Sara Ryan

If William Gibson is speaking anywhere near you, I recommend you go. This is the second time I’ve seen him at Powell’s; here’s what I wrote about the other time. This time Mr. Gibson was juxtaposed with a taxidermically-themed art exhibit, which made it appear among other things that a bear was enthusiastic and amused [...]

You may know Colleen Mondor from her blog, Chasing Ray, or her insightful reviews for Bookslut, Booklist, and Eclectica Magazine. Her first book, Map of My Dead Pilots, is a gripping, unflinching look at what it’s like to fly for a living in Alaska, where pilots are rewarded for — and sometimes simply expected to [...]

I’m a sucker for journalism about teens’ lives; whether it’s photo essays like Adrienne Salinger’s In My Room: teenagers in their bedrooms, interviews like Sydney Lewis’s A Totally Alien Life Form: Teenagers, or books like Brooke Hauser’s, which tell teens’ stories in the context of an institution that’s shaping their lives — in this case, [...]

I’d thought I’d lurk around Wordstock on Saturday, but I elected to write instead. But I did come for a substantial portion of Sunday, above and beyond the session I was moderating. First I went to see Emily Warn and Ursula Le Guin, both reading poems. Warn read several, then Le Guin read one long [...]

When I read journalist Daniel Hernandez‘s book Down & Delirious in Mexico City: the Aztec metropolis in the twenty-first century, I often found myself picturing the scenes he writes about illustrated by Los Bros Hernandez (no relation). Passionate soccer fans, punk and emo kids, decadent fashion designers, grieving families of kidnap victims, devotees of la [...]

Some writers, I am given to understand, struggle because they have SO many FABulous iDEas, they just don’t know WHICH one to write FIRST! I am not one of them. My inner critic, who resembles a very angry prosecuting attorney, starts second-guessing before my first guess is fully formed, doing her best to demolish the [...]

Today I received an Amazing Artifact. The Mod-Mod Read-In Paperback Book List was produced in 1970, under the auspices of the Young Adult Services Division, the precursor of the Young Adult Library Services Association. From the titles, it seems to be an ancestor of both Popular Paperbacks and Quick Picks. It was part of a project [...]

When I finished Jo Walton’s Among Others this afternoon, my first thought was: “Now I know how people who imprinted on mainstream comics feel about Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude.” I loved Fortress of Solitude, but I was often aware while I read of references passing me by, or simply detonating with less force than they [...]

I just sent a contribution to the Nathan Wolfson Trust. If you knew L.K. Madigan, if you were a fan of her work, that is a thing you could do as well. I’m glad I had the chance to meet her through her friend and agent Jennifer Laughran, and glad, too, that we spent some [...]

There is a point when I’m working on something new when I can’t experience anything without seeing it through the lens of what I need for the new thing. I’m not going to talk about the new thing yet, probably not for a long long time. But here are a few items currently jostling together [...]