popular culture
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Life’s Mini Pleasures
In early 2024, I came across a miniature replica of a bookshelf situated in a recycled Altoids tin on my Instagram “explore” page. It was impossible to pass this over.…
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“Now I’ve read all the books beside your bed:” Books, Literature, and Taylor Swift
It’s no secret that the cultural zeitgeist is currently saturated with Taylor Swift, from her massively successful Eras Tour to her relationship with football star Travis Kelce. Their swoon-worthy romance seems ripped…
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#reader-core: Aesthetics and Algorithmic Capitalism
Since Jane Austen’s publication of Sense and Sensibility in the 19th century, we’ve moved on from empire waist gowns, empire itself, and of course, industrial capitalism. And with these social,…
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Kim Wilkins, Beth Driscoll, and Lisa Fletcher. Genre Worlds: Popular Fiction and Twenty-First-Century Book Culture.
In 2017, I reviewed Jeremy Rosen’s exploration of genre and late 20th/21st century publishing in Minor Characters Have Their Day for SHARP News. So it seems only fitting that 5…
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Performing Romance: BookTok and Teen Reading
BookTok, a corner of TikTok largely dominated by young women that is dedicated to reviewing, recommending, and reacting to a wide range of texts, is a driving force for book…
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Under Your Skin: A History of the Necronomicon and Skin-Bound Books
The absence of evil books in real life hasn’t stopped us from imagining them in all manner of genres both past and present. And we love a good evil book,…
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Pentiment: An Interview with Josh Sawyer
Pentiment (Obsidian 2022, $19.99, Xbox and Steam), the new narrative game from Obsidian, is a piece of media that gets a rare trio of things right: it’s beautiful to look…
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The Pulp Magazines Project
The Pulp Magazines Project. Patrick Belk, Nathan Madison: 2011. <http://pulpmags.org/> The first generation of cooperative, open-access libraries were text-based transcriptions like Project Gutenberg. In the past 20 years digital imaging…