Last week, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Marcelo Crivella, called for the removal of the Marvel comic book “Avengers: The Children’s Crusade” from the city’s biennial book fair. he book features male superheroes Wiccan and Hulkling, who are in a committed relationship, kissing. When officials arrived to confiscate copies, the book had already sold out.
BY ISABEL RODRIGUEZ ’21
In celebration of March’s Women’s History Month, Michelle Obama starred in the YouTube original special, “BookTube: A Discussion with Michelle Obama.” The series is divided into seven short videos in which Obama discusses her record-breaking memoir, “Becoming,” and answers questions from a panel of YouTube personalities.
BY CAROLINE MAO ’22
In her autobiographical essay collection, “The Collected Schizophrenias,” Esme Weijun Wang discusses her personal experiences with a variety of mental and physical illnesses, particularly schizoaffective disorder. The collection begins with her journey towards diagnosis and includes topics such as her family’s history of mental illness and their refusal to acknowledge it, her expulsion from Yale as a result of her repeated psychiatric hospitalizations and her decision not to have children.
BY CAROLINE MAO ’22
In November 2018, Margaret Atwood announced that she would be releasing a sequel to her 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” in September 2019. The sequel, entitled “The Testaments,” has no connection to the Hulu television adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It follows three female narrators from Gilead, a dystopian America, and is set 15 years after the first novel.
BY GABY RODRIGUEZ ’22
Young adult (YA) novels rocketed into the public eye in 2008 when Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” came to the big screen. YA has always been a genre that defied typical expectations; not quite children’s literature but not quite a full-fledged heavy adult narrative, YA is a rebellion against publishing norms. This boundary-pushing nature gives minority authors more opportunities to publish their work, creating a more diverse array of YA novels.
BY SIDNEY BOKER ’21
On April 1, award-winning author Vonda N. McIntyre died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 70. According to her obituary in the Guardian, McIntyre was at the forefront of science fiction in the 1970s, inspired by other feminist authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ. McIntyre wrote about women in a genre in which women usually weren’t represented and explored gender in many of her works.
BY ISABEL RODRIGUEZ ’21
Since its first publication in 1967, Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” has been met with international acclaim. Despite its popularity, the novel has not been adapted into a film or TV show in the 50 years since its publication. Now, for the first time ever, the story will be told on screen.
BY SIDNEY BOKER ’21
A hush of anticipation fell over Gamble Auditorium as the first student-poet took the podium for the 96th annual Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition. It honors Glascock, who died of pneumonia a few months after graduating from Mount Holyoke. Ahmed’s success marks the third consecutive year for a Mount Holyoke student to win the competition.
BY GABRIELLE RODRIGUEZ ’22
Mount Holyoke’s 2018 common read, “The Book of Unknown Americans” by Cristina Henríquez, is a novel full of complex and validating representations of immigrant communities. Literary systems must be critiqued to be bettered, and while Henríquez does a great job crafting an enticing story with great representation, I will continue to push for stories with Latinx casts that do not hinge on trauma.
BY GABRIELLE RODRIGUEZ ’22
LGBTQ+ romance is notoriously hard to find. Romance involving LGBTQ+ women is even more scarce. Whether it be in the romance genre itself or in the growing ranks of LGBTQ+ mainstream novels, the question of which stories are told and how to tell them is one that arises with every new publication.
BY SIDNEY BOKER ’21
New year, new books! This list of books to look out for in 2019 was compiled from Literary Hub’s “Most Anticipated Books of 2019,” Goodreads’ “43 Highly Anticipated Books of 2019” and Entertainment Weekly’s “50 most anticipated books of 2019.” This year’s new books span genres including YA, thriller, contemporary, fantasy and essay collections. The books spotlighted here are a few of this year’s top picks curated to meet a range of literary interests at Mount Holyoke.
BY ISABEL RODRIGUEZ ’21
On Jan. 24, online storytelling platform Wattpad announced that they will enter the print industry with their own publishing division, Wattpad Books. The website announced that, starting in the fall of 2019, Wattpad Books will publish six Young Adult (YA) titles, all stories that are popular on Wattpad.
BY KATE FLAHERTY ’19
Art, deception, love and murder are the centerpieces of B.A. Shapiro’s historical mystery novel, “The Collector’s Apprentice.” Shapiro, whose 2012 novel “The Art Forger” became a New York Times best-seller, delivers a lyrical and elegant story set in 1920s Paris and Philadelphia. Shapiro weaves in the lives of dozens of historical figures like Henri Matisse and Gertrude Stein, immersing the reader in a world of postImpressionist artists.
BY ISABEL RODRIGUEZ ’21
Since the release of George R. R. Martin’s “A Dance with Dragons” in 2011, fans have been impatiently awaiting the sixth book in Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, “The Winds of Winter.” An ongoing joke with “A Song of Ice and Fire” fans is that winter is not coming soon enough.
BY DEANNA KALIAN ’20
“I have a history of dragging friends into questionable endeavors,” explained Chris Baty, the creator of National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. “And NaNoWriMo was one of many self-improvement schemes that began with me saying ‘What if we all got together and….’”
BY BEATA GARRETT ’20
This year, “The Kissing Booth,” a romantic comedy on Netflix, and the supernatural thriller “Light as a Feather” were released on Netflix and Hulu. Both films started as novels on Wattpad, a website and a community for the online publication of user-generated fiction, and were subsequently published by Penguin Random House and Simon Pulse, respectively.
