Samantha Nelson's posts

In Sarah Gailey’s debut novel, Magic For Liars, twin sisters Ivy and Tabitha Gamble grow apart after Tabitha is…

Stories about alternate universes are often focused at the individual level, exploring how people react to learning…

In Elizabeth McCracken’s novel Bowlaway, the recently widowed Dr. Leviticus Sprague writes a biography of his wife,…

A woman walks into a private investigator’s office with a case. She’s not from around here, and she’s clearly…

Early in The Library Book, Susan Orlean describes the joy of scanning a library’s shelves and discovering the…

In an early chapter of Ling Ma’s debut novel, Severance, a genre-savvy character details the difference between…

Thriller author Megan Abbott can make anything creepy. In her latest novel, Give Me Your Hand, she describes a…

Lauren Groff opens her latest short story collection with a woman walking through her North Florida neighborhood,…

Children Of Blood And Bone made headlines before the book was even published, thanks to a pair of flashy deals…

There’s a section of Jonathan Abrams’ All The Pieces Matter: The Inside Story Of The Wire about the…

Melanie Benjamin finished writing The Girls In The Picture months before the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, but the…

Something about this year made reading books feel not just crucial, but a little bit transgressive. Maybe it’s the…

There’s an interlude in Brandon Sanderson’s Oathbringer where a scholar takes a break from fretting about the end of…

David Litt thought Donald Trump had been firmly defeated in 2011. Litt worked on Barack Obama’s monologue for that…

Dysfunctional families are Matthew Quick’s specialty, and the latest novel from the author of The Silver Linings…

Laini Taylor, bestselling author of the Daughter Of Smoke & Bone trilogy, likes to play with her readers. Early in…

It’s a good thing that The Impossible Fortress is such a fast and easy read, because it would be all too easy to…

Every December, instead of searching for a group consensus, Gameological looks back at the year in games through…

When things get hard, you can always retreat into a good book. For all the drawbacks of 2016, the year produced some…

In Gameological Unplugged, Samantha Nelson looks at trends and new developments in the vast world of tabletop games.