The phenomenally talented, groundbreaking science fiction author Octavia Butler died in 2006. Her papers went to the Huntington Library, and they’ve just put a document online that you really should see.

Want to supercharge your reading speed while miraculously retaining every word? Well, don’t hold your breath.

A previously unpublished Beatrix Potter tale—The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots—is set to hit bookstores in September, and it’s already climbing to the top of the Amazon charts in the U.K. People just can’t get enough whimsically sentient animals from the English countryside!

On January 5, Scholastic released A Birthday Cake For George Washington, written by Ramin Ganeshram and illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton. On Sunday, January 17, the children’s publisher pulled the book for its sentimental depiction of slavery.

Following the success of her surprisingly strong literary start in The Body Book: The Law of Hunger, the Science of Strength, and Other Ways to Love Your Amazing Body, Cameron Diaz is releasing a tome that’s “an all-encompassing, holistic look at how the female body ages—and what we can all do to age better.”

This has been a tough year. Pop culture let us down in many ways, even as our political system and our social institutions revealed a deeper seam of ugliness. But speculative fiction still offers us hope: not just optimism about human ingenuity, but actual reasons to look forward and keep our heads up.

From your favorite purveyors of beautiful online garbage, here are the books, essays and pieces of journalism that’ve stuck with us throughout the year. It’s a long list and a good one: we hope it’s useful as you prepare for the plane trips, family avoidance, blissful solitude and last-minute presents that will close…

In The Dead Ladies Project, Jessa Crispin—founder of the online lit mag Bookslut—weaves together longtime preoccupations to create a bracing, prickly, through-provoking book.

The film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG—one of the greatest children’s books of all time—is headed for the big screen in 2016. The first official trailer takes a dark approach, showing young heroine Sophie creeping around her orphanage at the witching hour and being snatched from her bed by the hand of a (big)…

Chill out, you’re not getting a memoir. But Book Club enthusiast Oprah Winfrey is, and it’s about time.

The US produces over 300,000 books yearly—but books written by black women, about black women, occupy just a slim margin of that, despite the demand for those voices and storytelling. Getting these stories published and reviewed by major publications is where the obstruction lies: the 2014 Women of Color VIDA Count,…

Historical romance covers of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s are instantly recognizable—a triumph of design, frankly. But equally striking are the covers for these science fiction romance stories from the period. In 3034, we won’t need spacesuits, just pants and rippling abs. The future looks bright!

In 1976, The Female Eunuch author Germaine Greer commenced an affair with novelist Martin Amis, at the time a dashing young scamp with literary heft and a Mick Jagger haircut. She found him so enchanting that one day in March of that year, midway through a lecture tour, the feminist author filled a notebook with a…

It would seem counterintuitive for a book entitled The Diary of Anne Frank to have another author besides, well, Anne Frank. But strange things happen in the Year of Our Lord 2015 – and by “strange things,” I mean copyright gymnastics propelled by a yen for profit. In naming Anne’s father, Otto Frank, co-author of the

Presidential candidate and dusty barrel of fermented peepee Donald Trump is exclusively a Power Top in all aspects of life, which is why I’m sure he is devastated to learn that his prop book will debut below his opponent Ben Carson’s prop book on the New York Times bestseller list.

Someone has found a previously unknown, never-published Edith Wharton short story about French society on the home front and female volunteer workers during World War I, knocking around Yale’s rare books and manuscripts library. Hey, while you’re back there, check for the Holy Grail and a recipe for turning lead into…