Genevieve Valentine

Between exhibits at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, there's an interactive behind-the-scenes playground. You can record Marilyn Monroe's lines in the ADR booth; you can plug goofy sound effects into Jurassic Park. Sure, some of it's just to amuse kids (make the raptors meow!), but if you ...

Find someone who's read Little Women, and you'll find someone with opinions about Little Women. There's something almost as comforting about the well-worn arguments as about the book. It's a pillar of a literary childhood, or it's a treacly, preachy domestic fable. Jo should have accepted Laurie, or Jo should ...

Crimson Peak's previews hardly bothered with the ghosts haunting its dilapidated mansion. It didn't need them. Mia Wasikowska runs down moonlit stairs in a nightgown with a ten-foot train — that's all you need to know. By now, the Gothic speaks for itself, and it's trained us to listen.

There's no such thing as an objective cultural history; that's just the nature of the beast. Every student brings something to their research, and every reader brings something to the text. And that's before you get into the idea of memoir as an approach unto itself. Documentarian Alex Mar walks ...

Any historical account worth its salt knows this underlying truth: The two fighters in any face-off are never alone. They stand atop a hundred things that buoyed and buffeted them until they came to be staring one another down. When Harry Houdini (yes, the legend) showed up at 10 Lime ...

"But I will sustain myself

With nothing more than the perfume of jasmine flowers..."

If you don't know the Ancillary series by now, you probably should. Ann Leckie's sociopolitical space opera almost singlehandedly breathed new cool into the stereotype of spaceships trundling through far-off systems amid laser battles. It helped ...

"The journey would have been pleasant in most circumstances ... but because you were there, it was wholly delightful."

-- Winifred Holtby, in a letter to best friend and companion Vera Brittain

In Anne of Green Gables, passionately impulsive Anne Shirley throws herself into a friendship with her easygoing neighbor ...

A teenage girl is working on a factory line, assembling stereos in Seoul during the industrial boom of the 1970s. She's lied about her age to get the job; she's being pressured to leave the workers' union so management will keep paying for her to attend high school at night, ...

It might seem odd to be reading about an old-fashioned farmstead shootout and thinking about how charming it is, but if you're reading Girl Waits With Gun, you might as well get used to it. You'll be thinking that a lot, because the women holding down this particular farmstead are ...

In the sweltering summer of 2003, studious and awkward Ella comes home from college and sneaks back into her own house. She's trying to avoid her adoptive parents — her uncle Anwar and aunt Hashi — and, maybe, to share the secret of her return with her outgoing cousin Charu, ...

"I cannot feel exiled here; it is a second native country."

Every biography carries dual burdens. One is to represent the life of the subject in the time they lived — how they operated within their own system — as honestly as possible. (That last bit's a real stinger; it's ...

It's the least surprising thing in the world to discover that historian Alex Kershaw's latest book, Avenue of Spies, has already been optioned for development with Sony Pictures TV. Its circumstances — an American family in Paris aiding the French resistance from an apartment only a few doors down from ...

To read one of Shirley Jackson's signature works is to live in a house built on sand. From novels like We Have Always Lived in the Castle to the iconic "The Lottery," Jackson's worlds carve some essential, uncanny instability out of the everyday, and any of us can sink without ...

There's no question the Back to the Future trilogy has entrenched itself in the collective pop-culture imagination for even longer than Reagan could have imagined when he adopted the movie's catchphrase about not needing roads to appeal to The Youth. It's been a video game (twice), a theme park ride ...

As one of the many kids who became fascinated by the science-trumps-magic movie The Flight of Dragons, you can imagine my delight when I realized it was based on a real book. Well, a composite of two books (as it turns, out the plot comes from somewhere else entirely), so ...

Long ago in far Bavaria, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth went hunting for fairy tales. However, the collection disappeared, and his work was thought lost forever. Then in 2009, cultural curator Erika Eichenseer discovered five hundred of them in what one assumes must have been the deepest, darkest, most perilous basement ...

"I have come in search of a gazelle with white feet or a man in a shirt."

Sometimes, it's advisable to leave an introduction until after the book, when it becomes part of an experience you've already drawn from the work itself. But sometimes you're reading Tales of the Marvellous ...

"Well, irony really does better unelaborated, but if you insist."

Ah, grimdark. It's become shorthand for a subgenre of fantasy fiction that claims to trade on the psychology of those sword-toting heroes, and the dark realism behind all those kingdom politics. But there are arguments over who fits the definition ...

"Oh, tree! Eat the fish! This granite folds a peach!"

Last year, Anne Leckie's Ancillary Justice introduced Breq, the reanimated-corpse soldier (called an ancillary) separated from her starship's hive mind, out for revenge against the Radchaai Empire that made her, and stymied by the terrible inconveniences of conscience. It ...

In William Perkins' 1608 A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft, he opens with a list of the reasons such a treatise is necessary, beginning with one that now reads as far more astute that he intended: "First, because witchcraft is a rife and common sin in these our ...