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
From Sappho to Audre Lorde to Rivers Solomon, we track the 100 most influential queer books—fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—of all time, including The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal.
From lost reindeer in The Last Quarter of the Moon to blood donation in Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, the stories in these books in translation are impossible to put down.
From The Tone Liar to The Excessive Tease, I break down how the description on the back cover can ruin a reader's whole experience.
Swedish books aren't just crime novels. Check out these Swedish grim dystopias, exciting thrillers, and emotional contemporary novels, including The Family Clause by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, translated by Alice Menzies.
By setting up a list of rules that kept me grounded, I pressed the "restart" button on my hyperactive, anxious brain.
When reviewing a book publicly, consider whether you're critiquing it unfairly because of its intended age group or genre.
From Junji Ito's tight, spiraling ink work in Uzumaki to Hannah Berry's rich greenish shadows in Adamtine, these eight books will leave you deliciously unsettled.
Dive into Brazilian literature, from the works of Clarice Lispector to Jorge Amado, with this list of books available in English translation.
Dig into 11 novels, short stories, and poetry collections from Ukraine in order to engage with its cultural identity and its people.
Thirteen amazing reads from all over Southeastern Europe, translated into English for our reading pleasure.