This is the story of a woman whose childhood was filled with disruptions and changes that she didn’t understand — until her mother summoned her to a hotel to tell her (finally) the truth.

Alyssa Cole talked to Vulture about writing a black princess heroine in her latest romance novel.

Robot love stories are always stories about consent (says the terrific Emily Asher-Perrin).

Claudia Rankine has written a play! How cool is that? AND WITH ME SO FAR AWAY FROM NEW YORK WHERE IT WILL EVENTUALLY BE ON THE STAGE.

More book designers and how they work! I will never tire of this genre of links, so I’m hoping that you like them too because otherwise you may find my link round-ups repetitive.

The romance diversity stats for 2017 are actually worse than the ones for 2016. People need to do the fork better. And this is before the news arrived that Crimson Romance is shutting its doors.

Rahawa Haile is typically brilliant on the subject of Black Panther, a movie I have now seen so consequently I can finally read all the awesome takes on it that people have been writing.

Octopuses might not even be all that great. That one octopus that escaped from the zoo might not even really have done it.

Why are TV detectives all so sad?

Nicole Chung writes about writing a memoir while grieving one of its central figures. I got choked up, friends.

Sherman Alexie’s flaws and failures were evident long before the sexual harassment claims came out (but white readers declined to see them).

Daniel Mallory Ortberg has come out as trans, and he’s been typically thoughtful and funny on the subject of his transition and his new book. An interview with Nicole Chung. Another interview with Heather Havrilesky.

A South African writer considers the question of whether people like Bari Weiss and Katie Roiphe are being censored. (They are not.) It is the best. THE BEST.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

The post Lili Loofbourow Changes the Game: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Emily Asher Perrin’s Tor.com piece on identifying with uncool characters spoke to my nerdy, rule-abiding heart.

Akwaeke Emezi talks about finding a path to a truer identity, through Nigerian spiritual beliefs and Western surgeries.

This interview with Jia Tolentino reminds me of so many reasons why I dig her. If you’re not familiar with her work, familiarize yourself! She’s got a book coming out!

Gabrielle Bellot writes brilliantly and eloquently on the colonial thinking that produces remarks about shithole countries, and how every country has “a grandeur in spirit worth fighting for.”

A defense of Book Five Capslock Harry.

Millennial culture is this Twitter thread. (Major spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi contained herein.)

Amal El-Mohtar is taking over for NK Jemisin writing an SFF column for the New York Times Book Review. Two excellent reviewers for an excellent column! What a world!

Some elements of the trailer for The Shape of Water made me suspicious, and I decided not to see it. Elsa Sjunneson-Henry (who did see it) explores the film’s failures of disability representation. (One amazingly easy improvement would have been to cast a disabled actress in the main role.)

On good guys and bad guys and how old-time stories didn’t really have them.

“While men weren’t looking, women built a genre that tackles love, sex, pleasure, class, money, feminism, masculinity, and equality.” Romance novels! (With lots of my fave romance authors being quoted, so hooray for that too.)

Mimi Mondal offers a brief history of South Asian science fiction and fantasy.

The grand jury prize at Sundance this year went to a YA adaptation, The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Woot!

A twitter thread about how to fight in a dress.

One of my 2018 goals is to read more SFF short fiction. Luckily, I have the writers at Lady Business backing me up, including this MASSIVE post of 2017 favorites. What a time to be alive.

Rebecca Traister is so sensible, even when she’s talking about Katie Roiphe who I find to be mostly nonsense.

This interview with the guy who gets Super Bowl halftime shows on the field in LITERALLY SIX MINUTES is really fascinating from a process perspective.

Have a wonderful weekend, friends, and if you’re a Mardi Gras celebrator, have a wonderful Mardi Gras!

The post Too Sleepy to Think of a Title for My Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

“I am beginning to wonder if it isn’t blackness that Dolezal doesn’t understand, but whiteness”: Ijeoma Iluo interviews Rachel Dolezal.

The Guardian carried a really fascinating article about separating the artist from the art (and finding ways to acknowledge both artistic brilliance and personal turpitude).

Hysteria, Hillary Clinton, and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a sobering read.

Okay I guess I am a credulous lambkin but this Tampa Bay Times article about farmers’ market produce not really being from local farms blew my mind.

Racebending vs. whitewashing (and another reminder why I love Geeks of Color).

Emily Asher-Perrin on being the uneasy girl in horror movies who nobody believes.

I grabbed Deepak Unnikrishnan’s book on a whim at the library last Saturday, and shortly thereafter I discovered this excellent New Yorker article about him and his book about foreign workers in the UAE.

Welp this remark about what fanfic is for is searingly accurate.

I’m furious at 13 Reasons Why, and this post and this post are two (YES I’M DOING THIS) reasons why. My brother-in-law, who teaches high schoolers, reports that all his students are watching and loving it, and I want to protect all those babies from this harmful nonsense. Ugh.

“Write the things that are weird about your culture, for an audience that isn’t like you”: Six authors of color discuss what they are told when submitting speculative fiction stories to agents and publishers.

I quietly enjoy David Foster Wallace’s essays while feeling very confident that I would loathe his fiction and probably end up wanting to beat him over the head with a tennis racket, so this article on men recommending David Foster Wallace until the heat death of the sun really resonated with me. This Sarah McCarry response includes an excellent anecdote.

Why are you still reading this! Go read that Rachel Dolezal piece!

The post Whatever Else You Do, Read This Rachel Dolezal Piece: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

“We try not to get too hung up on the split infinitive”: Here’s some charming stories about copyediting and style guides.

Gavia Baker-Whitelaw at the Daily Dot adored Logan and made me feel pretty sure that I will too.¹ Likewise Emily Asher-Perrin at Tor, who does the excellent thing of saying a superhero movie is very good without trashing all other superhero movies.

Emily Yoshida wrote this thing about silent murder girls in Logan (and elsewhere).

Raise a glass to the spoilsport big sisters of literature.

YA author LJ Alonge on how to write black stories without catering to the white gaze.

Do not read this article if you have not yet finished season one of The Good Place and dislike spoilers (also, catch up on The Good Place!). But here is an interview with showrunner Mike Schur about how he crafted the season, and it’s aces.

I feel tingles of pleasure when I read negative reviews of Iron Fist, which sounds like a badly paced, badly directed, badly written mess. Yay. Maureen Ryan calls it “about as exciting as a slice of Velveeta cheese left out in the sun too long.” Kwame Opam describes it as a “boring, confused, and often offensive mess of a series.” Susana Polo says it was so bad she found herself “incredulously texting coworkers who also had screener access to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.”

This piece on The Learned Fangirl draws parallels between the WGN show Underground (which I haven’t seen yet) and Nisi Shawl’s superb work of what she calls AfroRetroFuturism, Everfair.

Buzzfeed ran a round-up of takes on the women’s strike and a round-up of reports from women on why and how they did or did not participate.

This profile of The Ripped Bodice, a romance novels bookstore in Los Angeles, made me happy in every possible way.²

Another links round-up, another Vulture piece by Angelica Jade Bastien making me happy. This one’s about Buffy the Vampire Slayer!

Have a wonderful weekend, friends. Stay brave!

The post Spoilsport Big Sisters: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Eliding the horrors of American slavery.

The development of American English and the new London dialect that’s replacing Cockney.

Literary blind spots from famous authors.

Writing letters to trees.

“I don’t see gender/color/difference” is bullshit, and let’s not ever forget it.

An appreciation of Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye, which recently (sob!) ended its run.

What women write about when we write about the apocalypse.

This article about Auroville is shocking because this lady apparently found a liquor store in Pondy. HOW DID YOU FIND A LIQUOR STORE IN SOUTHEAST INDIA MADAM. Whiskey Jenny and I yearned and yearned to find a liquor store while we were in India but we ALWAYS FAILED.

TERROR BIRDS.

The moral, for movie execs, of this Grantland story about the guy who breaks the superhero news stories is probably “Your coat check girl thinks you’re an asshole.”

Starlee Kine launches an investigation to discover Jake Gyllenhaal’s height, and the resulting podcast may actually be the teleological cause of the internet’s invention.

What cultural osmosis has taught non-Harry-Potter-readers about the Harry Potter books. Oh and since I’m in, the illustrated edition of Harry Potter is going to include this and you should get pumped.

The #HarryPotterDeluxe Illustrated edition will include a fold-out of this GLORIOUS Diagon Alley image by #JimKay pic.twitter.com/pplZPG8Jky

— Bloomsbury Kids UK (@KidsBloomsbury) July 15, 2015

I mentioned Sandra Bland in my last links round-up, and the whole story has been making me sad this whole past fortnight. Jamilah Lemieux and Roxane Gay both wrote about it. And since I drafted this post earlier in the week, Sandra Bland has become last week’s thing, and we’re doing Sam Dubose now, and it just never goddamn ends.

The post An extremely on-brand links round-up appeared first on Reading the End.

Terry Crews on misogyny and toxic masculinity. Apparently this dude also works to prevent human trafficking. Yay for allies.

Some thoughts on Islamophobia in dystopian fiction.

Not sure of your language when you’re talking about race / sexuality / disability / whatever? The Conscious Style Guide is here to help, rounding up links that explain why you shouldn’t say that, what to say instead, and generally how not to be a dick accidentally.

A reminder that these exceptionally gorgeous coloring books for grown-ups exist. My sister has one, and I plan on stealing it from her at some point and coloring a page myself. I promise I will make my page pretty.

On lightening up women of color in comics (gross).

Emily Nussbaum being awesome about Kimmy Schmidt and the stories TV tells about rape survivors and PTSD. Also, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was originally called Tooken, and that is awesome, even though I get why they changed it.

An interview with the lady who writes Guy in Your MFA and Dystopian YA.

Emily Asher-Perrin on criticism and anger in fandom.

The Firefly theme song is not the best theme song there has ever been. Except when Jesse Martin and two other people from The Flash do a beautifully harmonized cover of it to thank Joss Whedon for contributing to their Kickstarter for a short musical film about a family hiding from slavery in the 1850s, which incidentally also sounds super great.

Some awesome bloggers created the Socratic Salon this month, which will be an all-spoilers space to discuss books in-depth. The five ladies who created it will have conversations among themselves, and other readers are encouraged to engage with them and each other in the comments. Yay!

The post As usual, I need more internet: A links round-up appeared first on Reading the End.

Don’t forget that A More Diverse Universe is going on now! Head over to Aarti’s blog to see all the amazing POC authors people are discovering and rediscovering this month!

More awesome discoveries by science: Scientists have found the most complete dinosaur skeleton yet, and they have named it THE DREADNOUGHT. I hope it’s not too late to incorporate it into Jurassic World. The tail alone is thirty feet long. This is awesome. Science is the best.

The wonderful and brilliant Jenny Diski has inoperable cancer. Stupid universe. In other sad news, much-acclaimed fantasy writer Graham Joyce died last week of also cancer.

Here is a history of the “Can This Marriage Be Saved” column from the Ladies’ Home Journal. I love that column, but okay, yes, its history is not the greatest. Yikes, guys. It is like if Roger Goodell were masterminding a marriage advice column.

Speaking of which, the National Football League has been making me alternately furious and miserable this whole past fortnight! “Fuck you Roger Goodell” is far from a new sentiment for me, but man, he’s really pushing for Worst Human Person this year. Alyssa Rosenberg is typically cogent about how they should behave.

Emily Asher-Perrin’s Harry Potter reread continues to be pretty much the best thing ever. Yesterday’s recap produced this:

I really feel like Hogwarts has probably not changed any school rules (outside of not torturing students in detention) in a few hundred years. Like, what is the Board of Governors even for? Pretty sure that other than Lucius Malfoy strutting around and getting in people’s faces (back when he was a member), they probably just get together to drink sherry, talk shit on various Ministry policies, and reminisce about when they used to be students. In fact, I guarantee you that this is exactly what the Board does. . . . Can I be on the Board?

How not to respond to a bad review. Basically, just don’t respond to it. Keep your feelings to yourself, and everyone will like you better. I absolutely promise.

Ten lessons from real-life revolutions that fictional dystopias ignore, from the good people at io9.

My favorite thing The Toast has produced in this past fortnight: How to Tell if You’re in a MFA Workshop Story. I like “You saw something horrifying at the circus.”

Last but not least, the lovely Lory of Emerald City Review has come up with an idea that it’s weird to me nobody came up with before: Witch Week! From Halloween (31 October) to Guy Fawkes Day (5 November), we’ll be spotlighting a fantasy author — this year, it’ll be the wonderful and inimitable Diana Wynne Jones, who coined the term “Witch Week” in her book Witch Week. There will be guest posts (one by me!) and giveaways, and you should get excited.

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