Books

July 11th and 12th are Prime Days, so Amazon has a ton of sales for members going on right now — including on books! We’ve rounded up some of the best Prime Day book deals available. These are all for paperbacks or hardcovers, not ebooks! Also be sure to check out the boxed book sets

Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She’s the editor/author of (DON’T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/author of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her next book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen. View

The 2023 Hugo Award finalists have been announced. The Hugo Awards— started in 1953 and awarded annually since 1955—are recognized as science fiction’s most prestigious award. The members of Worldcon, The World Science Convention, determine the winners of the award and present it each year. This year’s finalists were chosen from 25,000 works of science

Fans have been waiting a long time to hear news about the adaptation of a beloved queer YA novel and it’s finally here. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe will be released nationwide in theaters September 8, 2022. [embedded content][embedded content] Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin

Erica Ezeifedi, Associate Editor, is a transplant from Nashville, TN that has settled in the North East. In addition to being a writer, she has worked as a victim advocate and in public libraries, where she has focused on creating safe spaces for queer teens, mentorship, and providing test prep instruction free to students. Outside

Last week’s legislation in Illinois which aims to end book bans in schools and libraries requires those institutions receiving state aid to have the Library Bill of Rights as part of their policies and procedures. But what is the Library Bill of Rights? It is a document celebrating its 70th year of existence in 2023,

We know that LGBTQ+ books are under fire across the country and they have been specifically targeted by right-wing conspiracy theorists in a very organized fashion now for several years. In addition, we have seen public education and teachers come under fire by these same conspiracists who believe that by having LGBTQ+ books in the

The place where the lost things go isn’t one of the most frequently-occurring story tropes, but it’s certainly one of the more compelling. In the Wizard of Oz universe, L. Frank Baum created the Valley of Lost Things, a location in Merryland where anything lost in the real world will eventually turn up. Danielle Page

It’s about the middle of the year — and the middle of Pride Month — and Esquire has blessed us with a roundup of 20 of the best queer books out this year so far. In this list, you’ll find trans memoirs, illuminating nonfiction, poetry, and a variety of genres written by well-known authors as

It’s time to pause, take a step back, and review the books we’ve read and enjoyed this year so far. Other booksellers — Amazon and Barnes & Noble — have already shared what they think are the first half of the year’s best books, but the advantage of this list is that it’s the most

Illinois became the first state in the United States to pass legislation to end book bans. Signed by Governor JB Pritzker June 12, House Bill 2789 takes effect January 1, 2024. Introduced by Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, who serves at the State Librarian, the bill received significant support both in the House and

Queer bars are the site of some of my most treasured memories. They’re also one of my favorite settings for books. Whether it’s a true story about a real bar or a fictional tale about a favorite haunt, I can’t stay away from books with queer bar settings. On this list, you’ll find fiction and

I have been a fan of The Little Mermaid since my early childhood days of demanding rewatches of our well-loved VHS cassette tape of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. The story has always snagged my interest. I love Ariel’s character, a mermaid who struggles with navigating her family relationships while staying true to herself. Ariel’s fiery

Black-owned Chicago-based alternative comics publisher Iron Circus Comics is having quite the year. In the past 12 months, the publishing house earned two Eisner awards for an anthology, had at least two books banned in the Great Banning Epidemic, and the pilot of their first animated feature reached 8.9 million views since it debuted in

We can’t all be Auguste Dupins or Miss Marples. If we were to appear in our very own mystery novel, some of us would undoubtedly be relegated to the role of the sidekick: we’d be John Watson, or worse, Arthur Hastings. We’d muck up every crime scene, confess our suspicions of the butler to the

The launch of ChatGPT in the fourth quarter of 2022 shook up many industries, including publishing. In fact, plenty of doomsaying articles floated the idea that the software might replace many jobs; the list inevitably includes creative jobs such as writing, editing, and translating, and it feels a lot like a ticking bomb. Do we

Today is a good day. The apparent apocalypse seems to have retreated from the East Coast, and there are new books. I live. And the new releases I have for you today are a pretty good mix — there’s an engaging murder mystery set in ’70s Texas with a queer protagonist, a unique tale of

Pageboy, Elliot Page’s long-awaited memoir, gives a fragmented but close-up perspective of Page’s life and experiences growing up as someone who has always known that he was a boy even when everything in society told him otherwise. We follow him from childhood through close to the present day and he is unflinching in the detail

Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road, No Country for Old Men, Blood Meridian, and more, has died at the age of 89. He passed away from natural causes in his Sante Fe home, according to his publisher, Knopf. McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his bleak dystopian novel, The Road.

In Waypoints: My Scottish Journey (8 hours), Scottish actor Sam Heughan, best known for playing Jamie Fraser in the TV series “Outlander,” describes the experience of hiking the West Highland Way, from his journey’s impulsive beginning to its funniest and most painful moments, all the way to its successful end. With disarming asides and humorous

A children’s book titled The Sweet and Sour Animal Book, written by Langston Hughes and illustrated by Elmer W. Brown, has resurfaced in Cleveland, OH and is being given a platform it never had. Hughes and Brown met in the ’30s in Cleveland’s Karma House, the oldest Black theater in the United States. Once their

In the 1980s, Paul Newman began working with screenwriter Stewart Stern to compose an oral history about the actor’s life, from his difficult upbringing to his Hollywood career to his passions for racing and philanthropy. But the project remained incomplete after Newman’s death in 2008—until the arrival of The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man

Anti-censorship advocates and activists have shouted from the rooftops that it is essential to vote. That it is essential to show up to school and library board meetings and speak up about/write those who sit on those boards against book bans and censorship. Advocates and activists have been on the front lines in their respective

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World (12 hours) begins with a perilous escape attempt from Auschwitz and expands into a larger story about Rudolf Vrba, one of the first Jewish people to escape from the notorious concentration camp.  British author Jonathan Freedland (known for both his thrillers

For My First Popsicle: An Anthology of Food and Feelings (7 hours), actor Zosia Mamet (“Girls,” “The Flight Attendant”) has gathered a who’s-who of creative folks, including fellow actors like Busy Philipps, musicians like Patti Smith, writers like David Sedaris and chefs like Kwame Onwuachi. Each contributed an essay about food or a food-related memory,

There’s wit, honesty and insight in Madly, Deeply (19.5 hours), a collection of Alan Rickman’s succinct yet keenly observant diary entries spanning 1993 to 2015. The late actor’s journals reveal a palpable lack of pretentiousness and a go-with-the-flow attitude (even after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer), as well as a compelling contrast between his two

The Washington Post released their analysis of book challenges they had obtained from PEN America researcher Tasslyn Magnusson. These 1,065 challenges, which were filed during the 2021-2022 school year, extended over 153 school districts and 37 states, and totaled 2,506 pages. They also tended to target books with similar content, specifically LGBTQ+ topics. While a

A K-8 school in Florida has banned Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb” for its elementary students. In March, the Miami Lakes school received a complaint from a parent of children at the school, Daily Salinas, about the poem as well as four other books. In the complaint, which Gorman tweeted below, Salinas

The Color Purple by Alice Walker was published in 1982, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction for that year. In 1985, it was adapted into a movie starring Whoopi Goldberg directed by Steven Spielberg. In 2005, it was also adapted into a musical. The 2015-2017 revival won a

Martin Amis died Friday in his Lake Worth Florida home from esophageal cancer. Amis was born to a novelist father, Kingsley Amis, in 1949 Oxford, England, and won the 1974 Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel, The Rachel Papers. He became a big part of the literary scene in London in the ’80s and