Editor’s note: Joel is reading his way through the finalists for the 2012 Nebula Award for best sci-fi/fantasy novel. Read his introduction here. The mainstream success of Game of Thrones aside, it’s easy to see why many readers might find reading fantasy embarrassing and/or intimidating: not only do the books [...]

It’s no surprise that Rainbow Rowell chose the 1980s as the setting for Eleanor & Park, her first YA novel. After all, the 1980s were arguably the Golden Age of the teen movie (see The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Say Anything, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Footloose), and Rowell’s [...]

He’s won the World Fantasy Award, the British Science-Fiction Society Award, and other awards with the word “fantasy” in them. But if you aren’t a loyal reader of those kinds of books, you might not know who he is. But you really should!

Thanks to Charlie Kaufman, we all know what the process of adapting a book is like for the screenwriter—it starts with a depressive funk and ends with your imaginary twin brother getting eaten by an alligator—but what’s the experience for the writer whose work is being adapted? What does it [...]

Editor’s note: Joel is reading his way through the finalists for the 2012 Nebula Award for best sci-fi/fantasy novel. Read his introduction here. Look, I love Jane Austen books as much as the next guy (provided the next guy’s love of Jane Austen books is limited to reading her shortest [...]

There are few places quite as dreary as Westeros, the setting for George R.R. Martin’s massively popular A Song of Ice and Fire novels and the HBO series Game of Thrones. Unless your barrel of laughs is filled with violent deaths, incest, maimings, rapes, slavery, and crazy priestesses who give [...]