Mother-and-son writing team Patricia C. and Fredrick L. McKissack Jr. take on the legendary figure of Nat Love, a black man who fled tedious conditions in the post-war South to become a famous cowboy known for his bravery and skill with both horse and gun.
Distinctively illustrated by Randy Duburke, Best Shot in the West: The Adventures of Nat Love bursts from the pages with a vibrancy this dramatic character would've appreciated.
Find more books about African-Americans in the Old West.
One thing I love about Nat Love is that he's not perfect. He's a great horseman ...
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There are lots of reasons people enjoy reading fiction. To name a few: entertaining escapism, connecting emotionally with the characters and engaging in social discussions like book clubs. But one of the most rewarding aspects of reading has a more significant and meaningful impact. It's how literature can make us reflect upon our own lives.
Read the last SF Signal on the academic side of speculative fiction with Karen Burnham.
Here's a secret: No kind of fiction tells us about ourselves better than science fiction.
Here's why.
Today's 50-Cent Phrase: "Cognitive Estrangement"
By immersing yourself in ...
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In a novel that we called “an even more thrilling, densely packed novel that makes most Chicago crime thrillers seem tame,” Charlie Newton returns to the mean streets with Start Shooting.
Read more new and notable thrillers.
This densely plotted police procedural pits two local cops against a conspiracy of violence and corruption that dates back to World War II, with a soulful spoonful of Chicago blues to boot. Just returned from Austin, Texas, where Kirkus Reviews and the Texas Book Festival presented Charlie’s talk about his new novel, the novelist sat down to talk about cops, criminals and ...
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“The future is here,” sci-fi author William Gibson famously said. “It’s just not evenly distributed.”
In some visions, it’s not fairly distributed either and definitely not very nice. It’s a mainstay of science fiction and science fact alike to conjecture a future world in which only the very few have the resources to live well on a ravaged planet—or ravaged otherworlds—while the bulk of humankind lives like the people of Los Angeles in Blade Runner—in other words, much like we live today, if turned up to 11.
Read more new and notable nonfiction in ...
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“Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots is an emergency intervention,” writes Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore in the introduction to the new anthology. The collection of diverse and unruly writing, subtitled Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, was put together in response to what Sycamore and other writers saw as a flattening of a vibrant gay culture, a culture more obsessed in participating in consumer culture with “Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers” than celebrating its schism from the outside world.
Read the last Bookslut on 'Portrait of the Mother.'
Of course, that is the way most ...
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Culinary expert, food critic, Top Chef judge and special projects director at Food & Wine magazine, Gail Simmons describes how her life is connected by a deep appreciation for food in her new memoir, Talking with My Mouth Full: My Life As a Professional Eater.
Check out more recently published books on food and cooking.
Why this book now?
When I first started thinking about a book, I didn’t know…maybe I’d write a cookbook? But then I asked myself, do I really have 100 recipes in me that have never been done before, that the world really needs ...
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Award-winning journalist Tracie McMillan traces the origins of the current incarnation of America’s food supply in The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Wal-Mart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table.
Read more new and notable titles on food and cooking.
Working undercover as a laborer in the grape fields of California, a produce clerk in a Wal-Mart superstore on the outskirts of Detroit and on the line in a Brooklyn Applebee’s, the author was determined to live and eat off her wages. What she discovers is the depressing reality millions of Americans face daily—no matter ...
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Over the last several years, I’ve become a pretty reliable consumer of handsome, complete new sets of works by prominent crime and mystery fictionists.
Which is why you’ll find on my office shelves Academy Chicago’s uniform series of Earl Derr Biggers’ Charlie Chan novels, Vintage Crime’s paperback collection of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Martin Beck novels, Bantam Books’ reissues of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe yarns (published in double-book volumes), W.W. Norton’s annotated hardcover editions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories, and a growing group ...
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How was your Valentine’s Day? From a literary standpoint, I mean.
Mine was a bust.
Last year, February brought me Anna and the French Kiss (swoon!) and The Big Crunch (bittersweet swoon!). So this year, I went looking for more contemporary romance.
Read the last Bookshelves of Doom on the fantastic new book 'The Girls of No Return.'
First, I picked up Heather Hepler’s Love? Maybe, a book about cynical Piper, a girl who Finds Love Where She Least Expects It. The problem? The characters all go through the motions of Falling in Love (or Realizing That They ...
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There’s a mixed blessing to being a pop-culture maven based in the United States. The same vibrancy and volume we celebrate in our homegrown product make the American market extraordinarily resistant to penetration by foreign properties. It’s a little embarrassing that American films can rule the overseas box office from Milan to Yucatán, but that Doctor Who is only now—50 years after its debut—starting to garner some brand recognition in the States.
Read the last Popdose on 'Tales From Development Hell.'
For every Pokémon or Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that pushes through to ...
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In 2009 at her blog nestled over at the online version of the New York Times, illustrator, designer and author Maira Kalman penned and illustrated a moving tribute to Abraham Lincoln, a post that was read and loved by many.
Read more new and notable children's books.
In early January, Nancy Paulsen Books (an imprint of Penguin) released the picture-book adaptation of that post, geared at children. Looking at Lincoln is a loving tribute to the former president, and it’s rendered in Kalman’s clear-eyed, honest manner. And it’s all topped off with her wonderfully offbeat flair ...
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Already a bestseller in the UK, Mikey Walsh’s life story of growing up a Gypsy offers that rare glimpse into a fascinating yet horrifying life that many of us can hardly imagine in Gypsy Boy.
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Born to a family of bare-knuckle boxers, Mikey’s dad is intent on teaching his son the ropes. Mikey, however, fails horribly at learning the family trade, which leads to yet more hideous abuse within his clan. We called it “a poignant memoir that bears comparison to the bestselling Running With Scissors—but better written and far darker ...
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If there is any children’s author today capable of taking the gravity of a cosmic situation in stride, it’s Carolyn Cinami DeCristofano.
A STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) education consultant who develops science curricula by day, DeCristofano possesses the rare gift to make complex scientific concepts accessible to young audiences. She and illustrator Michael Carroll first joined forces in 2005 in Big Bang! The Tongue-Tickling Tale of a Speck that Became Spectacular, tackling the abstract wonders of the universe’s creation.
With A Black Hole Is NOT a Hole, they unite again both to pique readers’ curiosity and ...
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This year has already been bountiful in outstanding releases. Check out these books (hint: most have earned starred reviews) as potential must-reads to cure the winter doldrums.
Read more new and notable nonfiction this February.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Katherine Boo
Mumbai’s sparkling new airport and surrounding luxury hotels welcome visitors to the globalized, privatized, competitive India. Across the highway, on top of tons of garbage and next to a vast pool of sewage, lies the slum of Annawadi, one of many such places that house the millions of poor of ...
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It is a tiny slip of a book, unassuming in both size and color. And yet it might as well be covered in razor blades for the way it slices into you and leaves you on the floor, weepy and devastated.
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The young woman of the title, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, is a German...“woman” is pushing it. She’s barely 21, but heavily pregnant, married and waiting for her husband to come back from war. It is 1943, and she has been displaced in Rome. She came down to ...
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It may surprise you to know that people see science fiction and fantasy literature as more than mere vehicles of entertainment. In addition to enjoying the fiction side if things, there is gratification in knowing about the history and culture behind it. But what exactly is speculative fiction academics? And what does it teach us about the field?
Read the last SF Signal on discovering cool new worlds.
To answer these questions I turned to Karen Burnham.
Burnham is a longtime speculative fiction fan whose love for genre prompted her to learn more about it. Since then, she has become ...
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When we listen to President Barack Obama deliver a speech, some of us may recall the sacrifices required to get to this place in history, but others have forgotten—or never knew—the whole story of the civil rights movement in America.
Cynthia Levinson has found that many adults have never heard of the Children's March that happened in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, in which hundreds of children were jailed after marching for civil rights. With We've Got a Job, she hopes to inform both children and adults. Here, Levinson discusses her everyday heroes and why their stories ...
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I'll tell you a secret: I don't actually like going out on Valentine's Day. Everything is crowded, babysitters are expensive, and, here in the Northeast, it's COLD. I don't want to even go outside, much less put on fancy, potentially itchy clothing.
Have you checked out the Player's Club series?
But the best part is, my husband knows that. He and I both would rather cook dinner, drink wine, light a fire and read (me) and look at random sports news on the internet (him). And if you're reading this website, you're ...
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As the founder and publisher of edge.org, a website devoted to great thinkers discussing the world’s greatest challenges, John Brockman has a pretty decent idea of what makes a person smarter.
Here, he’s collected ideas from many of today’s top thinkers—including Richard Dawkins, Daniel Kahneman and Kathryn Schulz, to name but a few—in one book, aptly named This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking. Brockman was kind enough to allow us to run a few passages from this collection that we called in a starred review, “a winning combination ...
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In a social and economic experiment as bold as it was challenging, Maggie and John Anderson pledged to spend a year buying only from black-owned businesses in their hometown of Chicago. In Our Black Year, Maggie and co-author Ted Gregory chronicle the results of the couple’s experience, balancing the harsh realities of the business world with an inspiring story of a couple’s real investment in their community.
Read more books in honor of Black History Month.
We talked to Maggie Anderson about her year, but readers can visit EEforTomorrow.com for more information on this modest, game-changing proposal ...
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