The Handmaid's Tale

In the age of the smartphone, one might be forgiven for thinking attempts to ban books are one of those old-timey things we can all laugh about today, like prohibition or child labor. Yet, every year the Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) puts out a list of the most-challenged books in America, based on reports […]

Naming a sports team after literature—that’s pretty awesome. (The Baltimore Ravens of the NFL are technically; they’re named after an intimidating bird, but the team is specifically named after “The Raven,” the classic, super-spooky poem by Baltimore resident Edgar Allen Poe.) With baseball season coming up, we took it upon ourselves to give every Major […]

Here’s a trope that pops up in sci-fi and fantasy stories more than you might realize: societies broken down by color coding. Sometimes it is handled subtly, but sometimes, authors put it front-and-center in different ways, making the subtext into text. The 14 books and series below make no secret of their use of color to […]

What qualities must a book have to be considered science fiction? Genre categories can be helpful in guiding us toward works that we might like, or just are in the mood to read, but those definitions can be slippery, and many of the very best books defy conventions and upend expectations. Perhaps we’d be better […]