I think buying a wrap in a pharmacy is incredible. I once bought a huge wrap in a Walgreens in Manhattan. It came with a sachet of extra mayonnaise tucked into the packaging even though it was already heavy with mayonnaise. I bought it and a thin can of Coke Zero and ate and drank while walking, like an actor. It’s usually a kind of chicken prep inside the wraps I like but it’s so unrecognizable to the mouth and the eye as to be moot, the name, the food question, and likewise the preparation who knows. A wrap is chopped foods folded up in a bib of parcooked very flatbread. Once folded, it looks like a handmade food tube with hospital corners at the ends to stop the food tumbling out when it’s lifted vertical to eat. I eat it, or someone else eats it, and thinks of drastic things coolly. The best wraps are cave fish and peter forever outside time. That goes for a lot of what’s happening when I’m inside of a big pharmacy. I feel outside of time and outside of my life. I go into a big pharmacy when it’s dark outside. I buy a wrap and a fizzy drink with my earbuds in listening to my music. My music lends the whole thing a cinematic thing. I’m the crushed protagonist buying a corpse-like wrap and a thin can of Coke Zero on another planet the same as this one. I’ll take my earbuds out to pay unless there’s a self-checkout. A self-checkout’s good for buying food at the pharmacy. The fantasy ennobles whatever and lifts what from the outside looks miserable but is not. When I have food in that’s bad for me I’ll bolt some of it then bin the rest and pour bleach over it in the bin so I can’t fish it out later and eat it, then I’ll smoke the first cigarette from a new pack then go to the sink and hold the rest of the pack under the cold tap on full or I’ll have a first few pulls on a cigarette and pluck it from my mouth and flick it some irretrievable place. The expression on my face won’t change; when there’s no one around I needn’t be convincing. This is very realistic; my feelings happen internally. I’ll have half a glass from a bottle of wine then upend the rest of the bottle into the sink. I like making whatever bad thing irredeemable because I don’t trust future me to be consistent with current me. I know I’m inconsistent and this can be frightening. Self-love is an unobservable phenomenon that cavils forever. I should be punished but not killed outright. I bought a big bag of Doritos in Blackheath in the morning and started eating them in rough stacks outside the shop. I then sharpish turned and emptied the rest into a bin there and used the empty Dorito bag as a shiny mitt to force the Doritos deep into the bin, then. Everything else in the bin groaned and shifted downward. When I’m alone I’ll buy processed foods and unrefrigerated premixed alcoholic drinks. Once, my mouth was full of Dorito pulp and room-temperature vodka maracuja drink outside a späti in Berlin in the summer, great. Cool Original Doritos have a remarkable savory flavor I can’t place. The bag has a lot of blue and black on it, as well as dramatic photos of the Doritos. Blue and black are inedible executive colors. They mark the contents as exclusive and ambitious. I think it’s Cool Ranch flavor in the U.S., a thick dressing. I like processing Doritos with my mouth. Saliva piddles moisten while molars pound to a paste. I compress the paste between my tongue and the roof of my mouth to make now Dorito-flavored and colored spit leach from it and get into me via ducts. The paste remainder forms a curved cast and this is a remarkable temporary food object. I cut the soft cast object into neat nothings with my teeth then and swallow it easily. I’m just getting rid of shapes down a chute. The thing we all go to Doritos for is the intense flavor and astonishing color. Dorito flavor is staggering. It can be easily decoupled from the corn medium inside my mouth. The flavor and the color of Doritos cheers me up no end and the lurid smut on my fingers. I like eating all kinds of cheese puffs. They don’t pique my loathsomeness much as they’re just aerated packing material, a deniable foodstuff at the far end of edible. I eat cheese puffs with an urgency that from the outside looks like mechanical efficiency but isn’t it’s just noise in me, it’s squirming almost nothing perhaps pleasure’s dust there’s nothing to it. The cheese flavor of cheese puffs varies within a small window only, whereas actual real cheeses have many different ones. When an ideal of course ghosts I toss the future after it. Silk Cuts are okay when they’re customized: cover over the perforations with a torn-off glue strip from a cigarette paper or you can clamp two fingers over the perforations while you smoke to make it proper strength. I do something similar with my vape nowadays. I part-block a valve near the mouthpiece of the vape with my fingertip and in this way I can throttle the vapor. The vape mouthpiece is musical-feeling, like a child’s first wind instrument. Stuff from my mouth and lips comes off on the mouthpiece and can gather in the breathing hole but I can always get a pin or a sharp pencil and gouge the stuff out and wipe it on a trouser leg. I keep the vape in one of my two trouser pockets. Sharp lint from my pocket can get in the breathing hole and shoot into my unsuspecting throat when I vape it. I like vaping all of the time. My vape provides me with my home planet’s gas mix without which otherwise I’d suffocate on Earth’s mix. As with my voice my exhalation made visible by vape in it is an aspect of me that flees me to be with the world and never to return. I like that there’s formaldehyde in vapes but I don’t like popcorn lung. When the juice runs out I taste burning metal. When the juice leaks into your mouth sometimes oh, it’s very obviously poison I’m pulling in. I know about formaldehyde from alien fetuses and big decapitated heads in jars of it but I don’t know about popcorn lung. It’s a very evocative name and an ominously fun euphemism I won’t look up the reality of. I secretly vape on planes, in cinemas, in concert halls; everywhere you can’t vape you can actually very easily vape without discovery. I palm the vape like an inmate. I ensure the little glowing display’s hidden. I look straight at anyone nearby so if they try looking at me they’ll be met by my gaze before they see that I’m vaping so that they’ll immediately look away. This sort of preemptive gaze is weird, it repulses other’s sight; it relies on being there first, looking first, and on protocol. I pull on the vape and hold it in for as long as possible so that the vapor dissipates in me. By the time I breathe out there’s no giveaway vape opaquing my breath. In circumstances where vaping’s not really okay to do I take care to pull on it when I’m quite sure it won’t be my turn to talk or laugh for about twenty seconds, which is about how long the vape takes to entirely dissipate in me. During this time I smile and nod while I hold it in. I can do it. I presume it’s fine to vape everywhere or I don’t care if it is or it isn’t. I have the gall to do it in someone else’s house just in front of everyone midconversation without asking. If someone says something I feel terribly guilty. I feel for myself via remembered stilled machines still warm to the touch. I’m shadowing myself through a history of my own impersonal sentimentality the pining for which electro-plates the meaningless with a rose zirconium-like. I sat alone on a low stool at a low table in a pub lounge and customized a Silk Cut. The table and the stool were genuinely small. There was an empty blue glass ashtray and a drained pint glass marbled with beer foam scum on the small table which was round and a brown metal spackled with little hammered divots. My hands are seen from an instructional isometric perspective and my concentrating face is in close-up which in this sequence bravely allows itself the ugly repose of the unobserved. I gave an unaffected performance with my jaw slackened. I bulged some. No visible musculature and no visible veining on my arms. What was I? I’d a pad of green Rizla, a purple-and-white Silk Cut ten-pack and a black plastic lighter with a silver cuff. I got a cigarette paper and tore the glue strip off it. I licked the glue strip and wrapped it around one Silk Cut’s midriff to dress the perforations that make it healthy, closed. Then I took up the lighter and ground the striking wheel slowly with my thumb, moving the lighter up and down just above the Silk Cut, milling invisible flint bits over it. Then I smoked the Silk Cut and the flint bits once caught spat glum sparks when the lit tip was on them. The sparkles and the blued smoke dawdling around my head made my head look like a monument to something on the night of its national holiday. This was when you could smoke inside pubs in the UK. When I run out of cigarettes I collect the squashed butts from the ashtray, split them open along the middle with my thumbnail-like minnows, and empty the stinky spent tobacco into a new cigarette paper to smoke. The catch when smoke goes haltingly past my epiglottis is abject but I could be wrong to use those words—abject, epiglottis. The catch resumes disbelief and with it my body happens in my embrace by myself of it. I know it’s a turnstile, I know it admits smoke or not, I know it’s not the pink teardrop. People start smoking for different reasons. I started smoking when I was twelve I rolled Tony and his flunkies’ cigarettes at Sophie’s party in a barn in Wootton and everyone drenched in Lynx or Impulse. I slipped away and walked home when the little brick of Golden Virginia ran out, purposeless. I often walked the many miles home through the countryside in the middle of the night as a teenager, blank I can’t remember feeling anything. There was no one else anywhere. We’d two welcome pedophiles in the village. Jim had no toes but I loved acting. The image of my future radicalizes and pillories my present. I abuse myself in ways. I like eating tinned hot dog sausages drooped onto sliced white, scribbled with ketchup. I like the iron-blood taste of tinned hot dog sausages and their cold makes them seem found, eaten speculatively. I like modeling balloons pumped with blood meal, it seems. Hot dog sausages are a more appetizing prospect than recognizable meats if you’re like me. I eat ultra-processed meat products as a cannibal. The main ingredient in ultra-processed meats is the ultra-processing, the ultra-processing’s culture and its technologies and histories rather than the beautiful pig in the past. Cannibalism is the correct way to be.

 

From Flower, to be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in April.

Ed Atkins is a British artist based in Copenhagen who is best known for his computer-generated videos and animations. In recent years he has presented solo shows at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, Castello di Rivoli in Turin, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Serpentine Gallery in London, among others, with a survey show at Tate Britain opening in spring 2025. He is the author of A Primer for Cadavers and Old Food.

In early March, a new production of Moby-Dick will open at the Metropolitan Opera. In some ways, Moby-Dick already has everything an opera needs: narrative drama, memorable characters, high stakes, and even the high seas. But to adapt Herman Melville’s classic text—sometimes called the most famous novel no one has ever read—into a three-hour stage production was no small feat. (Remember, after all, all those chapters in the middle about whale anatomy and theology?) Gene Scheer wrote the libretto for Moby-Dick, and composer Jake Heggie wrote the music; it was originally commissioned by the Dallas Opera. It was first performed there in 2010, and has since gone on to audiences in San Francisco, San Diego, Calgary, and elsewhere. We talked to Scheer about the process of adapting Moby-Dick into an opera—and doing the same for Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which comes to the Met in September. We touched on the nuts and bolts of staging whaleships, borrowing from and changing Melville’s language, and the surprising similarities between opera and silent film.

 

INTERVIEWER

Were you at all overwhelmed by the prospect of adapting Moby-Dick?

In her new gripping memoir Catherine Simone Gray reckons with the questions what happens when survivors become mothers and what if we give half the attention to understanding our pleasure as we have to our pain? Gray reminds us that even amid pain, our bodies can teach us new truths about our capacity to heal and experience pleasure. Proud Flesh rewrites the body of the mother beyond the borders—bold, defiant, and heart-stoppingly true, it’s an unputdownable memoir and a force of nature.

“Why the obsession with motherhood?” writes author and journalist Gabriela Wiener in her book Nine Moons, translated by Jessica Powell. And it’s a question so many writers turn their minds to. It’s perhaps not surprising. Motherhood, in one way or another, affects us all—even the not having or the not doing can create tensions, pain, and societal implications that many have to grapple with. But perhaps more interestingly to writers and other creative minds, it overlaps with so many other significant subjects in our lives, like power and wealth; race, gender, and sexuality; language and culture; science and the environment, among others. Among the many books to choose from, I found that I was personally drawn to titles that were more international, translated from languages other than English. I’m grateful to the talented translators of these motherhood memoirs. Their work allows me to read more widely and think deeply and intentionally about what it means to be a mother all over the world.

6 Motherhood Memoirs

Breathe by Imani Perry In Breathe, author, critic, and historian Imani Perry writes movingly about what it means to raise Black sons in America. It is at once a letter to her sons, a memoir sifting through her life and her son’s formative years, and a resounding challenge to society to see her sons—and all Black children—as precious and deserving of humanity. At one point in the midst of Breathe, Perry writes, “I live for the life of the mind and heart.” It’s a simple statement in the midst of so much that’s insightful and profound in the collection but it struck me as a perfect capturing of the book. Breathe is a thoughtful and intimate glimpse into one of the brightest minds writing today but there is an equal amount of care and heart. It’s a special combination that I’ve treasured.

Nine Moons by Gabriela Wiener, translated by Jessica Powell Gabriela Wiener is an award-winning Peruvian journalist and author who is known for her wild explorations of sex, identity, and gender. Her personal accounts in the book Sexographies, also translated by Jessica Powell, range from infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison to detailed encounters at sex clubs and being whipped by a dominatrix in public. In Nine Moons, she approaches her pregnancy and motherhood in a similar full-bodied approach. One of my favorite early images in the book is her growing pile of books on motherhood next to her recent research on various sexual subcultures. Her work is fierce and funny and brilliant, and it’s a necessary and exhilarating addition to the genre as she discusses so much that is often left unsaid in other books about motherhood—like her abortions and her lust.

Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes by Jazmina Barrera, translated by Christina MacSweeney I loved Jazmina Barrera’s debut work of nonfiction, On Lighthouses, translated by the legend Christina MacSweeney, where she melds memoir and literary history while examining what lighthouses mean to her and more widely to us all through the works of Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ingmar Bergman, and many others. So it’s no surprise that I would love her exploration of pregnancy, motherhood, and art. Like On Lighthouses, Linea Negra is a memoir and also so much more. Barrera chronicles her own pregnancy and early motherhood while also reflecting on representations of motherhood in art and literature. I was particularly struck by the collection of resources she presents at the back of the book—poems, short stories, interviews, and essays—that she read while breastfeeding, the act of the artist feeding herself as she feeds her child. This urgent and intimate book is one of the most stunning I’ve ever read.

The Millions’ seasonal previews have become anticipated, admired, and extremely useful events in the book world. Sophia Stewart, an editor at The Millions and Publishers Weekly, was kind enough to answer some of my questions about how it gets made.

The Millions has been doing comprehensive previews for a while. How did you come to be a part of it?

It really is amazing that The Millions has been publishing its Most Anticipated book previews for 20 years—the first one had something like 15 titles, most of which were by big-name authors. Since then, the lists have evolved to be more thorough and to spotlight emerging authors or small press books that might not enjoy the same marketing muscle as the big names at big houses. I joined The Millions as deputy editor in early 2022, and within a few months became the editor of the site, at which point I took over the Most Anticipated previews. I published my first preview at the start of 2023.

Having written this column since mid-2021, I sometimes forget what I’ve covered. In some ways, I haven’t written anything new in the world of book censorship because the tactics, goals, and outcomes have not changed much at all over the course of this significant era of censorship. The guide to 56 tasks you can take to end book censorship? It’s literally the same guide as every other “how to fight book bans” guide since 2021, but it’s repackaged as a more granular checklist to make attending to those tasks easier. You’re still ultimately showing up to board meetings, voting, and sharing verified information about the latest news in book censorship.

This week, rather than drafting something fresh, let’s take the time to look back at some of the Literary Activism columns you may have missed from the previous several Januarys and Februarys. Catch up on what you may have missed, and remember that there is nothing new in the book—just different names and faces trying to get their 15 minutes of manufactured outrage fame. We are seeing the results of these actions play out and if you’ve been watching or engaged, nothing is surprising. That doesn’t mean it isn’t infuriating, disgusting, or not in need to pushback. It just means that the groundwork’s been being laid so it is simply not surprising in the least.

Be Your Own Library Advocate (2024)

“Public libraries are not play places. They are not cooling centers or warming centers or mental health clinics. Public libraries are not bars, nor are they essential services. Public libraries are places of information and access to information. They are places that ardently defend the rights of every person to seek out that information. This is fundamental and yet not highlighted or underlined enough. Public libraries are cornerstones of democratic and civic engagement, not safety nets for broken systems elsewhere. They might take on those roles, but that’s not their purpose.

No one else can raise your social value for you. You have to do it yourself. You have the data here to support it.”

Been too busy to keep up with all the comic book news lately? I’ve got you covered!

News From DC and Marvel

A hearty and heartfelt congratulations to Jenny Blake Isabella, best known for co-creating Black Lightning, who came out as trans earlier this month.Captain America: Brave New World opened to mixed reviews and massive receipts.Rob Liefeld did not have a marvel-ous time at the Deadpool & Wolverine premiere and is now making it Marvel’s problem — namely, by cutting all ties with them.The Thunderbolts* trailer debuted during some football game earlier this month.Michael B. Jordan’s position on Jonathan Majors’ domestic violence conviction is deeply unfortunate, to say the least.Variety ranked its 100 greatest TV performances of the 21st century (so far). I won’t spoil it entirely, but superhero fans should definitely check out Numbers 71, 64, and 13.If you’re a fan of both Marvel and My Hero Academia, you’re going to want to check out these Japanese promotional posters that combine both franchises.

News From the Wider Comics World

Akio Iyoku, one of Dragon Ball‘s executive producers, recently did an interview about the role that franchise creator Akira Toriyama had in the anime’s development.ND Stevenson, best known for creating such popular graphic novels as Lumberjanes and Nimona, is venturing into prose novels. Scarlet Morning, the first of an illustrated duology, will be released this September.Book Riot’s Megan Mabee has thoughtfully rounded up some great teen sci-fi comics for your reading pleasure.The Binc Foundation has awarded scholarships to four comic book retailers to be put towards attending the ComicsPRO comic industry meeting later this month.

People often say that life imitates art, but sometimes art imitates reality television shows. It make sense that reality TV has crept into so many of our favorite horror novels. After all, these unscripted TV series have become such a huge part of our lives. Who isn’t watching The Traitors, the campy and suspensive reality competition show where contestants murder each other to win? Sounds like the perfect setting for a horror story, does it not?

Here are three horror novels that turn the world of reality TV into a dark, twisted place. Or at least…slightly more dark and twisted than it is usually.

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Grim Root by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam Two of the books on this list are inspired by one of the biggest mainstays in reality TV, The Bachelor. Who can blame authors for wanting to write horror based on that show? What’s more horrifying than agreeing to marry a man you barely know after only, like, two dates? Especially when he’s been dating 20ish other women at the same time? In Grim Root, a Bachelor-like TV show gets ghosty when the contestants find themselves spending a week in a haunted house. But when the bachelor dies, all bets are off.

Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen This novel is about a reality TV dating series called The Catch which is definitely not anything like The Bachelor (except it totally is). The bachelor is down to his final four ladies, and the crew heads to a remote island in the Pacific Northwest to film their next round of dates. What could possibly go wrong, right? Little does the cast and crew of The Catch know what awaits them on the island. Patricia might be a little furry and a little violent. But mostly she’s just misunderstood. All she really wants to do is cuddle.

I love everything Billy-Ray Belcourt has ever written, so it’s no big surprise that his latest, a collection of short stories, blew me out of the water. I had a rare experience while reading this book where I kept putting it down, thinking, “I cannot possibly read another sentence as beautiful as this one.” And then, a paragraph later, another sentence so utterly alive and breathtaking that, once again, I’d have to pause for a moment before continuing. If you are looking for stories that will make you feel alive, stories that confront Canada’s colonial violence but never center it, stories that are animated, always, by deep love—you need to read this book ASAP.

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Coexistence by Billy-Ray Belcourt These stories are mostly (though not exclusively) set in and around Edmonton. Belcourt’s narrators are mostly queer Cree men—artists, poets, professors, and students—struggling with how to live and love and how to use language to describe and make sense of their living. One story details the beginning of a relationship; another a different relationship’s end. They take place at literary festivals and in drab motel rooms, on highways and in living rooms. Every story is pulsing and clattering with aliveness. Every story is a beautiful and specific expression of Indigenous love. I’ve always admired the way Belcourt writes theory into his fiction. His characters take thinking seriously but they also belly laugh. They use theory and scholarship as a way to remake language and remake the world, but they wrestle just as meaningfully with the systems of oppression that affect their material realities. In these stories sex and poetry are equally important; the life of the mind and the life of the body are not separate. It makes for incredibly intimate reading. How do you make a poem? How do you fall in love in the wake of ongoing colonial violence? What does it mean to listen well—to your mother, your students, your lover, yourself? Does art matter? How do you rebuild your life after being released from prison? What about the prairies and the ghosts that live there, the Alberta wind, your childhood home? What are they telling you about how to live? These questions are not abstract, as they live in the bodies of Belcourt’s characters and in the language they use to make sense of the world.

My cousin Lorrie invited me on a ten-day retreat in Peru where we would partake in ancient ceremonies involving the Living Death Drug ayahuasca and—

“Don’t tell me anything more,” I interrupted. “The answer is yes!”

I never watch the trailer before going to the movie. I don’t want to ruin the surprise. Even if sometimes that means the surprise ruins me. I met a big-personalitied Frenchman while traveling and did not take time to get to know him before marrying him and moving into his house in Paris. I guess I don’t feel any proprietary rights over my destiny. I allow the Parisian shopgirls to choose my outfits, and now I will let the Peruvian shamans choose my insides. Whatever they’ve got has to be better than what I got going on now.

Lorrie and I tried to figure out when was the last time we’d seen each other. Thirty-six years ago, when she visited me in Philadelphia!

I read about 100 books a year, and most of those are queer. Since I started my book blog The Lesbrary, queer books—especially sapphic books—have taken over my reading life, and I couldn’t be happier about it. But that means that trying to narrow down a favourites list is tricky. I keep a running list of more than 100 sapphic books I recommend, never mind other queer books.

Recently, though, a BookTuber I follow invited members to submit a list of their top 20 books of all time. Since I already put in the work of narrowing down my favourites for that, I thought I’d share them with you! Of the 20 books I submitted, 15 were queer, naturally.

Because most of my reading has been sapphic (thanks to the Lesbrary), most of these books are, too. I also know that if I was asked on a different day, this list would change dramatically.

Even in the midst of this chaotic upheaval, collection development and readers advisory is still happening in libraries. Here are some recent lists, links, and resources to help your patrons. Reading is an escape, and we have a lot of people looking for a little escapism right about now.

New & Upcoming Titles

Ian McEwan is publishing a new book in September.

John Irving’s upcoming book, Queen Esther, returns to the setting of The Cider House Rules.

Here’s the cover reveal for Nick Medina’s upcoming horror novel The Whistler.

The top new releases for February, plus the best picks for mysteries/thrillers, romance, SFF, horror, nonfiction, queer books, and children’s books.

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

The Life-Changing Celebrity Book Club

On the cusp of Oprah selecting her 111th book club pick, The Cut has a piece out that essentially ranks the effectiveness of a few (of the seemingly endless) celebrity book clubs. I wrote about The Cut‘s earlier piece focusing on how Marissa Stapley’s life and career were changed when Reese’s Book Club selected her book, Lucky, and Reese’s is one of the book clubs at the top of the list where there’s the greatest potential for impact. Lucky, for instance, is getting an adaptation starring Anya Taylor-Joy (Reese Witherspoon has a media company, Hello Sunshine), and honestly it sounds like a blast to be among Reese’s author cohort with gatherings and long-term support. The iconic and long-running Oprah’s Book Club is up there as well, of course, as is Read With Jenna and Good Morning America. According to the authors and industry insiders The Cut spoke to for this piece, these four get books on bestseller lists and lead to development deals.

Pay Attention to This Small Press Doing Big Things

There are few things that I love more than reading nonfiction books with incredible prose. I lose myself in underlining, annotating, and thinking through ideas in the text. Sometimes I read a sentence and just think, “Wow, what a sentence!”

Here are a few books that I just adored reading and think have some especially noteworthy prose.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman Saidiya Hartman writes incredibly beautiful prose. She tells the story of the Black women she read about who were mentioned in passing or who appeared unnamed in photographs. She investigates their lives, researches their pasts, and invites readers to bear witness to these women all too often lost from history. These women come alive on the page in such a beautiful way. This book is incredibly captivating and intricately crafted.

Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America by Laila Lalami Lalami’s essays examine her experience moving to the U.S. from Morocco in hopes of pursuing the American Dream. She’d heard so much about the success one could achieve in America. But when she finally arrives in America and as she follows her path to U.S. citizenship, she begins to rethink her initial assumptions. She starts to think that the American Dream is really only available for certain kinds of immigrants. Lalami is an incredible prose stylist with such sharp observational skills. I love how she crafts each essay to be its own unique gem, but they all add to the overarching theme of the collection.

We’re now in the thick of legislative sessions for most states across the country. While there has been an astronomical rise in legislation targeting public institutions and targeting books held within them, there’s some good news. Several states have anti-book ban bills on deck as well. Some of these states pre-filed such bills, so they might sound familiar. Others are newcomers, either expanding existing legislation or building new protections for libraries with their fresh bills.

It is important to remember there are a couple of crucial pieces to these anti-book ban bills, which began in Illinois in 2023 and expanded to several other states in 2024. Some of the bills protect only public libraries, while some protect both public school libraries and public libraries. Some tie a financial incentive to freedom to read/anti-book ban policies while others increase protections of library workers against criminalization for not banning books. Other bills do both or all of the above.

We’ve seen, too, how legislators have been seeking to undermine existing anti-book ban legislation this session. Both Maryland and Minnesota do not allow books in public schools or public libraries to be pulled for political, ideological, or partisan reasons, but both states have bills this year that seek to allow bans of “sexually explicit” and “sexually inappropriate” materials. What those terms mean is left purposefully vague, hinting that this is yet another method to ban LGBTQ+ books.

If you live in any of the states with anti-book ban bills in the legislature this year, it’s crucial to have your voice heard. Make the phone calls, send the emails, and show up in person to talk to your state-level representatives about these bills and why they are crucial for protecting not only the freedom to read and institutions like public schools and libraries but also for protecting the rights, voices, and lives of marginalized people.

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Welcome to Today in Books. In this weekend edition, a look at all the news Book Riot covered this week.

Superhero comics are still dominated by white creators and white characters, but there have always have been voices of color contributing to the adventures we all love so much. Black History Month is the perfect time to review the influence that Black writers, artists, and characters have had on the world of superheroes.

Note: Some of the items featured here have not aged well. I included them because they still contributed to comics history and helped make the industry what it is today, for better or for worse.

1940 – E.C. Stoner creates, draws, and writes the character Phantasmo, Master of the World for Dell Comics. He is the first Black creator known to have worked on a superhero comic and created a superhero.

1940 – Ebony White, the Spirit’s sidekick, debuts in The Spirit newspaper strip. Although rooted in racial stereotypes, Ebony is intelligent and respected by the other characters. More recent iterations have sought to portray the character in a more appropriate way.

1947 – Matt Baker, the first prominent Black artist in comics, revives the character Phantom Lady for Fox Feature Syndicate. The next year, he draws a cover so scandalously sexual that it would be held up as an example of degeneracy in comics.

Raise your hand if you’re in the mood for a little cathartic fictional violence this February! I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: 2025 is a year that has already been filled with so much rage and anxiety, not just for me but for a lot of communities everywhere. In times like these, a quick little horror read where rich people are mocked, rage is celebrated, the violence is campy and over-the-top? Yes, that’s exactly what we’re looking for.

Thank goodness for Virginia Feito’s Victorian Psycho, which came out earlier this month. Feito, your timing couldn’t possibly be better. Horror lovers everywhere, make sure you read this book!

Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito Welcome to Ensor House in Victorian England. We arrive here alongside governess Winifred Notty who has come to the dreary estate to care for and tutor her two charges, Drusilla and Andrew Pounds. Immediately upon meeting the children, Winifred (or “Fred” as she is sometimes called) notices how completely unremarkable and, frankly, stupid they both are. Nevertheless, Winifred is determined to play the perfect well-behaved governess. She will do her job to the best of her abilities. And she will never, ever, ever commit any violent crimes or kill any babies. Not this time. She promises herself. But the more time she spends with the Pounds family, the more she feels the violent urges within her bubbling up to the surface again. Mr. Pounds has no misgivings about openly ogling Winifred and doesn’t mind flirting with her in full view of others. Meanwhile, Mrs. Pounds sees her husband’s behavior as a reason to punish Winifred. Between the Pounds’ horny patriarch, the constantly livid matriarch, and two infuriatingly dim children, Winifred has trouble keeping her rage in check. And, yeah…okay…maybe Winifred starts to give into some of her stranger urges. Who can blame her, really?