Blog Posts

Start with four books: Percival Everett’s James, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Each one earns its spot differently: James just took the 2024 National Book Award for i…

Annotate actively and selectively: underline the thesis, mark what surprises you, and write a short note explaining why each mark matters. That single habit turns passive reading into a real conversation with the page. Below you’ll find step-by-step…

Start by mining trusted directories like Poets & Writers, Publishers Marketplace, and the Authors Guild for verified agent names, then build a tight query package before you send a single email. Queries to a cold list convert at roughly 0.04%, so re…

A content warning, often called a trigger warning, is a short note that flags potentially distressing themes in a book. If you want to prepare for or avoid certain content, the single best move is to check the book’s front matter or search the title…

Yes, for most purposes, listening to an audiobook counts as reading, with a few caveats worth knowing. A recent poll found that about 40% of American adults still disagree, even though neuroscience shows the brain processes meaning in strikingly s…

If you love libraries, secondhand bookshops, or novels where reading itself becomes the plot, start with these twelve: The Shadow of the Wind for gothic bookstore atmosphere, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore for tech-meets-antiquarian mystery, The…

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded to numerous books since 1918, and this page lists every winner in order, from the earliest recipients through the most recent. The 2026 prize went to Daniel Kraus for Angel Down, a genre-blending Wor…

What does it really mean to know your worth? It's a question that follows us through every stage of life. Whether you're a teenager navigating peer pressure, an adult facing career setbacks, or someone rebuilding after heartbreak, the struggle to b…

If you're an author, you've probably heard the saying: "Don't build your audience on rented land." While social media is a wonderful tool for connecting with readers, algorithms change, accounts get suspended, and platforms come and go. The one pl…

In an enlightening conversation with the Bookaholic Podcast, Jacqueline Boylan delved into the many layers of her book, "A Broken Twig Can Sprout." This book isn't just a mere children's story; it's a powerful fusion of autobiography, educational re…

Monday, July 13, 2026 Today, we're diving into an issue that's as heavy as it is critical: the future of reading in our society and the intriguing article from The Atlantic Monthly that kicked off this compelling discussion. The Atlantic and the A…

This Is Not Your Teenager's Dance App Anymore Let's get this out of the way first: yes, TikTok once meant lip-syncs and viral dances. That was then. Today, TikTok is a full-scale commerce platform with over a billion active users, built-in shopping…

If you love books and you love podcasts, there is a good chance you have already stumbled across a book podcast and wondered whether it was worth committing to. The reasons to join a book podcast go well beyond just getting a few reading recommendat…

You want to read more. You have a stack of books, a wishlist that keeps growing, and a nagging feeling that you're not making real progress. The struggle to build a reading list that actually works is something almost every book lover knows. Too man…

There’s a persistent belief that why women read more books than men comes down to men simply not liking books with female protagonists. It’s a tidy explanation, and it’s mostly wrong. A large-scale Cornell University study found that men showed no s…

I was 19 years old in 1984. Old enough to ride the subway alone......if I lived in New York.Old enough to understand fear.Old enough to know that whose fear mattered—and whose didn’t—was never evenly distributed. On December 22, 1984, Bernie Goetz…