Stories about pirates fascinated people for hundreds of years. This is why so many books about pirates fill bookstore shelves that it’s hard to decide which one to read next. Many moons ago, I threw a Pirates vs. Ninjas party (shut up; I know.) I don’t know how many pirates showed up, but I can […]

Seen any good movies lately? The numbers suggest the answer just might be no—for the month of July (prime blockbuster season), box-office receipts are lagging some 30 percent behind last year. While I’d love to call it a referendum on Mark Wahlberg as an action star, that would suggest that there are people out there […]

  Everyone knows that “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” etcetera, etcetera, blahblahblah. But it has been proven that a cover can in fact be a solid litmus test for a reader. Do books with intriguing titles hold their own, too? In the ebook era, when we’re increasingly looking at tiny little thumbnails […]

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!