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.
BY SIDNEY BOKER ’21
“Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott is being adapted into a new film, set to be released in 2019. According to the New Yorker, Alcott wrote the book in 1868 after publisher Thomas Niles prompted her to write a “girls’ story.” Before “Little Women,” Alcott published thriller stories in different weekly papers under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard to help her financially-strapped family. The Alcott family consisted of Bronson, Alcott’s transcendentalist and jobless father, her mother Abba and her three sisters, who served as Alcott’s inspiration for the March sisters in “Little Women.”
BY ISABEL RODRIGUEZ ‘21
Stephen Dillon, an assistant professor of critical race and queer studies at Hampshire College, spoke to a packed crowd at Amherst Books last Friday night. His new book, “Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State,” focuses primarily on the work of underground women activists in the United States during the 1970s.
BY BEATA GARRETT ’20
Ask any American who Stephen King is and it’s almost certain they will have seen one of his adapted movies or read one of his books. Katie McLain at Bookriot, a website that focuses on book news researched which horror writers appeared most when “best horror writer” is Googled, revealing King as the winner.
BY SIDNEY BOKER ’21
Book subscription boxes are just what they sound like: a recurring (usually monthly) delivery of a themed assortment of products. Two examples of these genre-focused boxes stand out in particular for their superior quality of monthly new Young Adult (YA) literature and literary goods, like pins, t-shirts and bookmarks.
BY BEATA GARRETT ’20
Written by Marjorie Liu and illustrated by Sana Takeda, “Monstress” is a comic series that follows protagonist Maika Halfwolf’s journey in learning about her mother’s death and unlocking a devastating power within. The series is set in 20th century Asia during a war between humans and Arcanics, a race descended from gods. The comics highlight the way women of color survive the trauma of war both alone and through the relationships they form with one another. The content is violent — touching upon topics such as slavery, physical disabilities and PTSD — but never becomes exploitative.
BY ISABEL RODRIGUEZ ’21
Sonia Sotomayor, the third woman and first-ever Hispanic person to hold a Supreme Court seat, has recently released two autobiographies, now abridged for young readers. Her writing journey began in 2013 with her autobiography, “My Beloved World,” which she then adapted into two new books designed for young readers.
