This is the second 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.

A particularly common sentiment among the groups and individuals pushing to have books pulled from school libraries is that they’re not banning books. Because the books are available in public libraries, they claim that they are simply removing the books — parents can take their kids to other places where those titles remain available. It has become such a common refrain that even Googling the phrase “we’re not banning books” will lead to dozens of stories with some variation of the explanation that their removal is only on one front: the school. We know this to be patently untrue, as public libraries and bookstores have also been subject to calls for books to be banned.

Despite the fervor over “parental rights,” most parents not only trust librarians — school and public librarians rank in the top 5 most trusted professions — but they overwhelmingly believe that their children are safe in libraries. 93% of parents state their child is safe in the school library, with 80% trusting school librarians to select age- and content-appropriate materials for the school library and 82% trusting those school librarians to recommend appropriate material to their children.

In the current book banning climate, there is a pattern worth paying attention to: what begins in public schools seeps into the public library. This begins at the ground level in board meetings and then emerges in higher-level offices. Proposed legislation at the public school level has seen success — look at the Texas READER Act, the expansion of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Iowa’s S.F. 496 (currently partially enjoined), Indiana’s HB 1147, Kentucky’s SB 5 — in part because it is an easy sell to legislators. They want to protect kids or at least be on record, looking as though they want to protect kids. What better way to do just that than through laws that put parents front and center in the schools? To the average person not paying attention to what’s actually happening, it sounds good.

That is the same mentality behind the emphasis that book banners aren’t banning books because the kids can get them at the public library.

In the opinion of Simone Weil, King Lear was the only one of Shakespeare’s tragedies completely permeated with a pure spirit of love, and therefore on a level with the “immobile” theater of the Greeks. Perhaps Richard II never caught her attention at an auspicious moment. It is, anyway, very difficult to grasp and wrest into the light this mysterious tragedy, the most silent of all of Shakespeare’s works—this path that is constantly covering its own tracks, this voice that doesn’t want to raise any particular problem or to support any particular thesis. A story recounted with eyes downcast, slowly and, one might say, in the dark: en una noche oscura.

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings—
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed.

For five long symphonic acts, full of returns and rigorous reprises, confined in the very tight mesh of unbroken blank verse, not a single laugh, in this drama of young people, not one gallantry or a pleasantry, even a lugubrious one, from a clown. Not one of those great breaths of spring or autumn. Not one of those gratuitous songs as natural to Shakespeare as the circulation of the blood. In Richard II, everything falls inexorably down. Everything obeys the law of gravity. And yet it is in Richard II, more than in any other work since Homer, that the royal gestures “continually cross like blinding flashes” and grace blooms, a pure, pale flower, on the dark foliage of necessity. Never, I think, have “gravity and grace” been more exactly encapsulated in a play.

If Hamlet is the tragedy of irresolution, Richard II is the tragedy of relativity, or rather of reversibility. A group of young princes, united by ties of blood, and profoundly divided by this same blood (which has many times been spilled by their ancestors), whose consciences are extremely refined and whose spirits are ardent and melancholic, unremittingly clash in an attempt at loyalty and unity that is continually frustrated. Behind them two old men, John of Gaunt and the Duke of York, grow feeble and obscurely fall into the same strain, already tinged with defeat or with a presage of death.

The other day, I graduated from an iPhone 6 to an iPhone 15. The iPhone 6 needed to be plugged in all the time, same as me. The next day, when I woke up with the iPhone 15, I didn’t recognize the house where I lived, or the room where I was sleeping, or the person beside me in the bed. Richard said, “I think you should get the wireless earpods. You’ll like them.” I said, “How do you know?” He laughed.

The difference between learning a person and learning an iPhone is that, eventually, you learn the iPhone. You even forget the learning part. Once human beings know something, we think we’ve always known it—like the discovery of irony by a child, it’s a one-way door.

Going back to 2007—it was Richard’s and my second Christmas together—and the way I got the catering job was the chef who usually cooked dinner for the Murphys got sick. Or maybe it was that the catering company I worked for had overbooked the chefs, and suddenly there weren’t enough to go around. Alice, the booker, called me and said, “You do private parties, right? Can you please do Christmas dinner for the Murphys?” I said, “Sure.” It was the thing where you’re a movie actor, and they say, “You know how to gallop on a horse, right?” Or, “You know how to do a triple axel on ice skates, right?”

In the past, I’d worked as a server at the Murphys’ apartment on Park Avenue. They were a warm, easygoing couple, and they tipped well. At their holiday events, there were lots of kids and adults, a mix of Catholics and Jews. Lots of wrapping paper piled up on the living room floor, and each year, Ted Murphy made an appearance as Santa.

I turned nineteen and moved to Chicago. Three weeks later, Dave and I bought a silver Celica for five hundred bucks, which, even in 1999, didn’t seem like much for an entire car. Dave named her Angie (short for Angelica, inspired by the elica on the grille, the C having gone missing sometime in the previous eleven years). He was a sophomore at the University of Chicago, and I was his deadbeat friend who had moved to Hyde Park to get out of my parents’ apartment and go be a dropout eight hundred miles away. We liked to think Angie resembled a low-rent DeLorean. The headlights opened and closed—creaking up and down like animatronic eyes—but shortly after the big purchase they got stuck in the up position.

When we test-drove the car around Ravenswood, the steering wheel felt disconcertingly heavy. Oh, that’s just a minor power-steering leak, said the seller. Easy fix. We didn’t know what power steering was, or that the leak was actually expensive to fix, and that we’d have to refill the fluid on a weekly basis. Plus, the hood stand had broken, or disappeared, or anyway no longer existed, so it was necessary to hold up the hood with one hand and refill the cylinder with the other, which was quite difficult to do. Thankfully, there were two of us. We’d been friends since third grade, and with our easy dynamic, splitting a car didn’t seem odd—only convenient.

Growing up in Manhattan, we weren’t allowed to practice driving within the city limits, and most of my friends failed the test once or twice. I’d gotten my license a few days before moving to the Midwest (third try), and was thrilled to be a license-holding car owner. I’d go out at night—sometimes with Dave, sometimes alone—and drive around the neighborhood. Do laps up and down the Midway, blasting Born to Run or Hüsker Dü. That year was probably the freest I’ve ever felt, though I’m not sure I appreciated the freedom. Or maybe it was dampened by loneliness, and feeling like I had little to do with my time. I’d saved up from being the errand boy at a rock club the previous couple years and decided to be work-free in Chicago for as long as possible, with vague ambitions of starting a band. But I didn’t meet many potential bandmates, and my guitar grew dusty. That fall, I’d stay up till five, six in the morning, and sleep till three. Our lives were small. On Sunday nights, Dave and I would go to our favorite Italian restaurant, where we had a crush on the waitress, and then see a movie. Once a month, we’d hand-deliver our insurance payment to Bill, our friendly rep at the InsureOne office in a strip mall on Fifty-Third Street. The Obamas supposedly lived down the street.

When the money ran out, I answered an ad on a bulletin board in the U of C student center. Far East Kitchen was now my employer. Three or four nights a week, Angie and I would deliver juicy Chinese food across the neighborhood: from Forty-Seventh Street to Sixty-First, Cottage Grove to the lake. No matter how I arranged them, the bags of food would often topple over on the floor of the back seat and ooze “gravy” into the carpeting. I got paid by the delivery—on a slow night, I could finish a shift with sixteen bucks in my pocket. Despite the frequent disrespect and lowly social status, I found it satisfying to race around the neighborhood, making my drops. Less so during ice storms. (When, twenty years later and low on funds, I had a brief stint as a DoorDasher in Eugene, Oregon, the satisfaction, unsurprisingly, flagged. By then, Dave was living in a midsize Canadian city with a wife and child. Our dynamic had gone through some uneasy times.)

Hebe Uhart had a unique way of looking—a power of observation that was streaked with humor, but which above all spoke to her tremendous curiosity. Uhart, a prolific Argentine writer of novels, short stories, and travel logs, died in 2018. “In the last years of her life, Hebe Uhart read as much fiction as nonfiction, but she preferred writing crónicas, she used to say, because she felt that what the world had to offer was more interesting than her own experience or imagination,” writes Mariana Enríquez in an introduction to a newly translated volume of these crónicas, which will be published in May by Archipelago Books. At the Review, where we published one of Uhart’s short stories posthumously in 2019, we will be publishing a series of these crónicas in the coming months, starting with one of the most personal.

About thirty years ago, I had a boyfriend who was a drunk. Back then, I was full of vague impulses and concocted impossible projects. I wanted to build a house with my own two hands; before that, there’d been another project, involving a chicken hatchery. I was never cut out for industry or manual labor. I didn’t think that alcoholism was a sickness—I believed he would be able to stop drinking once he decided to. I was working at a high school and had asked for some much-needed time off to improve my mental health, and I spent my days with my drunken boyfriend going from club to club, and from one house to the next. We paid countless visits to the most diverse assortment of people, among them an old poet and his wife who would receive guests not at their home, but in bars. Some turned their noses up at the pair, whispering that it took them a week to get from Rivadavia Avenue to Santa Fe Avenue, as they spent a full day at each bar. It was a year of great discovery for me, learning about these people and their homes, but sometimes it was boring, because drunks have a different sense of time and money. It is like living on a ship, where time is suspended, and as for my boyfriend’s friends, they were always destined for the bottle and stranded at the bar (or so they claimed) until someone could come rescue them. I used to get bored when drunk poets began counting the syllables of verses to see if they were hendecasyllabic, trochaic … it could go on for hours.

The whole time I was mixed up in all of this, nobody ever knew where I was going. I would only come home to eat and sleep—I didn’t tell my family anything. They became concerned. My mom had a cousin follow me and report back to her:

“They sleep at a different house every night. My advice—buy her an apartment.”

Halfway through Sven Holm’s taut unfolding nightmare, Termush, the unnamed narrator encounters “ploughed-up and trampled gardens” where “stone creatures are the sole survivors.” Holm describes these statues as “curious forms, the bodies like great ill-defined blocks, designed more to evoke a sense of weight and mass than to suggest power in the muscles and sinews.” Later, a guest of the gated, walled hotel for the rich from which the novel takes its name relates a dream in which “light streamed out of every object; it shone through robes and skin and the flesh on the bones, the leaves on the trees … to reveal the innermost vulnerable marrow of people and plants.” The same could describe the novel, which accrues its strange effects via both this stricken, continuous revealing and the “curious forms” of a solid, impervious setting, in which the ordinary elements of our world come to seem alien through the lens of nuclear catastrophe.

Long before the sanctuary of Termush becomes visibly unsafe, these tears at the fringes of reality signify the truth of the narrator’s situation. The very texture of the world becomes unknowable, imbued with a potency, vibration, or sheen that alters reality. Holm’s Termush is both a realistic chronicle of a microsociety’s collapse and a surreal journey of a man confronted by crisis, remaking his surroundings as a way of coping.

The detritus and decisions of the past may still affect our future, in that the threat of nuclear holocaust has not left us, though it is far less pronounced than in the 1960s, when Holm published Termush. But in the interim, other disasters that manifest in largely “invisible” ways have overtaken us: our fear of radiation and immolation has led to climate crisis fear, which has led to pandemic fear. The grappling of minds with these threats leads to derangement and odd visions, because the elements of infiltration and contamination baffle the brain. Our hauntings in the modern era so often now are not ghosts but simply the things we cannot see—but that radically affect us.

Little wonder then, that, read now, the lucid logic of Termush feels more like lucid dreaming, imbued with a new relevance in which unseen monsters creep through the same rooms as the narrator, studying his movements. The stark deficiencies of emergency management become hyperreal because of the overlay of self-inflictions in our modern times. For Termush—unlike some vintage classics, cult or otherwise—has waxed, not waned, in relevance. The accuracy in the calm description of becoming undone by disaster, and the anonymity of place and character, ensure the novel’s timelessness. It’s a curious book in this regard, with its dispassionate prose that eschews, in large part, the sensory detail of taste, touch, and smell, yet gets to the heart of living through such a situation. At that heart is the disconnection that occurs, laid bare by a certain level of detail—or lack of detail. Amid the banal recitation of procedure and the understated but sharp satire about privileged people, such a strong sense of feeling about the world rises from these pages.

Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple seconds later, when we realized the light was only the shining moon rising over the peaks, we began laughing so hard that my parents heard and stumbled out into the front yard. 

I thought of this memory a few weeks ago while in a Lyft in Las Vegas, also at twilight. A man named June was driving me to the Sphere, the giant 20,000-capacity arena built just off the Strip by the Madison Square Garden Company and designed by the firm Populous, which opened earlier in the fall. The Sphere is (mostly) its titular shape, 157 meters wide, and covered in what is reputedly the largest LED screen on earth, and inside is a smaller sphere, holding a lobby and an arena with a curved screen that bears down at and envelopes the audience, a massive take on a planetarium with 4D features. The globular animations on the outer surface are what first captivated the attention of online viewers; since the Sphere turned on, it has featured rotating basketballs, mercurial ripples, AI-generated washes of color, and advertisements that cost brands nearly half a million dollars per day to display. Its most iconic exterior images are all the kinds of things middle schoolers like to draw in the margins of their notebooks: an eyeball, an emoji face, and, yes, the moon. 

I first latched on to the Sphere in mid-2021, when architectural renderings had already been circulating for a few years. During the 2022 midterms, while election forecasters were waiting for late-breaking votes from Clark County, Nevada, where Las Vegas is the county seat, I remember thinking that the Sphere would be the right place on which to beam the same consequential results in the future. If the electoral college was always going to turn random populations into oracles, why not enhance the effect and ground the abstraction with the most cosmic of shapes? At that point, the structure was still a giant salad bowl of curved steel beams just off the Strip; Madison Square Garden had been building the thing since 2018, and inflation had pushed the projected cost to $2.2 billion, nearly double the original budget. By September of this year they finished it, and U2 started its forty-show residency. I booked a trip to Vegas and bought a ticket to Postcard from Earth, the Darren Aronofsky “movie” that had been made for the venue. (Cheaper than Bono’s show.) It was all I could think about for weeks. 

Then I began having dreams that punished me for my enthusiasm. In them the Sphere was a pathetic size, the circumference of a backyard trampoline, languishing in roadside parking lots like a sheepish dumpster with a vending machine’s tepid glow. People whizzed past it in their cars as they would highway billboards for personal injury lawyers. And I guess that was the outcome I was afraid of. For me, the question of the Sphere was not really about the subjects that other journalists had focused on—the state of live entertainment, or what screens do to our attention spans—but about whether a physical object could still truly excite us, siphon and sustain our normally starved collective passions. (For the majority of human history, this type of adulation was mostly aimed at entities that were sacred, cosmic, or both, like comets.) That the Sphere was owned and operated by sterilized companies didn’t really matter to me; perhaps this increased the effect of the thing as a smooth, vacuous singularity of the masses. Once I got there, and once I went inside it, would the energy I had generated thinking about it have anywhere to land? I was hoping—and this might have been the optimism that the Sphere was brazenly promoting at a time when everyone seemed to be shorting it—that if you tore away all the facts about its content, you would still be left with what moved me against all odds: the shape, and the light.

As every author has probably revealed in an interview at some point, writing a novel is hard work. Writer’s block is a constant professional hazard; characters can decide to do their own thing at a moment’s notice, and I can confirm that it’s a real struggle to stop a plot from getting soggy and slow in the middle. This doesn’t go away with practice; as Joe Fassler noted in his article My 150 Writing Mentors and Me, “The artistic process never seems to get easier, not even for the most successful, famous authors.”

In more practical terms, many writers are hampered by day-to-day life, like having to work a day job or the time-consuming commitment of childcare, something noted by the women writer’s magazine Mslexia: “Survey after survey has found that women spend more time on housework and childcare than men […] So it was for Mrs. Gaskell at the birth of the novel, complaining that ‘everybody comes in to me perpetually’ while ‘Mr. Gaskell just trots off to his study.’” There are also major structural inequalities within the world of publishing that mean Black authors and other authors of colour are underrepresented across the board, with the publishing world throwing up roadblocks such as “quotas for books by or featuring people of colour, a perceived limited appeal for these books and a feeling that authors of colour could only write about race issues.”

But when you finally get the book published, all the difficulties are worth it, right? Well, not always. Sometimes, authors deeply regret the books that they have published, even if — and sometimes because — those books made their names or brought them wild success. Arthur Conan Doyle famously hated Sherlock Holmes so much that he tried to kill the character off permanently, only to be forced to bring him back after a public outcry. Agatha Christie resented the public demand for more Poirot novels; she found her creation irritating and hated all the idiosyncrasies she had given him, something she wryly references when writing crime author Ariadne Oliver’s hatred of her own fictional detective character.

Many of the books that authors regretted writing are well known, but others come as a surprise. However, it’s important to note that nearly all of the authors who went on to regret their books are white, and most are men. As the publishing statistics show, authors of colour struggle far more than white authors to be published in the first place — it’s likely that there are simply not enough books being published by authors of colour for those authors to have those same feelings of regret about the work they have struggled to get out there in the first place.

What do we remember about our favourite fantasy stories? Apart from the compelling plots and characters, we’re most likely to fall in love with a fantasy novel because of strong worldbuilding, whether that’s the creation of a fascinating fictional society, the inclusion of fun legendary creatures, or, in many cases, the construction of an interesting and thought-provoking magic system. Throughout the years of fantasy dominating as a genre, there have been many different types of magic systems, some well-explained, with strong structures, while others fall into the “no rules, just vibes” category. But what makes for the best magic systems in fantasy, while others are disappointing?

Many magic systems are based on concepts or ideas that exist in the real world. The wizards of Discworld devote years at university to learning spells from ancient times (or, in later years, simply enjoying big dinners and doing very little real magic). Some magic systems are based on maths, while others draw on crafts such as sewing or weaving. Some fantasy authors have created magic systems based on music, while others have taken a religious slant to their characters’ magical practices, having them work closely with gods to cast spells in their worlds. A good magical system is consistent, not too overpowered (even magic users need to struggle to make a story interesting), and is interesting enough to stick in the reader’s mind long after they’ve finished the story. Here are some of the best magic systems in recent — and not-so-recent — fantasy literature.

Reading Legends and Lattes has gotten me thoroughly obsessed with the cozy fantasy genre, and lucky for me — and you — there are some really great books like Legends and Lattes out there to enjoy. Exactly what makes a cozy fantasy novel cozy can shift a bit from book to book, but there are some similarities across the board. They’re generally full of heartwarming characters, little to no drama, and relatively low stakes. And the addition of bookstores, coffee shops, tea shops, or bakeries doesn’t hurt. That might just be a personal preference, though.

When it comes to books like Legends and Lattes, in particular, I’m looking for books about characters finally looking to settle down, stories set in magical shops, casts of found families, friendship, and maybe a touch of romance. But most of all, I’m looking for books that invite you in and envelope you a nice, warm hug. Because that is what cozy fantasy is, really: the bookish form of pure comfort. And that’s what Legends and Lattes does so well. So brew up a pot of tea or coffee, drag out your fluffiest blanket, and settle in for the coziest of cozy books, just like Legends and Lattes.

Even if you don’t pay much attention to literary news, there are some book awards you’ve probably heard of: The Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Awards, the Booker Prize. But these big-name awards are just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens and dozens of smaller book awards out there, and paying attention to them will lead you to exciting books that get overlooked by the flashy, mainstream prizes.

One of the best things about these smaller awards is that they often recognize books from indie presses that don’t get huge marketing budgets. There are also lots of prizes designed to celebrate literature from certain regions and written by authors from marginalized communities. All literary awards are subjective and a bit random, but if you’re looking to expand your reading beyond the bestsellers, checking out the past and current winners of niche prizes is a great way to do so!

These eight nonfiction books have all won different literary prizes in the last five years. But many of them have flown under the radar and only have a few hundred ratings on Goodreads. In other words: these are hidden nonfiction gems, each of them brilliant in its own way, and you’re going to want to get your hands on them.