In education there’s a distinct jargon used. Acronyms and idioms and particular turns of phrase. This isn’t unique to education, but ubiquitous in most occupations. While we do the best we can to reflect on our teaching processes and make corrections where necessary, sometimes we don’t even think about a term that needs to be examined because we’ve been using it for so long. This is not an excuse; it’s an explanation.

“Reluctant reader” is one of those terms. It’s still in use for a few reasons. One, it does describe people who are hesitant to read, and specifically, books or long passages. Two, it’s easy to remember and easily understood by non-educators. Parents, for example, understand what we mean when we call a child a reluctant reader. Whereas terms like 504 or scaffolding or IEP are not as accessible upon first hearing them. Finally, it’s alliterative. I don’t have to tell you that people who love literacy love alliteration.

It’s time for the expression to be closely examined and weighed. “Reluctant reader” does not have a positive connotation, for children or adults who identify with that term. In order to redefine reluctant readers, we first have to understand who they are.

It’s Monster Mash season, baby! My favorite time of year. Porches are decorated with pumpkins and ghouls, bowls of candy are everywhere you look, and the options for your costume are endless. And with that comes all of the scary movies, books, and comics just waiting at your fingertips. You want vampires, you’ve got them. You want aliens? You betcha. You want horror that’s also sad? Signed, sealed, delivered. Even for the scaredy cats, there’s lighthearted horror or the cozy aspects of the holiday. Hot chocolate and chocolate and sweaters to stave off the fall chill. There’s something for everyone at Halloween, that’s what makes it so great.

Sometimes working full time or taking care of a family makes it harder to get into the Halloween spirit. I love comics and audiobooks and even podcasts full of scares to get me in the monster mood. Comics and graphic novels are great to read during my lunch break or for 15 minutes before bed. I fall asleep with the images seared into my brain, gorgeous and gruesome in equal measure.

If you’re wanting more horror in your life, here are eight Halloween comics to read this scary season (or anytime really)!

I love big, sprawling, fantasy series as much as anyone. But for the past few years, I’ve also been craving more self-contained stories that don’t demand as much time and attention from me. Which is why I began reading standalones — and let me say that they are more than capable of telling complete and detailed stories with well-developed characters despite the shorter format. In fact, that’s exactly what makes them great reads for both fantasy newbies and genre veterans. We covered adult fantasy standalones recently here at Book Riot. So today I’m going to focus on standalone YA fantasy books.

A few things before we get to these amazing books. For today’s list, I chose eight great books with different kinds of fantasy elements. From mythology retellings, to mermaids, golems, witches, and even exorcists. There’s a book for everyone on this list! Plus, I chose to focus on more recent releases — the oldest one being from mid 2020. That’s because, now more than ever, standalone YA fantasy books are thankfully full of non-Western, non-white, and non-cis characters and settings. Which is something I wanted to focus on today.

So without further ado, let’s dive into eight great standalone YA fantasy books that are absolutely worth reading.

The mornings are crisp. The days are shorter. Tomatoes and peaches have been replaced by apples and pumpkins at the farmer’s market. And the fall books are here! Autumn is always a busy time of year for books, with publishers releasing their big titles in the hope of capturing the interest of readers shopping for the holidays or looking to curl up with a blanket and a good book as the temperatures drop. There’s something for everyone this season, with thrilling debuts, thoughtful nonfiction, stunning poetry collections, and so much more. Readers will be particularly excited to see new titles from favorite authors like Scholastique Mukasonga and Samanta Schweblin and translators like Emma Ramadan and Megan McDowell. But don’t sleep on some of the new and exciting voices on this list too.

I’ve poured over the catalogs and galleys and highlighted just some of the best fall 2022 new releases in translation, and because there’s just so much to choose from, I’ve added notes for others you should seek out as well! And whether it’s just something about publishing this year or my ever constant love for works of short fiction, but there are a lot of new short story collections that caught my eye. So if you’d like to dip in and out of some incredible short fiction in what can be a busy time of year, you’re in luck.

Fall 2022 New Releases In Translation

One of the things Asia is most known for is horror. In fact, Japan and South Korea have produced many horror films throughout the years. Who hasn’t been terrified by The Ring or Sadako? Or those films featuring scary Japanese dolls? How about the zombies in Train to Busan?

The Asian continent also has plenty of horror movies and TV series based on its culturally diverse urban legends. Unfortunately, there’s just far and few between when it comes to books. Luckily, I was able to dig up some gems that are written by Asians themselves.

In this list, you’ll find horror stories based on urban legends: a white lady who is said to be haunting a street, scary college tales in India, a girl killed and thrown into a well, babies tossed in coin lockers, and urban legend ghosts in Southeast Asia. But before we get to them, just a note: I was only able to include books in English, specifically, ones from majority English-speaking countries such as India, Singapore, and the Philippines. I’m sure that there are more of these out there but that they aren’t available in English.

Find below are eight urban-legend horror books by Asian authors. Get ready to be frightened by a different kind of horror this scare season!

Skulls, bones, and skeletons are classic book cover iconography, with symbolism for myriad tones or themes: horror, poison, death, humanity, and, you know, just general coolness. I’d like to think skull imagery became popular in the literary world thanks to our friend Hamlet and his pal Yorick — the exhumed skull Hamlet monologues at — and for that, I’m eternally grateful for the bard.

The real joy in curating this list of books with skull covers is the variety of genre and audience. Skulls are not tied to any one genre, though of course, they tend to be more popular in horror, fantasy, science, and crime books. In the land of middle grade covers, the skulls tend to be subtle or cartoonish, while young adult and adult covers go hard in trying to give you nightmares.

I’m ranking these covers by prettiness to eerieness, because that’s how I roll. We have skulls of all styles here, from floral arrangements and abstract shapes to realistic illustrations and haunting manipulations.

A note: I tried to track down the designers for these gorgeous skull covers, but a few were elusive. Apologies to those designers, and if you find this, let us know to add your name for proper recognition!

Clarence Larkin’s commentary on THE BOOK OF REVELATION is written LIKE THIS, crafted with occasional capitalizations to emphasize IMAGES and TERMS. Reading it doesn’t feel like being shouted at but rather kind and intimate, as though he’s DIRECTING our attention in the same way a CHILD is directed to look at CARDINALS and CATERPILLARS during NATURE WALKS. Larkin directs the reader to symbols like THE SEVEN SEALS, a kingdom made of STONE, and the NEW HEAVEN and NEW EARTH. As a writing style, its effect is in guiding the EYE to see ONE THING over another. Eventually we’re pointed to this: a vision of the New City. There shall be NO NIGHT there: they need no candle, neither light of the Sun; for the Lord God giveth them LIGHT; and THEY SHALL REIGN FOR EVER and EVER.

***

I grew up in Willoughby, Ohio, the supposed subject of the Twilight Zone episode “A Stop at Willoughby” (1960), in which a man falls asleep during his daily commute and DREAMS of a train station for a UTOPIAN TOWN. The opening narration begins: “This is Gart Williams, age thirty-eight, a man protected by a suit of armor, all held together by one bolt. Just a moment ago, someone removed the bolt, and Mr. Williams’s protection fell away and left him a naked target.” A naked target, the episode suggests, for virulent daydreaming. It’s a cold winter, and Gart is an advertising executive so beleaguered by both wife and boss that his only respite is the commute he spends dreaming of a better place. As his life spirals horrific—his wife thinks he’s a coward, he fails at his job—Willoughby from the window waxes idyllic: parasols, pushcarts, summertime in 1888. It is a backward-looking fantasy, one he indulges in daily while sleeping.

vladimir nabokov said:

i confess i do not believe in time
in BEING AND TIME, poor heidegger
didn’t finish the time part in time
to publish it with the being part
so everything-now must be not-being
there is a pine needle stuck in the screen
the side nearest me must be the being side
the one further away’s the time side
nabokov only said the first line
even when you have nothing to do
there’s not enough time in the day

there are 5 stinkbugs on the back porch—the stinkbugs don’t make you feel good or likable. but the one beautiful tree we have that i can see is still fulsome. in years past it’s always been the best & most long-lasting foliage tree & now, even in this year of all the leaves blown down & drabness, as i see it, it’s a glorious tree between the locusts, acting as if there’s not a stinkbug around.

Following the Attica uprising in September 1971, Celes Tisdale, a poet and a professor at Buffalo State College, began leading poetry workshops at the correctional facility—the first at a U.S. prison to be run by a non-inmate and an African American. Poems written by his students were published in 1974 as Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica, by Broadside Press, the first major Black-owned publishing house in America. Below are several noncontinuous entries from the diary Tisdale kept during that time, beginning with his first day at the facility.

May 24, 1972

4:30 P.M.
“Anticipation”

“I could hardly believe my luck in having found her,” Vivian Gornick writes of the persona she created for her pivotal 1987 book Fierce Attachments, a rich, genre-redefining portrayal of fraught maternal bonds that the New York Times has anointed the best memoir of the past fifty years. “It was not only that I admired her style, her generosity, her detachment—such a respite from the me that was me!—she had become the instrument of my illumination.” That shock of wonderment and good fortune is familiar to all Gornick’s readers, and especially to the many writers of nonfiction who still pass around The Situation and the Story (2001)—in which those words appear—like a talisman. It’s a thrill to read Gornick’s precise, elegant account of how a voice and a narrative are made, and to see that process so masterfully demonstrated in her own work is often (as she herself has said of reading and rereading the likes of Edmund Gosse or Joan Didion) to become “enraptured.” 

It’s in that spirit that the Review will present Vivian Gornick with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement, at our seventieth-anniversary Spring Revel on April 4, 2023. Her engrossing Writers at Work interview, which appeared in issue no. 211 (Winter 2014), was the magazine’s second ever to focus on the art of memoir. 

Gornick’s exceptional contributions to literature over the past several decades span autobiography, essays, and journalism. Her first book, In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt—the research and writing of which she described, with characteristic élan, for the Review’s short documentary series My First Time—was a finalist for the 1974 National Book Award. As a contributor to The Village Voice in the years that followed, she became a leading writer of the feminist movement while developing a unique style of criticism that blended literary analysis with clear-eyed observations of her own experiences. This style came to fruition in books including The End of the Novel of Love (1997), a groundbreaking collection of essays that debunked the insidious ubiquity of romantic love as a metaphor for happiness, and The Men in My Life (2008), a compassionate study of the struggle for inner freedom that is shared across genders. 

My favorite app is Find My Friends. If you do not know what this is, it’s an app that lets you share your location at all times with fellow iPhone havers. I have access to the locations of nineteen friends and they have access to mine. I also have two friends, both named Nick, who refuse to share their locations with anyone—but I have given mine to both of them out of loyalty, just because I like the idea that they know where I am. I like looking at the map of New York, seeing little bubbles with my friends’ initials pop up in the usual and the surprising places. Sara is at the office. Graham is at home. Ben is at the bar where he does trivia. This guy I met at a concert is in the East Village—who knows why he’s there? I realize this sounds really boring, and it is. But I love knowing where my friends are—that they’re exactly where they belong, or that they aren’t. Of course there are practical uses: there’s the chance you might be around the corner from someone, both at different bars, and have a serendipitous meetup. But I check Find My Friends constantly and impractically, as a little way of knowing where my friends are at any given time. I guess it makes me feel close to them in a stupid technology way, but I feel close to a lot of people in stupid technology ways. That’s why I spend so much time texting.

The best times to look are of course nights and mornings, especially on weekends. There’s a chance you might see that someone didn’t sleep at home! It would be indiscreet to mention this to them, or at least I never would, but it’s a fun little secret in your phone. I understand why many people think this is weird and creepy, but I am not one of them. Someone above the age of forty asked me recently how anyone in my generation has affairs, if we all know where others are at any given time. I told him I wasn’t really trying to have an affair. It was a good question, though, and maybe one day someone will put a location-sharing plot in a not-very-good novel: a man idly looking at Find My Friends only to discover that his wife is not where she said she would be. The house of cards that is life comes tumbling down, et cetera. That would probably be too tedious to put into a book, but it would happen in real life and it probably already has, possibly thousands of times. I will take my chances and try to avoid affairs.

The other night I met someone who asked for my number and immediately shared his location with me, indefinitely. I thought this was very funny and I shared mine back. We parted ways, and we might never see each other again. I just checked his location. Now he’s in Vienna! Life is full of surprises!

Henrietta Garnett was forty-one when her first and last novel, Family Skeletons, was published in 1986. She knew that her debut, a tragic gothic romance revolving around a complex constellation of family secrets, would face an unusual degree of public scrutiny: Henrietta was English literary royalty, the direct descendant of the Bloomsbury Group on both sides of her family tree. Her father was the novelist David “Bunny” Garnett, author of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize–winning Lady into Fox (1922), a book so highly regarded it was on the British high school syllabus when his daughter was a teenager in the late fifties and early sixties. Henrietta’s mother was Angelica Garnett, née Bell, daughter of Virginia Woolf’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. “I had been putting off trying to get anything published,” Henrietta confessed when an interviewer asked about her famous relations, “because I couldn’t help thinking that whatever I did it would never be as good as anything they’ve achieved.” Family Skeletons is a strange and singular creation: melodramatic in plot but elegant in tone, written in a cool and fluent prose that is utterly Henrietta’s own. The novel bears no resemblance to either Bunny’s or Woolf’s fiction; nevertheless, the story does contain more psychological traces of her family’s legacy—namely, of the uniquely disturbing personal dramas that shaped the lives of those who raised her and the public perception of the Bloomsbury Group.

***

Family Skeletons begins at Malabay, a grand old house in the wilds of Ireland. Our first glimpse of the rambling lakeside estate is early one summer morning: “The dew was heavy and glittered on every twig and leaf and blade of grass. The rain, so fine that it seemed to be suspended in the misty air, shone like the frail skein of a cobweb. The air was so moist, the leaves and grass so wet, the fish pond and the lake so scheming with reflections, that the division between land and sky seemed nebulous, amorphous and indistinct.” It’s a place that “gets into the blood” of those who live there. Ever since the death of her parents, seventeen-year-old Catherine has been raised at Malabay by her uncle Pake, a taciturn recluse still haunted by the torture he endured as a prisoner of war years earlier. Barring the household staff—Mick-The-Post and her cousin Tara, the only visitor Pake will allow—Catherine is completely shut off from the rest of the world. She measures out her days by riding her beloved horses, writing fanciful stories, and attending to the rather unconventional curriculum her uncle has devised for her education (translating the ancient Greeks features heavily). Given her naïveté, it comes as no surprise that she is in love with the handsome, older, and more world-wise Tara. That he returns her girlish affection is perhaps a tad less convincing, but it befits the almost mythic structures that organize this slightly off-kilter world. This incestuous undertone, which foreshadows certain revelations to come, is just one of a handful of nods to Wuthering Heights (1847). Although less headstrong than her nineteenth-century namesake, Henrietta’s Catherine is another skittish beauty, frequently compared to the animals she so adores. When Pake discovers that the cousins plan to marry, he explodes in a rage—but the lovers put this anger down to his general eccentricity and proceed regardless. Only three weeks after their wedding, in a traumatic reprise of her parents’ deaths by drowning years earlier, Tara is killed in a boating accident out on the lake. The teenage orphan, now a widow, is distraught; she lops off her hair, takes to her bed, and descends into a “wild and desperate misery.”

In our new Fall issue, no. 241, we published Nancy Lemann’s “Diary of Remorse.” To mark the occasion, we asked writers to reflect on Lemann’s remarkable literary career.

In the early years of the revived Vanity Fair, I happened to be in Tina Brown’s office when the conversation turned to a dispatch Nancy Lemann had just filed from the trial of Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, which Nancy, a child of New Orleans, was covering for the magazine. Tina was dissatisfied, borderline exasperated: Nowhere in the article, she complained, did Nancy specify what the trial was about, what the actual charges were, and what the criminal penalties might be; it was all mood, séance atmosphere, and sketch artistry. This was not journalism as we knew it in the halls of Condé Nast. “I’ll talk to Nancy and get her to work all this in up front,” said Pat Towers, Nancy’s editor. In Towers’s comment, I caught an echo of something I once heard Nancy sigh aloud about: an editor’s suggestions regarding her latest novel manuscript, primarily its lack of story. “I guess I’ll have to go back and put in some plot,” Nancy had said—but of course you can’t retroactively implant a plot into a body of fiction as if installing a new transmission.

Starting with her first novel, Lives of the Saints, Nancy Lemann has spread her impressions across the page in a style that calls to mind smooth, panning camera shots. Lives of the Saints, Sportsman’s Paradise, The Fiery Pantheon, Malaise (what a title, so Françoise Sagan): they’re like pre-mumblecore movies with a more interesting ensemble of neurotics, a firmer point of view, and a shapelier sense of comedy. No Lemann scene is complete without several characters in various stages of disrepair or subtle agitation, in need of flotation devices to get through the day. Although Nancy was a protégé of Gordon Lish, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Walker Percy—a heady triad of influences and personality-pluses that might have easily overloaded her circuits—her literary voice from the outset was assuredly, distinctively hers. In temperament and sensibility, she seems to me closer to F. Scott Fitzgerald than any of her mentors—or perhaps she’s Scott and Zelda rolled into one, her work suffused with a longing for a lost glamour. And she has no imitators.

Unlike Scott and Zelda, though, Nancy and her autobiographical stand-ins are interested in comfort rather than luxury; they’re bohemian romantics with a fondness for familiar haunts and a taste for the shabby-genteel. I once made the mistake of chaperoning Nancy to CBGB, and as soon as she stepped through its grotty portal I sensed an inner freeze: punk was beyond the pale. For Nancy, bohemia was a blue-lit lounge leafed with fake palm trees, or a private social club where white-haired gents in rumpled seersucker beam benignly upon younger folks making tiny spectacles of themselves.

Read any biography of Jack Kerouac and here’s essentially what you’ll learn: that in the summer of 1956 he spent two months in a mountaintop shack as a fire lookout for the US Forest Service in the North Cascades in Washington State, and nothing much happened. Mostly he was bored.

Jack’s experience on Desolation Peak marked the climax of his involvement with Buddhism and of a decade of restless travel; it’s the high point of his journeying and spiritual seeking. A voracious reader, he nevertheless chose to go up the mountain without any books, only his personally typed copy of the Diamond Sutra, which he planned to read every day and transcribe yet again, this time in language more accessible to American readers, in order to achieve the enlightenment that he was certain would result. The extent of his solitude, thus, was acute. There were no radio stations from the outside world to tune into. No electricity. No running water. And most radically for Jack, two months without alcohol. It was his last, best chance to change the trajectory of his life, to avoid the alcoholic downfall that accelerated a year later with the instant celebrity from On the Road’s publication and that would ultimately kill him at age forty-seven.

The following excerpts six pages from the one-hundred-and-eighty-page diary Kerouac kept during that time. 

In the early seventies, Helen Garner, a newly single mother, found herself in the first of several “hippie houses” she lived in that decade in the suburbs of Melbourne. She read and made up songs with her daughter and fell in love with a heroin addict—an affair she documented daily in her diary. The writing deepened as her life became more complicated. Soon, she began to see an outline. “Story is a chunk of life with a bend in it,” Garner told Thessaly La Force in her Art of Fiction interview, published in the Fall issue of the Review, “and I could feel this one coming.” Every day for a year, after she had dropped her daughter off at school, she sat in the state library working on her first novel, Monkey Grip.

The book was a hit, although several critics (“almost always men”) accused Garner of simply publishing her personal journals. The truth is, she confesses, the novel really was closely based on her diary—and why not? “Underlying the famously big gap between fiction and nonfiction there’s a rather naive belief that fiction is invented—­that it’s pulled out of thin air,” Garner says. “All those comments I’ve had to cop about my novels not being novels—­they rest on that idea that the novel is mightier than every other form.” When we asked Garner—­who is also an accomplished journalist who has covered criminal trials for decades—­whether she might share with us something from her recent journals, she sent us a true “chunk of life,” at once artfully sculpted and uncompromisingly honest.

In the winter of 2017, when I wrote these entries, three things were dawning on me: first, that if my hearing continued to fade I would have to stop writing about criminal trials; second, that although I was probably burned-out, I would miss the courts terribly; and third, that I would be saved from boredom and despair by the company of my young grandchildren, who live next door.

So why do book banners insist that they don’t ban books? Because the level of doubling down as book banning increases is, on one hand, impressive and on the other hand, is concerning about several key components of literacy.

Click through to see the Moms For Liberty member who cites BookLooks as a Moms For Liberty joint in order to get on a review team of a school library.