At Sesquiotica, James Harbeck revels in the memories of the scents of his books: “The way books smell matters.”

In Barb magazine, founder Marcelle Karp has a wide-ranging conversation with author and professor Tressie McMillan Cottom, on the South, black feminism, being a little petty, and much more.

“What I do when I look at Twitter is less akin to reading a book than to the encounter I have with a recipe’s instructions or the fine print of a receipt: I’m taking in information, not enlightenment.” Mairead Small Staid explores the work of Sven Birkerts and reading in our digital age.

“Hundreds of thousands of people are discovering that they didn’t know significant aspects of their own identities.” On her blog, Leslie Lindsay interviews author Dani Shapiro about her memoir Inheritance.

In an excerpt from her debut memoir, WordPress.com blogger-turned-author Stephanie Land recalls moving from a homeless shelter to transitional housing with her young daughter.

“All I’ve wanted from the beginning is just to put a human face on poverty that is not the one that we think of…” Stephanie Land, who wrote a memoir on working as a maid and being a single mother, first found an audience on her blog.

At Musing, adoptee Betsy Coughlin recounts discovering her own true ancestry as part of her interview with Dani Shapiro, author of the new memoir, Inheritance.

Start planning your 2019 reading schedule with Literary Hub’s exhaustive list of exciting future releases — including numerous titles by women writers and writers of color.

At Women You Should Know, Dale DeBakcsy compiles a list of books by and about women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).

“The Interdependency, humanity’s interstellar empire, is on the verge of collapse.” At Tor.com, read the prologue from acclaimed sci-fi author John Scalzi’s upcoming “epic space-opera novel,” The Consuming Fire.”

Do you ever feel a tad claustrophobic here on Earth? At Book Riot, Jenn Northington recommends 50 works of speculative fiction set in space “in all its mystifying, occasionally terrifying, really freaking huge glory.”

As the school year is kicking into gear in many countries, Cari White, a librarian in Texas, gives parents and educators 10 reasons to encourage young readers to tackle entire works.

“Can we all agree that there is no such thing as a girl or a boy book?” Teacher and parent Pernille Ripp writes on the toxic effects of defining books by the gender of their supposed audience.

Why do we love (and fear, and kill) polar bears with so much intensity? At Longreads, Michael Engelhard, a wilderness guide and anthropologist, looks into the Arctic predator’s grip on our imagination.

Librarian Deb Baker rejects a recent op-ed calling for Amazon to replace public libraries: “Libraries are often the only egalitarian spaces in American communities, radically welcoming of everyone who comes through their doors.”