Series creator Lev Grossman returns to BOOM! Studios for an all-new story in the world of The Magicians with Lilah Sturges and artist Pius Bak that features the first appearance of the next generation of heroes and villains! Long after Quentin Coldwater has graduated from Brakebills, Dean Fogg welcomes the first class in Brakebills history to include hedge magicians, who are known for being dangerous practitioners of unsanctioned magic. As these two student bodies clash to prove their superiority, everyone at Brakebills is forced to take a side – not realizing a new threat has targeted them all! But the reason for this change at Brakebills will rock them to their core – and shock longtime fans of The Magicians!

This collection of essays serves as a response to passionate discussions regarding how librarians are perceived, reigniting an examination of librarian presentation within the field and in the public eye, employing theories and methodologies from throughout the social sciences. Through deconstructing the perceived truths of our profession and employing a critical eye, we can work towards improved status, increased diversity, and greater acceptance of each other.

Susan Orlean’s bestseller and New York Times Notable Book is “a sheer delight…as rich in insight and as varied as the treasures contained on the shelves in any local library” (USA TODAY)—a dazzling love letter to a beloved institution and an investigation into one of its greatest mysteries. “Everybody who loves books should check out The Library Book” (The Washington Post). On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who? Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a “delightful…reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America” (New York magazine) that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before. In the “exquisitely written, consistently entertaining” (The New York Times) The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries; brings each department of the library to vivid life; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago. “A book lover’s dream…an ambitiously researched, elegantly written book that serves as a portal into a place of history, drama, culture, and stories” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), Susan Orlean’s thrilling journey through the stacks reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books—and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country.

The depictions of librarians in over 374 novels, short stories, and plays in English are the focus of this fully annotated reference work. Librarians, no less than other professionals, want to know how they are depicted in fiction. The stereotypical or fictional librarian--the one with the bun, comfortable shoes, and dour demeanor--may be fading, but fiction teaches a lesson about public perception. Actually, story librarians are often described as adaptable, knowledgeable, shrewd, tactful, tender and intelligent--traits that the authors, and by extension the readers, look for in their librarians. All entries include complete bibliographic data, followed by a lengthy annotation that discusses how the librarian fits into the story and gives insight to how he or she is depicted. Title and author indexes are provided for further utility.

Unashamedly a book for the bookish, yet accessible and frequently entertaining, this is the first book devoted to how libraries are depicted in imaginative writing. Covering fiction, poetry, and drama from the late Middle Ages to the present, it runs the gamut of British and American literature, as well as examining a range of fiction in other languages—from Rabelais and Cervantes to modern and contemporary French, Italian, Japanese, and Russian writing. While the tropes of the complex catalogue and the bibliomaniacal reader persist throughout the centuries, libraries also emerge as societal battle-sites where issues of personality, gender, cultural power, and national identity are contested repeatedly and often in surprising ways. As well as examining how libraries were deployed in their work by canonical authors from Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Swift to Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Jorge Luis Borges, the volume also examines in detail the haunted libraries of Margaret Oliphant and M. R. James, and a range of much less familiar historic and contemporary authors. Alert to the depiction of librarians as well as of book-rooms and institutional readers, this book will inform, entertain, and delight. At a time when traditional libraries are under pressure, Libraries in Literature shows the power of their lasting fascination.

Readers, Reading, and Librarians reaffirms librarians' enthusiasm for books and readers in the midst of the evolution of libraries from reading centers to information centers where librarians are now Web masters, information scientists, and media experts. It explores the future of the book as a medium and examines reasons for the decline in pleasure reading and the need for librarians to sponsor book groups. With nearly two hundred open-ended interviews with readers who read for pleasure, this book looks at how and why they choose or reject certain books.

While the importance of writing has often been recognized, the role of books and especially that of libraries has just as often been slighted. Knowledge, once generated, has to be communicated, preserved, and accessible. Books in their varying formats—from clay tablets to scrolls and manuscripts to pixels—have been instrumental in spreading knowledge, although relatively little attention has been given to the story of books themselves. A Social History of Books and Libraries from Cuneiform to Bytes traces the roles of books and libraries throughout recorded history and explores their social and cultural importance within differing societies and changing times. It presents the history of books from clay tablets to e-books and the history of libraries, whether built of bricks or bytes. Following an introduction that sets the theoretical basis for the historical importance of books and libraries, chapters alternate between the history of the book and the history of libraries. Included within the chapters are short excursions on some particular development, such as book emblems or cataloging. Case studies are given as thematic illustrations of libraries everywhere. Patrick M. Valentine argues that social and cultural forces have been more influential in determining the nature and status of information, books, and libraries than has technology. But A Social History of Books and Libraries is far from a jeremiad against technology; rather it presents history within the subtle yet shifting context of time and place. Although written primarily for librarians and library students, it will also be of interest to a wider audience of scholars and those interested in books, libraries, and cultural history.