Ilana Teitelbaum

I've decided: I want every show I watch to be written by George R. R. Martin. (Except Mad Men. Mad Men is perfect already.) I suspect this might cut into his schedule, but hey, that isn't my problem, is it? (When I told a friend of mine about this new...

If this were an episode of Friends, its title would be "The One Where Robb Gets Some." While a few other things did happen -- Cersei threatens Tyrion (with the wrong whore, no less), Catelyn catches hell for letting Jaime Lannister go -- it wasn't exactly the most action-packed of...

"A Man Without Honor" made me so many kinds of happy that, in the depths of my geeky heart, there was a 15-year-old girl dancing some kind of faux medieval jig. If Game of Thrones continues in this vein, the show may actually overcome its reputation as a gratuitous-gore-and-sex fest...

Or should that be "old plots and new?" This episode deviates so sharply from George R. R. Martin's books that fans were reeling, with some upset by this turn of events.

But others are feeling just fine, and count me in the latter camp. From what I can see, the...

Tudor England during the reign of Henry VIII is a place readers have visited many times--but in the hands of Hilary Mantel, it becomes territory both new and unsettling. In Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, Mantel weaves a richly textured world that is...

This episode had a recurring theme dear to my heart: Women being awesome. And by "awesome" I don't just mean brave and heroic, though that's here to some degree, too. I mean interesting, and forging independent paths for themselves to the extent that they can in a stratified and brutal...

Religious tradition has the power to enrich one's life -- or to destroy it. That is the message at the core of I Am Forbidden, a novel that sheds light on some of the most destructive -- and least discussed -- tenets of ultra-Othodox Judaism, in the cloistered world of...

Welcome to Westeros, where nothing good ever happens to anyone. Ever. Well sometimes people get laid, but that's about it.

As I promised earlier, I won't be spoiling the books, but there are spoilers ahead for "Garden of Bones," the latest bone-sawing, chest-devouring, rape-with-a-sceptre-ing(?) episode of Game...

Last year, I outed myself as a geek on the Huffington Post, when I felt compelled to defend HBO's Game of Thrones from what I deemed an ill-considered New York Times critique. Full disclosure: I've been reading the George R. R. Martin series since I was 17. In...

When the 22-year-old Cheryl Strayed loses her young mother to lung cancer, her life plunges into a downward spiral leading to the disintegration of her family, compulsive adultery and heroin addiction. Surveying the wreckage of her life at the age of 26, newly divorced, Strayed resolves to hike -- alone...

When Margaret Fuller perished in a shipwreck off the coast of Fire Island in 1850 along with her husband and son, the world was quick to forget the transcendentalist author. Male counterparts in the movement -- including Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne -- dismissed her foundational feminist essay, "Woman in the...

Women with psychic powers take center stage in The Vanishers, a paranormal thriller by Heidi Julavits that turns on rivalry between women and the often fraught relationship between mothers and daughters.

Julia Severn's powerful psychic gifts bring her to the Workshop, which is similar in purpose to Hogwarts but has...

Even for readers who think they've seen everything, Gillespie and I by Jane Harris is almost certain to be surprising. The novel's setting is Victorian-era Scotland, and its narrator, 35-year-old Harriet Baxter, is a nosy spinster with an interest in art -- Scottish artist Ned Gillespie in particular. Harriet chronicles...

Everyone has them: those friends or acquaintances whose life's peak, and especially whose romantic peak, was in their Ivy League college days. Get in a room with one of these people plus a bottle of wine, and you are in for a long night of recollections of days-of-our-lives relationship dramas...

To arrive at the end of Caitlin Sweet's The Pattern Scars has the feel of awakening from a dream -- one of doing terrible things. It is a novel of intense contradiction: a lush, delicately imagined nightmare; a horror novel about intimacy.

Paradox is the heart of The Pattern...

As a reviewer I try to avoid hyperbolic statements, as it is expected of a critic to maintain an analytic distance. But Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods is designed to shock, and is quite simply the oddest novel I have ever read. "Novel" might be an inaccurate description, since the work...

Anyone who claims the novel is dead has not encountered Kathryn Stockett. The traditional literary tools of plot and character, working skilfully in tandem, make The Help pleasurable to sink into as a warm bath. I'd been wondering why the experience of reading this book evoked a nostalgia for my...

Was it worth the wait? That is likely the most burning question facing readers of George R. R. Martin's mammoth Song of Ice and Fire series regarding its fifth and latest installment, A Dance with Dragons. This book's release was famously delayed for years, drawing a barrage of reader outrage...

For months now, I've been counting the days to April 17th, the release date of HBO's Game of Thrones. As a longtime fan of the books I have high hopes for the TV series as delicious entertainment, which is the chief characteristic of George R. R. Martin's books at their...

What happens after we die? In the half-nightmare, half-comic world of Beyond Black, spirits "airside" are often more concerned about the cakes and marmite sandwiches they miss than with the secrets of the universe and are as likely to reminisce about kitchen fittings as about lost love. Beyond Black truly...