Lucas Stoffel

If you've seen anyone screaming about Jacks the Prince of Hearts on BookTok or bookish Twitter, this is where the damage starts. Once Upon a Broken Heart is the first book in Stephanie Garber's series that leads to The Ballad of Never After and A Curse for True Love, and it's the doorway into one of the most addictive romantasy ships in recent memory. Evangeline Fox is desperate. The love of her life is about to marry someone else, and in her desperation she does the one t

Book two of the Once Upon a Broken Heart series, and the tension between Evangeline Fox and Jacks the Prince of Hearts just keeps building until you want to physically shake the book and scream at both of them. Evangeline is trying to break a curse — one of several that keep stacking up in this series like the worst kind of fairy-tale compound interest — while Jacks is doing that infuriating thing where an immortal Fate who has murdered people with a kiss tries very hard to p

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

Let me tell you something about Stephanie Garber: she understands that the best fairy tales are the ones where love might actually kill you. Not metaphorically. Not in a "love hurts" pop song kind of way. In a "the person you're falling for might literally be cursed to destroy you" kind of way. A Curse for True Love is the finale of the Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy, and it delivers on that promise with theatrical flair. If you haven't read the first two books, stop here

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.