Amal El-Mohtar

How do I even begin to talk about this exceptional, astonishing book?

I could show you the notes I made while reading: they begin with bullet points, neat and tidy, saying things like "very good voice work — distinctive, moving" and "fantastic characters, riveting perspectives" and "enamored of commas in ...

The unfortunate thing about The Accidental Highwayman is that it looks too much like something it's not. From the gorgeously designed cover and elaborate title to the apologetic editorial front matter and interior illustrations, it looks like a book aware of its place in a specific history: namely, 18th century ...

It's a bright cool day in September and the books now number 13. Kim Harrison has concluded her long-running Hollows series, the 10-year-anniversary of which I marked back in April, and I am bereft. In The Witch With No Name, Rachel Morgan, Ivy Tamwood and Jenks the pixy have their ...

The difficulty in reviewing excellent poetry is to keep from responding in kind. When I've thoroughly enjoyed a collection, it isn't enough to praise the rhythm, the intensity, the clarity of the work I've just read; I find myself writing about how the book is "seamed in smoke" or observing ...

Trans men and women face many problems — not least among them is the small but pernicious group of people, usually found on Tumblr, who use the rhetoric of trans experience to claim that they too are trapped in the wrong body: an able body (I have the soul ...

I am not a trained reader of horror. Usually whenever I encounter horror stories, I'm left feeling dissatisfied with the quality of my unsettlement; I think "oh, that was gratuitous" or "eh, was that necessary?" With very few exceptions, I tend not to seek out horror.

Emily Carroll's Through the ...

Two remarkable graphic novels being released this week are themed around shadow-selves, legacies and second chances: Bryan Lee O'Malley's Seconds is about a woman given the opportunity to magically undo past mistakes, while Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew's The Shadow Hero revises a mysterious golden-age superhero called the Green ...

I'm deeply conflicted about how to review this book. On the one hand, I literally laughed and cried from one page to the next and devoured the whole in a brief sitting.

On the other hand, I've also read Rainbow Rowell's other books, and this one pales in comparison.

So ...

Usually when someone steps from our world into a fantasy world, they're one of two sorts of characters. There's the Bookish Outcast for whom the portal fantasy is a literal manifestation of the act of reading as escape — and there's the Chosen One, an otherwise unremarkable or unlikeable character ...

Genevieve Valentine's new novel, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, uproots the classic fairy tale of the 12 dancing princesses and replants it in the speakeasies of Prohibition-era New York City.

Ambassador Suzi LeVine became the U.S. representative to Switzerland and Liechtenstein on Monday. She took the oath of office on an electronic copy of the Constitution.

There's a photograph of my mother's side of the family that I often think about. In it are my mother, her five siblings, and a host of children and cousins. Nestled into the center of the photograph is my grandmother, small and frail by then, but without whom none of ...

Back in the far distant past we now call The '90s, I read Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic, almost immediately after having watched the film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. I enjoyed both, managing the difficult trick of experiencing them as separate entities rather than flawed versions of each other. ...

Fortunate happenstance has led to me reviewing Laline Paull's The Bees alongside Dave Goulson's A Sting in the Tale. I am more than a little obsessed with bees, honey, watching wildlife and reading dystopias, and am therefore predisposed to find both books interesting. Together they make a splendid double-header of ...

Roughly halfway through Najwan Darwish's Nothing More to Lose, wiping awkwardly at tears and trying self-consciously not to sob with my partner in the room, I found myself wondering what someone with no connection to Palestine would make of it.

I grew up with the conflict. I have never not ...

When my friend Margo suggested I read Kim Harrison's Dead Witch Walking, I was skeptical. Many were the conversations we'd had about the annoyance of fluffy modern-day vampires and the growing skeeze-factor of what got marketed as Urban Fantasy. But her recommendation carried a lot of weight, so on a ...

Every now and again I come across a book that makes me wish to do violence to my learning, to tear away words like tour de force and magnificent in order to excavate something more true, more raw, more appropriate to the experience of reading it. Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing ...

I've been wanting to read Isabel Allende's work for years now, for the praise it's received as an exemplar of the magical realist tradition (which I love) and for its focus on the lives of women (which I applaud). So it's with some bemusement that I discovered my first experience ...

When I was 7 years old, living in a flat overlooking Hamra street in Ras Beirut, I read The Hobbit. I fell in love with it. I memorized all the songs and made up tunes to them; I memorized all the riddles and asked them of whoever would listen; I ...