Lucas Stoffel

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

Carve the Mark is Veronica Roth's first post-Divergent novel, and you can feel her stretching into a bigger canvas. Where Divergent was one city, one system, one test — this is an entire galaxy of planets connected by a sentient energy field called the current, and every person in it is born with a currentgift that shapes who they become. It's ambitious, messy, and more interesting than it has any right to be. The story follows two characters from opposite sides of a confl

Fans of the Impossible Life is the quietest book on my shelf that hit the hardest. Kate Scelsa wrote a YA novel about three teenagers — Mira, Jeremy, and Sebby — whose friendship becomes the only safe place any of them have, and she did it without a single moment of false comfort.

Off to Be the Wizard asks one of the best questions in comedy sci-fi: what if a computer programmer discovered that reality is a simulation, found the source code, and immediately used it to give himself wizard powers in medieval England? Martin Banks is that programmer, and he is exactly as irresponsible as that premise suggests.

The Romeo Catchers is the second book in Alys Arden's Casquette Girls series, and it does what every good sequel should — it takes the world you thought you understood and flips the floorboards to show you what's living underneath. If The Casquette Girls was about surviving Hurricane Katrina and discovering that vampires exist in New Orleans, The Romeo Catchers is about what happens when the city starts to rebuild and the monsters are already embedded in the foundation.

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.

The Wanderers is the rare space novel that understands the most dangerous part of going to Mars isn't the radiation or the landing — it's what the mission does to the people you leave behind. Meg Howrey wrote a book about three astronauts training for a simulated Mars mission, and what she actually wrote is a novel about the impossible distance between people who love each other.

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