Lucas Stoffel

If The Dark Forest made you feel small, Death's End makes you feel like a rounding error in the math of the cosmos. This is the book where Cixin Liu stops holding back. Time jumps spanning millions of years. Dimensional warfare that makes conventional military sci-fi look like a pillow fight. The actual, literal end of the universe. Not metaphorical. Not symbolic. The universe ends, and Liu writes it.

The Three-Body Problem was the setup. Strange, cerebral, occasionally frustrating in its scientific density. It introduced the problem. The Dark Forest is where Cixin Liu tells you the answer, and the answer is worse than anything you imagined. I am not going to spoil the dark forest theory. I refuse. The moment it clicks is one of the great reading experiences in science fiction, and you deserve to arrive at it the way Liu intended — slowly, then all at once.

Jerry Saltz has been the art critic at New York Magazine and its offshoot Vulture for years, and before that he spent over a decade at the Village Voice. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2018. The man has spent his entire adult life looking at art, arguing about art, and thinking about what makes art matter. So when he sits down to write

I need to be honest with you: when my book club picked this, I wanted to run. Classic literature. John Steinbeck. I'm a sci-fi and YA reader. I live in the NYT bestseller list, not the Western canon. But the whole point of book club is to try things you wouldn't pick up on your own, so I took it up. And East of Eden completely blindsided me.

A Wrinkle in Time is one of those books that gets classified as a children's novel because the protagonists are children, but Madeleine L'Engle was writing about the nature of evil, the structure of the universe, and the terrifying power of conformity, and she wasn't simplifying any of it. Meg Murry is thirteen, angry, brilliant at math, and terrible at fitting in. Her father, a physicist, has been missing for over a year. Her mother — also a scientist, also beautiful, whi