LJ Reviews

January Sun is a graphic novelist, visual development designer, and illustrator. Sun was selected to draw LJ’s April cover, celebrating the textual and visual pleasures of reading graphic novels. In this interview, she discusses the cover design and message, her style, favorite graphic novels, and working with vertical versus horizontal sequential art.

To celebrate the joys of reading, browsing, and discovering new titles and to learn from our colleagues practicing readers’ advisory service in bookstores, LJ talks with Patrick Brower, co-owner of Challengers Comics + Conversation, a Will Eisner “Spirit of Comics” Retailer Award–winning comic store in Chicago. Brower discusses how he selects comics and YouTube’s role in comics discovery and offers a list of titles to hand-sell.

As readers always interested in finding and sharing titles, the book review editors launched a sure-bet survey last summer in advance of LJ’s yearlong celebration of our 150th anniversary. This month, we feature graphic novels. This format of storytelling offers readers an alchemy of elements—including text, image, page design, color, and line—to experience as they work together to craft a narrative. From manga to comic strips, from romance to horror, from memoir to history, there is an expansive canon of graphic novels to enjoy.

As readers always interested in finding and sharing titles, the book review editors launched a sure-bet survey last summer in advance of LJ’s yearlong celebration of our 150th anniversary. This month, we feature poetry. This form of expression provides readers with an experience of language, construction, meaning, and moment, vastly larger than the sum of its parts, which themselves are refined and closely considered. Poetry’s appeal is in the space where line, thought, and word combine into a reading experience that offers a revelation beyond what the text appears to hold.

Richard Russo, Paul. Tremblay, Julie Anne Long, L. C. Chu, Paul Rudnick, Shannon Chakraborty, Oliver Darkshire, and Tillie Walden are among the many authors writing star-earning titles highlighted in our April issue.

As readers always interested in finding and sharing titles, the book review editors launched a sure-bet survey last summer in advance of LJ’s yearlong celebration of our 150th anniversary. This month, we feature the mystery genre. These beloved books center on a world pushed out of balance by a crime; a world that must be righted. Readers eagerly follow along, trying to solve the crime as they become invested in the characters and the setting of the story.

As readers always interested in finding and sharing titles, the book review editors launched a sure-bet survey last summer in advance of LJ’s yearlong celebration of our 150th anniversary. This month, we feature suspense and thriller novels, those stories that center the plot around an unfolding threat, offering high stakes and plenty of twists and action while maintaining a gleeful level of escalating tension. 

Audio horror, fantasy, mystery, social sciences, and more. This spring’s audiobook stars offer auditory delights across a wide range of subjects and genres.

From a speculative fiction debut to a genre-bending fantasy blending horror and Western, these SFF audios make for tension-filled, entertaining, and altogether entrancing listens.