Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

  It’s funny how, when you spend your life immersed in books, unbidden thoughts of a book can presage an event. We’ve been focusing here at Booklist on the best books of 2012 for our Editors Choice list, but a 2013 title kept popping up in my mind. This morning it surfaced again, and I found [...]

The 2012 Thriller Awards were announced at ThrillerFest‘s “gala awards banquet” last Saturday night. (I’m taking “gala” on faith; I have yet to see a press release touting a “swell,” ”swank,” or “pretty nice” banquet.) Are you thrilled by the results? According to the Booklist reviews, Paul McEuen’s debut, Spiral, may have been the best of the [...]

Tributes are pouring in to honor the great writer, humanitarian, and library advocate Ray Bradbury, who died today at age 91, leaving us with nearly 30 books and 600 stories, works that profoundly changed our perceptions of ourselves, life on earth, and the entire universe. In our latest Spotlight on Science Fiction and Fantasy, editor [...]

This week marks the deaths of two multiple-award-winning children’s book creators:  Leo Dillon and Ellen Levine . In this online space, we invite you to share your personal stories about Dillon and Levine and the impact that their books have made on you, on the young people in your lives, and on the field of [...]

Summer is the season for exploration and discovery, and readers of all ages, interests, and tastes would love to visit the American Writers Museum—if only such a place existed. Although we have national museums celebrating the luminaries of baseball, rock and roll, the visual arts, various ethnic traditions, and science and technology, to categorize but [...]

As National Poetry Month begins, poet Adrienne Rich is much on the mind of poetry readers in the wake of her death at 82 on March 27, 2012. Adrienne Rich’s poems are works you turn to when the fog of stress grows too thick and the static too loud, when the world seems cruel and [...]

Almost as soon as Harry Potter et. al. took their final ride on the Hogwarts Express in 2007, readers began to speculate what the next big project was for J.K. Rowling. Now we know. She has finished an adult novel, though the publication date is still under wraps. What was disclosed in a press release is that [...]

Always eager for a good literary dust-up, I read with interest the news that Booker Prize winner Ben Okri had responded to comments made last month by his editor, Robin Robertson. In Sameer Rahim’s January 23 Telegraph article, “The Mystery of Poetry Editing: From T. S. Eliot to John Burnside,” Robertson, a Scotsman, claimed (or “confessed”) that he had [...]

When I first heard of the indie publisher ChiZine, I was certain they were Chicago-based—and assumed they had started life as a ‘zine. And yet I never ran into any ChiZine folks in my Chicago perambulations. Then, at a recent conference, I was introduced to the very nice folks behind the imprint and learned they were [...]

Last year, the first-ever World Book Night was held in the UK and Ireland—not quite “the world” but, here at Likely Stories, we certainly applaud the lofty ambition. The stated goal was to give away one million books to “light or non-readers” and, by most accounts, the night was a resounding success. This year, WBN will add two more countries to its efforts at [...]