You don’t always need hundreds of pages to tell a moving story. Or at least that’s the case with “The Paper Menagerie,” the titular story of Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories.
“Paper Menagerie” is a short story about a bi-racial boy na…
Category: Mashreads Podcast
The supreme weirdness of reading ‘A Wrinkle In Time’ as an adult
The first time I read A Wrinkle In Time as a kid, I remember being utterly terrified.
Beginning with the iconic opening line “It was a dark and stormy night,” Madeleine L’Engle’s classic children’s sci-fi tale takes us on a harrowing journey with ir…
‘Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda’ perfectly captures the angst and joy of growing up
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If there’s one word to describe Becky Albertalli’s book Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (turned rom-com Love, Simon), it’s “relatable.”
The book follows Simon, a closeted high schooler who begins an online romance with another student, who goes by the anonymous name “Blue.” When Martin, Simon’s fellow student, discovers the emails, he begins blackmailing Simon. From there, Simon must figure out how to protect his identity and who Blue is — all the while trying to navigate the messy, complicated world of high school. Read more…
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‘Call Me By Your Name’ is a book worth reading—even if you’ve already seen the film
Whether you’ve seen the Academy Award nominated film or not, Call Me By Your Name is worth your time.
On this week’s episode of the MashReads Podcast, we’re continuing our lovely streak of books that happened to have been turned into feature film…
‘The War Outside’: An exclusive peek at Monica Hesse’s heartbreaking new novel
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Monica Hesse’s books are like time machines — vehicles that help us explore our past.
In her first book, The Girl In The Blue Coat, Hesse delivered a nail-biting deep dive into World War II, following a black marketeer in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam who is suddenly tasked with finding a missing Jewish teenager.
Now Hesse is back, and she’s revisiting an aspect of WWII that’s not frequently discussed: the interment of Japanese Americans and German Americans.
SEE ALSO: Cheeky bookseller proves that Trump’s own words are the best way to sell the book about him
In her upcoming second novel, titled The War Outside, Hesse traces the lives of two teens — Haruko and Margot — who are uprooted from their lives and placed in Crystal City, a family internment camp in west Texas, because they’re parents are German and Japanese. When they meet at the camp’s school, Haruko and Margot believe that they’ll only know each other, and only stay in Crystal City, for a short amount of time. However, as time stretches on, and the dynamic of camp changes, the two begin to rely on each other as everything they know starts to fall apart. Read more…
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View More ‘The War Outside’: An exclusive peek at Monica Hesse’s heartbreaking new novelIf you liked the ‘Annihilation’ movie, you absolutely NEED to read the book
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There is frequently a disclaimer that accompanies Alex Garland’s new movie Annihilation: it’s nothing like the book.
At first glance, based on the trailer, the movie positions itself as a fight against creepy things that go bump in the night. Natalie Portman, playing Lena the biologist, must go into “the shimmer” with a team, to solve a mystery that’ll save her dying husband, who went into Area X previously. And then things get (very, very, very) weird.
In the book, the struggle is much more ethereal — it’s a quest to understand the un-understandable, to fight to hold onto one’s self in the face of extreme uncertainty, a quest to live in a landscape that seems to be fighting back. Read more…
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‘Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet’ might help those who want to stay in Wakanda
T’Challa finally got his very long overdue (get your sh*t together, Hollywood) standalone movie this February with Marvel’s new movie Black Panther.
The good news is that the movie has already broken a ton of records, with a $427 million worldwide op…
MashReads Podcast: Dave Eggers and the Monk of Mokha discuss their thrilling new book
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Can one person revitalize a country while sharing its history with the world? Mokht…
MashReads Podcast: ‘The Immortalists’ is a page-turning look at mortality
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How would you live your life if you knew the day you were going to die?
That’s the …
Teen angst gets real gritty (and real nerdy) in new YA novel ‘Down and Across’
In the ’90s, Forrest Gump famously opined “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.”
Now that musing is getting a much nerdier update with Arvin Armadi’s new novel Down and Across: life is like constructing a crosswo…
Neal Shusterman redefines dystopian fiction with his ‘Arc of the Scythe’ series
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If there is one person who has shaped the landscape of young adult pop culture, it’s Neal Shusterman.
The prolific author, perhaps best known for the Unwind Dystology and The Accelerati Triligoy, has been writing for a variety of mediums — books, film, TV, and games — since the ’80s, including writing for the Goosebumps and Animorphs TV series and the Disney channel original movie Pixel Perfect.
Now Shusterman is back, and this time he’s turning dystopian literature on its head with his new Arc of the Scythe series.
The Arc of the Scythe series dives into a utopian world where death has been defeated. In this perfect world, a governing body called the Scythes decides who dies “but everyone accepts it because everybody knows that this order is made up of the most compassionate humans in the world.” Read more…
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James Dashner reveals the secret element behind dystopian novels: hope
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Whether it’s the war torn world of Hunger Games, the socially stratified society of Divergent, or civilization in collapse of Delirium, the future depicted in YA is often bleak.
But for James Dashner, author of The Maze Runner series, there is a powerful undercurrent surging beneath the surface of a lot of the post-apocalyptic and dystopian stories popular in young adult novels: hope.
“There are a lot of places in the world that are in worse shape than even the books we’re writing. And with social media, kids are much more aware of it,” says Dashner. “Now kids see pictures of [real] places that are living in either in apocalyptic conditions or dystopian conditions. So I think [readers of the genre] love relating to the fact that our world could go that way, and that someone their age could make a difference in that world.” Read more…
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