I’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons, also known as D&D. That’s not for lack of desire — there’s just never been a right place, right time. Still, listening to David M. Ewalt’s D&D history Of Dice and Men reminded me of just how thoroughly the brand has permeated the universe of speculative fiction. I grew up playing the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons video game on Intellivision, and watching the Dungeons & Dragons Saturday morning cartoon. I’ve played Magic: The Gathering, and read multiple lines of choose-your-own-adventure fantasy books inspired by D&D. I’ve seen the 2023 ..read more

Remember the quarter-life crisis? Its prominence in the discourse harks back to a more innocent era, when stories about young urbanites couldn’t be faulted for omitting floods or wildfire smoke and when no U.S. presidential candidate actively fighting multiple felony charges had ever led polls in key battleground states. Although Naoise Dolan’s The Happy Couple takes place in the present-day British Isles and its characters are generally aware of the dire state of the world, its characters are principally focused on understanding their own loves and libidos. The novel brings a more authentic p ..read more

How did Patrick Stewart possibly manage to make it into his 80s before publishing a memoir? His longevity is a gift to him, and the fact that he held off this long is a gift to us. The book itself, of course, makes clear why the actor hasn’t previously sat down to recount his life in writing. He’s been busy on stage and screen, to the point where he’s struggled to maintain his marriages — and failed twice, amid incidents of cheating that he comes clean about in Making It So. The book’s title, as you’re probably well aware if you bothered to click on this review, is a riff on a trademark comman ..read more

You may have seen this coming, but the whale is a metaphor. Whalefall has one of the season’s best elevator pitches. What would it be like to be literally swallowed alive by a sperm whale? Could you survive? How could you possibly get out? How could you even get into that situation in the first place? Author Daniel Kraus is utterly committed to this bit, throwing in a giant squid battle and group orca attack among countless other unlikely devices in spinning the tale of Jay, a teenage diver who ventures too close to an underwater canyon and quickly has reason to regret it. It’s a harrowing tal ..read more

Hollywood Wives has been given new life with a 40th anniversary reissue, but it was long ago guaranteed immortality. A gilt-edged, leather-bound copy of Jackie Collins’s novel has pride of place on the schadenfreude bookshelf. Anyone seeking assurance that rich and famous people are absolutely miserable and obsessed with petty grievances can take Hollywood Wives into the bubble bath. It might be awkward to celebrate Hollywood Wives’ milestone birthday just as movie actors and writers are taking to the picket line, but the story of these characters and SAG-AFTRA, if set in the present day, woul ..read more

The pictures told the story. At one point in Strip Tees, Kate Flannery’s American Apparel memoir, she receives a series of photos for store display that depict a girl she’d recently hired as a high schooler, posing provocatively for the company’s 37-year-old male leader. The teenager was seemingly becoming a “Dov girl,” one of the employees who shared Dov Charney’s bed. For consumers who didn’t know the photo subjects personally, American Apparel’s problematic yet iconic ads told a different story. They saw a clean and sexy look (Charney couldn’t abide tattoos or facial piercings) for the 2000 ..read more

Where are the children? That question, in fiction at least, has become a lot more complicated over the past fifty years. That’s good for the children, not so great for the readers (or listeners). Mary Higgins Clark had her first commercial hit in 1975 with her second novel, Where Are the Children? She would go on to gain the superlative “Queen of Suspense” and sell over 100 million books, a total that has only grown since her death in 2020 at age 92. Her breakout book is as psychologically direct as its title implies. The reader always knows where the novel’s two abducted children are; it’s t ..read more

In her mid-40s, Greta realizes she’s been drifting through life. In response, she leaves her decade-long relationship, moves across the country into an infested house, takes up work as a sex therapist’s transcriber, and embarks on an affair with one of his clients, not bothering to mention the connection. We’re in the last wave of gen-X midlife crisis novels, and these slackers are not going gently. Daily life with Greta and her housemate Simone, in fact, isn’t far removed from the rhythms of Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, wherein post-boomers han ..read more

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “nerd” is a “mildly derogatory” term that emerged in 1950s America to describe someone who’s “socially inept.” Today, the dictionary allows, it can also describe someone who embraces “a highly technical interest.” While listening to the confident sweep of Maya Phillips’s Nerd: Adventures in Fandom from This Universe to the Multiverse, I kept returning to the title. Does the mildly derogatory “nerd” still have any meaning, I wondered, in a world where fantasy franchises have consumed the box office and where the fandoms Phillips embraces are avidly ex ..read more

There are at least two compelling books stuffed into Tara Isabella Burton’s The World Cannot Give. If the author had committed to one of them, the result may have been more satisfying than the novel we have, which seesaws uneasily between them. The first of the books is the one the promotional copy highlights: a thriller set at an exclusive Maine boarding school. Arriving at St. Dunstan’s Academy as a breathless junior, obsessed with a jazz-age author who wrote a cult classic set at the school and then died young, Laura falls into the orbit of goth ice queen Virginia, who imperiously leads the ..read more