Toonstar's proven ability to translate beloved stories into engaging animation, while keeping artists at the center of the process, makes them the ideal partner to bring Friendship List and other popular titles to new audiences in formats today's families love.
Saad (Mehdi Meskar) is a young Moroccan exile in Quebec who will do anything to save Reza (Aron Archer), his Iranian refugee lover who faces being sent back to his home country. In a desperate move, Saad sets out to seduce a high-ranking spokesperson (played by Alexandre Landry) from the ministry of immigration in a risky gambit that sets off a fateful chain of events.
Our mission is to bring queer books by queer authors to all readers, both from within the queer community and our allies. And we'll achieve this without compromising the authenticity or integrity of our queer books and authors.
The third Wednesday or Thursday evening of each month, comic book shop Books with Pictures ( 1401 SE Division St) hosts this open-invite book club devoted to a wide variety of graphic novels-from the Bitter Root series, about a family of sympathetic monster hunters during the Harlem Renaissance, to an illustrated retelling of the 1872 queer vampire murder mystery Carmilla. Sometimes artists and writers join to talk about their latest work.
At first, I think in the early drafts of Heated Rivalry, Ilya was much more of a jerk. I think he was much meaner. The things he said to Shane were more, I don't know, just meaner. And I think he was maybe more of a stereotypical bad boy, I guess. And then I softened him a bit as I went back and wrote more.
Storytelling is shaped by the way we engage with it. In the past, narratives unfolded slowly, giving the audience time to reflect and analyze at their own pace. Classic games, podcasts, and films provided the audience with time to settle into the narrative, and for emotions to build up gradually. These slower forms of media created room for reflection and engagement, allowing audiences to process narratives thoughtfully.
They're your over-prepared friends trying to get everyone to pitch in for the group trip, except their group trip involves selling tickets for a Tony-award winning production. Welcome back to Art Snack, a smol attempt at streamlining the beautiful chaos of Portland's arts and culture scene. If the thing you want to read about isn't in this week's Art Snack, check back next week. And it never hurts to put it on my radar. Anyhoo, let's snack!
H ave you heard Solomon Ray's new album Faithful Soul? It's number one on the gospel charts-and entirely AI generated, just like the musical artist behind it. The idea that a hit Spotify artist might not be human is a satire of the attention economy itself: an ecosystem once based on authenticity and connection now topped by a synthetic voice engineered for maximum uplift. What does "soul" even mean when it's made by software trained on real music?
"We're thrilled that our TPL customers have reached this incredible milestone. It reflects something powerful: hundreds of thousands of readers discovering stories and accessing information anytime, anywhere, all for free with their library card," Abbott said.
"Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era" quickly became one of my favorite nonfiction books written by a journalist. I appreciated how he showed the grueling, day-to-day work local journalism requires, and how many layers of people fought him in revealing the despicable work of the Ku Klux Klan.
Research has linked reading for pleasure in childhood to a host of positive educational and socioeconomic outcomes. But now 14 years after the Department for Education, in a more innocent time, commissioned a chunky report on the matter—reading books for pleasure is an activity in crisis. The culprit usually blamed for this falling-off is the smartphone and its many short-term distractions; the mere presence of a smartphone in the room, recent research suggests, has an impact on our ability to concentrate.
For many Canadians, Scholastic brings about an instant wave of nostalgia. Memories come flooding back of flipping through colourful catalogues, circling must-have books, and browsing tables stacked with trinkets from scented erasers to posters and pencils set up in school auditoriums during book fair week. For generations of elementary school students, Scholastic brought excitement and joy and for many kids today, even in an age dominated by screens, that magic hasn't faded, say educators.
In a packed room in Sydney, an excited crowd riffles through stacks of stickers and bookmarks searching for their favourite characters. Another group flicks through racks of clothing, pulling out T-shirts that say romance readers club and probably reading about fairies. A poster on the wall, with tear-off tabs, invites visitors to take what they need: a love triangle, a love confession mid-dragon battle, a morally grey man or a cowboy. Half of the tabs have already been taken.
If you're hunkering down ahead of the big winter storm this weekend, we want to make sure you're well prepared. Yes, with batteries, flashlights, toilet paper, and food but perhaps most importantly with good reading material. We looked back through some recent interviews and Books We Love, our annual year-end reading guide, to find snowy suggestions to get you through the storm.
Sounding amused, publisher Pramod Kapoor recalls the reaction of the Indian cricketing legend Bishen Singh Bedi when he learned Kapoor was printing 3,000 copies of his autobiography. Only 3,000? he protested. I fill stadiums with 50-60,000 people coming to see me play and you think that's all my book is going to sell? Kapoor, the founder of Roli Books, explains that Bedi's legions of admirers were unlikely to translate into book buyers. That was in 2021.
I guess I could explain the plot to you: An actress meets up with a man who is convinced she's his mother. It turns out she's not. I think? Maybe she is? Or, maybe she's not but actually kind of is? What is a mother? The most impressive thing about this Booker Prize finalist is how Katie Kitamura plays with the narrative and toys with the reader without being overly clever about it all. She's stingy with details and answers, but generous with intrigue and depth.
Subsequently, runaway children turned the valley into a fortress, surviving on food they could catch or grow, with occasional forays into the towns below. Riley has heard the rumours, but it is only when she sees a green-clad boy or is it a girl? hovering outside her bedroom window offering directions on how to find Nowhere that she realises this might be her chance to escape and save her little brother from their sadistic guardian.