundredth birthday, today, March 25. Glitter and sequins, gold thread and fabric scraps everywhere.

The image is candy to my eyes. I grew up in a stripped-down fundamentalist Protestant church—think Baptist but with a cappella singing. Violence and grace, sin and redemption, idolatry and judgment: When I read O’Connor’s stories for the first time, in high school, I recognized her religious concerns as my own. Fifteen years later I moved to Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where O’Connor’s Southern milieu—backwoods prophets, religious zealots, barely concealed racism and classism—was my literal backyard. I raised chickens in homage to her, then repurposed the coop as my writing studio, where I drafted a collection of stories wrestling with Christianity and sexuality in the American South.

Hobbs, who lives in Mississippi, has been making collage art since she retired from teaching at the University of Mississippi. Her first show, Radiant Matter, was an exploration of the ways her body underwent transformation during treatment for breast cancer. Birthday Cake for Flannery is her second series of collage paintings. Last month I drove from my current home in Chattanooga to Atlanta to see the seventeen paintings in the show. They weren’t installed yet, but Spalding Nix, who owns the gallery, and Jamie Bourgeois, the gallery director, hosted me for a preview.

Jamie unwrapped the paintings one by one. Every canvas—plus one creepy little sculpture wrapped in illuminated wire and encased in a thumbtack-lined shadowbox, meant to evoke the “mummified Jesus” in O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood—is an exuberant explosion of color and found materials illustrating O’Connor’s best-known stories: “Revelation,” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “The Displaced Person,” “A Temple Of The Holy Ghost,” “Parker’s Back,” and “Good Country People.”

1.

The mind is always too simply seeking meaning, trying to boil some beautiful thing down to its conceptual essence.

What can stun the mind into quietness? What can briefly flummox the mind in its quest to reduce everything to a concept?

Well, a work of art can.