Neal Wyatt

Welcome to RA Crossroads, where books, movies, graphic novels, and other media converge, and whole-collection readers’ advisory service goes where it may. This month, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein provides the starting point for a winding path.

To celebrate our 150th anniversary, we are inviting library luminaries who have retired from a life working in service to libraries, readers, and books to reflect on their careers, their experience with Library Journal, and their hopes for the future. Nora Rawlinson, who once ran LJ’s book review department and went on to serve as editor in chief of Publisher’s Weekly and to create EarlyWord, shares her perspective.

August 2026 Prepub Alert: forthcoming titles to know, share, and buy; plus a downloadable spreadsheet of all the titles and an Edelweiss catalog with plot summaries, author profiles, and more.

Authors sometimes make plain the various delivery systems of stories in their works. These appear as letters, excerpts, quotes, footnotes, collections of other tales, and much more. When this happens, a lovely sense of the story-ness of reading occurs. Examples spread across the development of fiction, when frame stories such as One Thousand and One Nights unfurled tale after tale within its own storyline or when Laurence Sterne interrupted his romping plot in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman to actually draw it on the page. Here are five more examples.