Author name: Graciela Newman

We’ve finally made it into spring, but May is still very much a transitional month: wrapping up school years and/or fiscal years for some, and easing into our summer plans. Let this month’s TBR sprout like the greenery you might have noticed popping up overnight: extraterrestrial sentient plants from Mira Grant, Guy Gavriel Kay’s medieval […]

“To what purpose, April, do you return again?” Edna St. Vincent Millay asks in “Spring.” “Not only under ground are the brains of men / Eaten by maggots. / Life in itself / Is nothing.” But don’t despair, fellow readers, it is May now, when, for some of us, the trees are finally (finally!) coming

May 1, 2025, 8:45pm Today, at a live event at the Chicago History Museum, Canisia Lubrin was named the winner of the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction—which honors exceptional novels, short story collections, and graphic novels by women and non-binary writers in the U.S. and Canada—for her book Code Noir (Knopf Canada/Soft Skull Press).

May 1, 2025, 2:11pm Image from Deadline & BBC Now here’s a mystery: how is a writer who died in 1976 teaching a new writing course? With a little help from academia and a little help from AI. That’s right, it’s not Poirot, but generative programming that has raised the writer Agatha Christie from her

May 1, 2025, 1:39pm Happy May Day, comrades! Today we celebrate international worker’s rights, and the rites of spring according to ye olde Pagan calendar. I hope all of you are clocking out right at five today and spending some time in the sun. Though American workers have been agitating for improved conditions since at

May 1, 2025, 11:42am “Why I’m leaving Twitter” is, at this point, an irritating genre of post. Nonetheless, it’s important to go on record in the face of Elon Musk’s vacuous amorality and its concomitant amplification of actual Nazis (not to mention his relentlessly inept destruction of American government as oligarch-in-chief). Look, the guy is