Under the best of circumstances, international politics and heartwarming romance make strange bedfellows. In 2019, the pairing might be accused of being preposterous, even cruelly self-indulgent. But that presumes two things: that there's definitively no light at the end of our tunnel and that there’s something less-than about a happy ending.

Here comes Saturday, May the 4th, swinging in like an orange fist on the big rocky arm of Benjamin Grimm. This day is fixing to clobber us, quite happily, with dozens and dozens of free comic books.

In a recent NPR interview, Jamaican-born author Marlon James described a keen dislike for whodunits and voiced his preference instead for the written journey – the process, if you will. And, indeed, the opening sentences of his new, sprawling novel Black Leopard, Red Wolf may actually reveal the conclusion of a wild 600-plus-page escapade.

Let’s begin with the truth that, if these pies weren’t so remarkably good, we wouldn’t be writing this post at all.

When 2020 presidential hopeful Kamala Harris stated that climate change called for “science fact, not science fiction,” she probably expected some resistance from denialists, but not a rebuttal from the world of literature. That’s exactly what she got from sci-fi author Charlie Jane Anders in a Washington Post op-ed.

A guy named Aaron Goldfarb writes about whiskey. He writes a whole bunch about whiskey, and it’s writing that, if you like whiskey at all, you should be aware of. It’s writing, in fact, that you should read. And if you love whiskey, then you should definitely read Goldfarb’s new book: Hacking Whiskey.

For Joe Nick Patoski, Austin is a city like no other, an anomalous spot of “blue in a sea of red,” where East Coast meets West and swimming laps in the chill waters of Barton Springs in February is oddly commonplace. His love for the city is covered in depth in his new book, Austin to ATX, launching Feb. 13 at the Austin Central Library.

With so much recycling of the Eighties going on – Stranger Things, Ready Player One, the Go-Gos musical on Broadway, Murphy Brown, She-Ra, I Want My All ATX, to scrape just the tip of the iceberg – we sure could use a look at the real deal. Well, one's coming in a book of images by Austin photographer Bill Leissner.

Not everybody’s going to conjure up a powerful classic like Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Not everybody’s going to render an intense work like Debbie Drechsler’s Daddy’s Girl. Like Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You. Like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Like Tom Hart’s Rosalie Lightning. Like –