Sara Ryan

Diana Wynne Jones almost made me miss my flight. I was so entirely inside FIRE AND HEMLOCK that it was only the final boarding call that managed to penetrate my consciousness. Are you surprised that I was reading it for the first time? Me, too. But somehow I grew up without discovering her work, and [...]

Tonight I went to see April Henry talk about her latest books at Powell’s. Yes, that’s books, plural — Girl, Stolen; The Night She Disappeared, and Eyes of Justice. I am in awe not just of how quickly she can write, but how frequently she thinks of gripping plot ideas — including the premise for [...]

Things I am doing, an incomplete selection: Making oatmeal with a lot of stuff in it. Tips: toast the pecans before you chop them. Use frozen blueberries when fresh ones are out of season. Frozen banana works too, and is actually great with the toasted pecan. Do not stint on the cinnamon. Working on my [...]

…by Sylvia Townsend Warner, as a result of this article. I am loving it, the prose and the mood. Here is a quote from it that reminds me a bit of Tove Jansson:  Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing and yet in some way congenial; [...]

I absolutely loved The People Who Watched Her Pass By, by Scott Bradfield, whose other books I am going to read right quick, and I was trying to figure out exactly why. I kept folding back the corners of pages, marking sections that especially resonated, and “matter-of-fact surrealism” was the phrase that finally came into [...]

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 [...]