After two vodka tonics and a cosmo, my ninety-year-old grandmother lifts her glass and says, “But you know that Nietzsche is my boyfriend?” 

“He is?”

“He’s my boyfriend.”

It’s all right—we’ve shared boyfriends before. The actor Javier Bardem. Errol Louis, anchor at NY1. Her new neighbor. Her many doctors. She tells me that Nietzsche is her boyfriend because Nietzsche also hates the German composer Richard Wagner. I tell her Nietzsche hates a lot of people. She nods. “That’s good in a man.” 

Russell Books is an iconic new and used bookstore in Victoria, BC, Canada. It was started in 1961 in Montreal by Reg Russell and relocated to Victoria in 1991. It’s now being run by the third generation of the family: Reg Russell’s granddaughter, Andrea Minter, and her husband, Jordan.

It started as a 300 square foot, one aisle bookstore and has expanded over the years to two floors connected with escalators and 18,000 square feet. The aisles ares packed full of used and new books in every conceivable genre, and they also have a large collection of rare and antiquarian books.

Russell Books is a popular tourist destination as well as a favorite bookstore of locals for its large selection and discounted prices.

The night of February 8th, the store was broken into, and $55,000 of antiquarian books were stolen, including a signed Walt Whitman first edition worth $10,000 and a book published in 1600. The cases containing the books were also broken.

After nearly three months of striking, the HarperCollins Union, representing about 250 employees across sectors of the publisher, have reached a tentative deal. This happened quickly after the publishing giant agreed to meet with the Union to discuss their demands. It comes on the heels of the publisher also announcing a 5% reduction in its workforce over the next few months.

HarperCollins Union members began their strike in November. Among their short list of demands were an increase in the starting salaries from $45,000 a year to $50,000, as well as more robust policies to ensure the company would be a safe, healthy, and robust environment for marginalized employees. Until this week, the company did not engage with striking workers.

Details on the tentative agreement are light. Workers across the company will get one-time bonuses of $1,500, and starting salaries will be raised. To what remains unknown. Information about the ways the company plans to ensure a diverse workforce is not clear.

The agreement now moves on to the full Union for vote. If the Union accepts, the agreement will be in place until the end of 2025.

It’s been a week of crisis for Manchester City after their Premier league charges. Marcus, Jim and Andy ask the question that needs to be asked: is it Kevin Keegan’s fault?

From the retired managerial legend to one of our new ‘favourites’, we then check in on Nathan Jones’ latest bizarre press conference. Elsewhere, Penaldo’s stat-padding is more legitimate than ever and we also hear why Patrick Vieira might not be too happy with our dear Andy. Join us!

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With the new legislative season in full swing, now is a crucial time to write to your representatives. We’re seeing unbelievable numbers of new proposals to outlaw intellectual freedom, to criminalize library workers and educators for providing queer and/or diverse literature to their communities, to ban drag shows (including drag storytimes), and to make being queer or a person of color even harder than it already is. You can track every single bill of concern to the freedom to read here, and you should.

In addition to keeping an eye on that legislation, no matter where you are in the country, you need to write your representatives about the importance of intellectual freedom and First Amendment Rights for all. Right now, there are very few public officials championing these freedoms nor proposing legislation that would further enshrine these rights to those from whom they’re being not-so-slowly stripped. Whether you’re in a state facing book ban laws or not, each letter sent is one more voice added to the chorus demanding for better.

This weekend, spend 15 minutes to look up the person who represents you both in your state government and D.C. You can look up everyone who works on your behalf right here by inputting your full address. Once you’ve done that, you have a couple of options: write to the primary decision makers who represent you, including your state congressional and senate representatives and those senators and congress people working for you in D.C. (so you’d send a few emails) OR choose to contact every single person listed who would be appropriate to reach out to (your local sheriff might not be useful here, but maybe enough emails land in the inbox of a lower-ranking politician or one who represents you at the county level might draw some attention).

Then, you’re going to compose a letter for each individual you’ve identified. But never fear: you don’t even need to do the work to compose the letter. Below is a template you can use. Change details where appropriate, and feel free to add anything else which you feel may be worthwhile. You can cut, too — this is a longer letter meant to help you have handy access to statistics, data, and relevant court cases that bolster your message.

Don’t feel limited here. Set yourself a reminder every other week or every month to reach out. Continue to send these emails periodically, and if you’re invested, make a phone call. You can use the template here as your script. Yes, it’s scary. But what’s a hell of a lot scarier than making a phone call that an assistant answers is not having books on library shelves…and knowing you could have done something to help save the lives of marginalized people blatantly targeted by bigotry.

Where the heck did January go? Who cares, it’s February, and there are a ton of exciting books coming out. It’s looking like a great month for fantasy, which is perfect to escape into when it’s cold and still a bit dreary outside. I’m personally already looking forward to National Discount Chocolate Day on February 15, which will provide me with eat-while-reading treats for many months to come. May the odds be ever in all of our favor when it comes to the candy shelves.

Here’s just a selection of what’s coming at us over the four glorious Tuesdays of February. It’s nine books out of the many that are being published, so please don’t mistake this as an exhaustive of all-inclusive list. It’s mostly fantasy with a sprinkling of sci-fi, and there’s romance, there’s darkness and horror, there are retellings and reimaginings of classic stories, and, best of all, at the end of the month there are pirates. I’ve also got you a mix of sequels, standalones, and new series starters. Hopefully there’s something on this list for everyone to love!

As always, you can find a full list of new releases in the magical New Release Index, carefully curated by your favorite Book Riot editors, organized by genre and release date.

As I write this, January is drawing to a close. I cannot believe that we are already one month into 2023. But whether I like it or not, time happens, and once again, the season of love is upon us. Though I never really celebrated Valentine’s Day in any significant way, irrespective of whether I was single or paired up, I have always loved the explosion of cute DIY literary Valentine’s Day crafts for kids and other projects on my Pinterest home page around this time. We crafters love a good theme, and love, hearts, and flowers are about as delightfully theme-y as it can get.

Valentine’s Day is also a perfect occasion to share your love of DIY with the kids in your life – be it in the classroom or at home. Crafting is a wonderful way to keep kids engaged and occupied, while teaching them a thing or two about recycling some of the material that they may have lying around in playrooms and classrooms. Add a literary twist to your Valentine’s Day crafting plans, and you are sure to win the approval of the bookish kids in your life. Here we have collected a list of some literary Valentine’s Day crafts for kids to get you started.

The romance genre, especially steamy enemies-to-lovers books, is a vast and steamy place, full of communication shenanigans, tissue-paper bodices, flowing locks of all colors that belong to all genders, and a disproportionate number of English dukes, people with piercing eyes and the ability to raise one sardonic eyebrow. One of the major reasons readers flock to romance is the steam factor. It is a place where readers can experience the joys and heartaches of any relationship arrangement without consequence to our hearts (or our joints, given the variety of possible…er…configurations).

Speaking of configurations, romance readers are statistically around 86% women. And while most readers discover the romance genre between ages 11 and 17 (no surprise there, given puberty, preteen, and teen curiosity around relationships and sex), the average romance reader is ~37 years old, heterosexual (82%), female, and white (86%), according to the Romance Writers Association. That is all to say, this is not a widely diverse readership, but as the genre embraces more diverse expressions of race, gender, and sexuality, I expect those numbers will shift.

More diversity in authorship and characters can only lead to more diverse ways to make us blush in public. With diversity in mind, I’ve done my best to include many different types of steamy enemies to lovers books — including a yaoi manga — to expand your steamy horizons.

February 10 is author E.L. Konigsburg’s birthday, and while most people are familiar with her classic children’s book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, she wrote more than 20 books, including picture books. Born to two Jewish immigrants, Konigsburg grew up in small towns in Pennsylvania. She was valedictorian of her high school class, majored in chemistry at Carnegie Mellon, and was the first person in her family to earn a college degree.

Konigsburg started writing in the mornings after her third child went to school. In 1968, she won the Newbery Medal for Mixed-Up Files, and was also awarded a Newbery Honor for her book Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. She is the only author to be awarded both in the same year. Almost 30 years later, in 1997, she won the Newbery again for her novel The View From Saturday.

In 2006, she was a U.S. nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen award, for her contributions to children’s literature. She died in 2013 at the age of 83, from complications of a stroke that she had the week before.

Konigsburg tackled many topics that other authors might not have touched in children’s literature more than 30 or 40 years ago: antisemitism, racism, classism (About the B’nai Bagels), pornography (also B’nai Bagels), mental health (George), and diversity — many of her books have racially diverse characters or disabled characters — to name a few. Was this always handled the way we would expect it to be handled now? Of course not, because these books were written decades ago and our language and use of language has changed and evolved, as it should constantly be doing. I have cringed when reading some of her writing. But there are also some amazing scenes where characters point out the explicit racism or ableism of other characters, and where mothers don’t hesitate to dress down their entitled, sexist sons and husbands. Keeping the time period when these were written in mind when I reread (and read for the first time) many of her books, it felt a bit groundbreaking to me.

In that respect, while I absolutely love Mixed-Up Files, I think it’s a shame that more of her work isn’t mentioned or taught. Other books of hers are much more diverse and layered, diving into some pretty deep topics.

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