The Crows Nest
The Best Literary Fantasy Books
"Literary fantasy" is mostly a shelving decision. Kazuo Ishiguro wrote a novel with ogres, a dragon, and a knight of the Round Table in it, and bookshops put it on...
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The Best Epic Fantasy Books and Series
Epic fantasy is the genre's default setting and the reason people picture doorstoppers when you say "fantasy." Continents, dynasties, wars that run for decades, casts you need a chart for....
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The Best Sword and Sorcery Books, From Conan to Now
Here's the cleanest distinction anyone has drawn in fantasy: epic fantasy is about saving the world. Sword and sorcery is about making rent. The heroes are mercenaries, thieves, and people...
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The Best Standalone Fantasy Books (No Series Required)
Fantasy's commercial machinery runs on trilogies. Publishers want a series because a series compounds — book two sells book one, and a reader who commits at nineteen is still buying...
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The Best Grimdark Fantasy Books
The word comes from a tagline. Warhammer 40,000 shipped with the line "in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war"; fans shortened it to grimdark, and...
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The Best Romantasy Books to Read Right Now
Romantasy is currently bringing more new readers into fantasy than every other subgenre combined, and it gets sneered at more than all of them put together. Those two facts are...
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The Best Cozy Fantasy Books to Read Right Now
Cozy fantasy gets dismissed as the genre where nothing happens, which is both unfair and a little bit true. Nothing happens in the sense that no continent is at war...
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What Is Propaganda? How to Recognize It (Including Your Own)
Americans used to eat a light breakfast. Coffee, juice, maybe a roll. Then in the 1920s the pork industry hired a public relations man named Edward Bernays, who did something...
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Pirate Democracy: How Pirate Ships Actually Governed Themselves
The Pirates Had Workers' Comp If you lost your right arm in a fight aboard a pirate ship in the 1720s, the articles you had signed before the voyage entitled...
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Who Actually Owns Publishing? The Big Five, Amazon, and What It Means for Books
Stephen King Testified Against His Own Publisher In the summer of 2022, Stephen King flew to Washington to testify in a federal antitrust trial. He testified against his own publisher. Penguin Random...
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What Is a Book Ban? Who Decides, and When It's Actually Justified
In the 2024–25 school year, PEN America counted 6,870 instances of books being banned in American public schools, across 23 states and 87 districts. Since 2021, the running total is...
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The Best African American Fiction and Books by Black Authors
A quick note on how this list is built, because it affects what's on it. "African American literature" gets shelved as a category, and categories imply a genre — a...
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The Best Western Novels of All Time
Here's our pitch for a genre most people think they've already decided about: the western is America's pirate story. Same essential material — people operating in the gaps where the...
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What Is Fascism? 21 Books That Actually Explain It
Fascism is one of those words that gets used so loosely it risks becoming useless — a general-purpose insult for any authority someone dislikes. That's a genuine problem, and not...
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The 23 Best Books About World War II
The Second World War has produced more books than any other event in human history — somewhere north of sixty thousand, by most estimates, and more arriving every year. Which...
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The 19 Best Gothic Novels of All Time
Gothic fiction has a fairly consistent set of requirements: a building that's too large and too old, someone with a secret, weather doing a great deal of emotional work, and...
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The Best Books About the Salem Witch Trials
Most people know the outline: 1692, Massachusetts, a group of afflicted girls, a spiral of accusations, twenty people dead. What most people don't know is how strange the actual history...
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The Best Spooky Books to Read for Halloween
There's a specific kind of book people want in October, and it isn't necessarily horror. It's the one you read with a blanket and something warm, where the season outside...
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The 19 Best Horror Books of All Time
Horror is the most unfairly dismissed genre in fiction, and we'd like to make a case for it before the list starts. The knock against horror is that it's cheap...
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How to Read Dune in Order (and When to Stop)
Dune has a strange reading-order problem: unlike Discworld or the Cosmere, the confusion here isn't about picking a starting point — it's about knowing where the story actually ends, or...
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The Case for Abandoning Books, Guilt-Free
Here's our position on this, stated plainly: if a book isn't working for you, put it down. Not "eventually." Not "after you've given it a real chance, say 100 pages."...
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Where to Start with Discworld: A Reading Order Guide
Here is the single most important thing to know about Terry Pratchett's Discworld, and we're putting it up top so you can't miss it: do not start with book one. The Colour...
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How to Read Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere in Order
We get some version of this question in the shop constantly: "I want to try Brandon Sanderson, where do I even start?" And it's a fair question, because the honest...
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The 20 Best Sea Adventure Books Ever Written
Here's a suspicious thing about running a pirate-themed bookstore: people keep asking us for fantasy recommendations, sci-fi recommendations, romance recommendations — and almost nobody asks us about books that take...
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The 17 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time
Every bookstore has an opinion about the difference between science fiction and fantasy, and ours is this: fantasy asks "what if magic were real," and sci-fi asks "what if we...
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The Best Pirate Books, Fiction and Nonfiction
We should probably clarify something before we get too deep into this list: not every book about the sea is a book about pirates, and not every book about pirates...
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How to Read J.R.R. Tolkien's Books in Order (All 31 Titles)
You finished The Lord of the Rings. Possibly twice. Or maybe you want to. And now you've discovered there are somewhere between six and thirty more Tolkien books, depending on...
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How to Finish the Book You're Stuck In
Sometimes you have to finish a book. It's assigned, it's for work, it's the one everyone in your field has read, or it's simply a book you've decided matters, and...
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The Honest Answer About E-Books vs. Print
We should get our bias out of the way first: we sell print books. So when we tell you print books are more sustainable, you should reasonably wonder whether we've...
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The 22 Best Books About the Vietnam War
Here's a claim we'll defend: Vietnam produced the best war literature in American history. Not the most — the Second World War has that comfortably — but the best, and...
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Why You Forget What You Read
You finish a book, feel genuinely moved by it, recommend it to three people — and six months later you can produce roughly one sentence about what was in it....
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You Don't Hate Reading. You Hated the Assignment.
Most people who say they hate reading don't hate reading. They hate the last twelve books they were made to read, which were assigned, discussed to death, and graded —...
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The Western Canon: 24 Classic Books Worth Reading
The word "canon" comes from the Greek kanon, meaning a measuring rod — and it was originally used for the list of books the early Church accepted as scripture. Literature borrowed...
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The 50 Best Fantasy Books of All Time
Most "best fantasy" lists are stuck about thirty years behind the genre. You get Tolkien, you get whatever was big in 1995, you get a respectful nod to Le Guin,...
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