Like many foolhardy ideas, The Book Smugglers was born of a time of great adversity. Faced with threats concerning the overwhelming volume of books purchased on a daily basis, Ana Grilo and Thea James resorted to “smuggling” books home in huge handbags to avoid scrutiny. In 2008, the devious duo founded The Book Smugglers, a blog dedicated to speculative and genre fiction for all ages. In addition to being an outlet for Ana and Thea’s bottomless obsession with books, reviews, and assorted popgeekery, it is also the home of original SFF short fiction and nonfiction.
SocialBookshelves.com was founded in April 2013 and officially launched on May 1st of the same year as a book blog with a difference – each review is constrained by the number of pages contained in the book. Still not clear? If the book I’m reviewing contains 182 pages, my review will consist of 182 words. Why? Good question. I wanted to deliberately limit myself so that I didn’t spend all of my time writing reviews – I’m a writer myself, and so time is at a premium. What with my various projects, I simply don’t have time to write a 500 word review every other day.
Bookmunch is one of those ten-a-penny book-review/author-interview/discussion type sites. We’re nice people. We read books. We’ll tell you what we think about them. Sometimes we get a bit mad about things. That’s okay. It would be wrong if we liked everything. We don’t like everything. But we like a lot of stuff. You are free to heed our word or ignore it. Isn’t democracy wonderful?
It may not come as a surprise to you that I like books and I read quite a lot of them – mostly contemporary, literary and translated fiction and non-fiction covering history, politics and popular science amongst other things. I shadowed the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 and 2017, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017 and the Wellcome Book Prize shortlist in 2018 and 2019.
Reading, reviewing and collecting all modern children's books . . . from J.K Rowling to Philip Pullman, as well as up and coming authors. This is for like-minded enthusiasts, who are as passionate about modern day children's' authors as we are. So enjoy, communicate and share the love of books with us.
I messaged my book group about us doing ‘the last meeting of the decade’, and everyone had a panicked meltdown. It feels quite a big deal that NONE of us are ready for, right?? Not least because the current state of politics in the West doesn’t exactly make one feel optimistic about the next decade… but we can only hope and pray. Anyway, I thought it would be a good opportunity to share my books of the decade – or, rather, the nine books that I chose as my Book of the Year from 2010-2018. 2019’s to be added when I’ve decided it!
We love writing and editing above all other things, whether it be for ourselves and expanding our pride and joy (this website) or working for publications or other individuals. We’re currently ghostwriting for several big-name blogs, as well as for international publications, and we are open to long and short-term relationships. That being said, our track record shows that most short-term relationships turn into long ones. We don’t just write about travel and literature (although these are our favourite topics). We have also both written on the topics of politics and various media, including TV, video games, and films. Jess even once dove into completely unknown territory and worked as a full-time finance writer – she can now give you a great recommendation on an ISA.
Electric Literature is a nonprofit digital publisher with the mission to make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. We are committed to publishing work that is intelligent and unpretentious, elevating new voices, and examining how literature and storytelling can help illuminate social justice issues and current events. We are particularly interested in writing that operates at the intersection of different cultures, genres, and media.
Literary Hub is an organizing principle in the service of literary culture, a single, trusted, daily source for all the news, ideas and richness of contemporary literary life. There is more great literary content online than ever before, but it is scattered, easily lost—with the help of its editorial partners, Lit Hub is a site readers can rely on for smart, engaged, entertaining writing about all things books. Each day—alongside original content and exclusive excerpts—Literary Hub is proud to showcase an editorial feature from one of its many partners from across the literary spectrum: publishers big and small, journals, bookstores, and non-profits.
