The Cardturner is Louis Sachar's answer to the raft of mindless teen printerainment that's been crowding bookstore shelves. It's unapologetically smart, with intricate story threads, and nary a speck of glitter.

Summer vacation brings a host of problems for Alton Edwards. He has no job, his girlfriend dumped him for his best friend, and his car barely runs. His avaricious mother is only too happy to help him with the first problem. She harangues Alton into working as his rich

Two bookish bits of news graced the pages of the New York Times last week, and I want to share a few thoughts about them both. As this first one, “E-Books, Shmee-Books: Readers Return to the Stores” shows, I think we’re seeing the evolution of a meme. It’s no longer big stores vs small stores, or even Amazon vs brick-and-mortar. It’s the ebook vs printed book fight.

Now I don’t mean to say that no one

Michael J. Sullivan’s Theft of Swords isn’t exactly a new book. Beginning in 2007, he self-published a series of six novels, collectively known as the Riyria Revelations, with great success. His Kindle sales in particular were excellent, so much so that he was able to score a deal with Hachette’s Orbit imprint to publish the books as a print trilogy. Theft of Swords is the first of the trilogy, comprising the first two ebooks (The Crown Conspiracy

I've been told that 95% of the internet¹ is pictures of cats, food, and people's computers. So here's my contribution. Behold my workspace.

This is where I tend to write when I'm at home. It's the armchair in the living room, with a cheap shelf slung across the arms to make a desk just big enough to hold my laptop and a mug of steamy caffeinated goodness.

Not pictured is my animal familiar, Samizdat, who was engaged in other

Girl Parts takes place in the real world...mostly. The only different thing is that a company called Sakura has figured out how to manufacture robots so lifelike that they can pass for real people, especially after their AI/learning positronic brains get a handle on their environment.

Basically, Cylons.

In an adult novel, the story would be about these robots. Can they be trusted? Are they people? Should they be destroyed? Which country’s army will control the technology

The Acquisitions Department recently procured the tabletop game of Dixit: Odyssey (a followup to the original Dixit by Asmodée). I’ve had the pleasure of playing a few times so far, and I am really impressed with the gameplay, the production quality, and the art. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Dixit is marvelous storytelling game that operates sort of like a visual Apples to Apples. Instead of matching nouns to adjectives, players try to pick a card