Since childhood, Vic McQueen has had an uncanny talent for finding lost things. Fueled by desperation to salve the rupture in her parents' marriage, Vic discovers the Shorter Way Bridge, a dangerous supernatural pathway that takes her to wherever a lost object can be found. Yet even while she becomes...

In mid-nineteenth century Texas when Eli McCullough is twelve, Comanches take him captive after killing his family. A generation later, Eli's son Peter rebels against his father after the latter orders the mass slaying of a family of Mexicans on the land adjacent to theirs. And one hundred years in...

There's a reason that each new fantasy novel by Guy Gavriel Kay is met with so much excitement by a core of devoted readers. These are books in which everything happens--epic battles, forbidden love, violent deaths--yet the threads of story inexorably tangle us in something that goes much deeper. Each...

A writer's colony in 1957 sets the scene for the fateful meeting of two young writers. Frances Reardon is a devoutly religious Catholic and hard at work on her first novel. Harvard graduate Bernard Eliot is also Catholic, but has a pronounced Dionysian, pleasure-seeking streak, and writes poetry reminiscent of...

A beautiful girl is mysteriously murdered amid the winding canals of Venice. A handsome, arrogant anti-hero with unique powers of deduction is hired by a billionaire to investigate -- and in a journey that takes him from Cairo to Paris and beyond, discovers a pattern with global and potentially devastating...

"Kill all parents, so you can keep living," sing Annie and Buster Fang to a shocked audience, as child props for their famous artist parents, Caleb and Camille Fang. The imperative for children to individuate, to dig themselves out from the seductive security of the family structure -- to "kill...

I should explain: it is very rarely that I am a ridiculous fangirl about anything. The process of being a ridiculous fangirl is so emotionally taxing, so inherently indignified, that I try not to fall into the trap more often than necessary. Everyone is human, right? Even the artists whose...

Who else really wants a pet dragon now? They are so adorable, and can burn enemies to a crisp! I don't have a dog or a cat because I don't see the point -- but the utility of a pet dragon is obvious. Of course there's the minor problem that...

In The Age of Miracles, the world is ending just as the life of a young girl is beginning. This tragic coming-of-age story chronicles the parallel disintegrations of the world and the life and family of Julia, a sensitive 12-year-old girl living in a sleepy suburb of California. As apocalypse...

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...