Leah Rachel von Essen reviews genre-bending fiction for Booklist, and writes regularly as a senior contributor at Book Riot. Her blog While Reading and Walking has over 10,000 dedicated followers over several social media outlets, including Instagram. She writes passionately about books in translation, chronic illness and bias in healthcare, queer books, twisty SFF, and magical realism and folklore. She was one of a select few bookstagrammers named to NewCity’s Chicago Lit50 in 2022. She is an avid traveler, a passionate fan of women’s basketball and soccer, and a lifelong learner. Twitter: @reading_while
Wow your favorite book lover this holiday season and sweep them off their feet with these seven absolutely extra bookish gift ideas.
These books about queerness, displacement, loss, and violence are must-read, rich novels and short story collections.
A spaceship full of humans is off to find a new habitable planet — and to no one's shock, something is going to go horribly wrong.
Learn about all the amazing work Friends of the Library do across the US, how you can support them, and how the groups first got started.
I read better and remember stories longer when my reading is accompanied by white noise — whether it's rain or ocean noises. But why?
From haunting historical fiction to poetic contemporary fiction, these 10 Haitian books in translation are worth picking up.
Check out all these must-read books about sentient robots, artificial intelligence, and what exactly it means to be human.
I bring my own long history of book collecting to walk you through how to find first editions online and in-person.
A roll of armadillos. A raft of otters. A shrewdness of apes. See how many correct collective noun–animal matches you can make!
From a queer, eerie novella to a book about a bazaar and mosque in Iran, here are 9 great Dutch books in translation.