It's an age-old debate: The Book vs. The Movie Since the dawn of cinema, film has been sort of the little brother of the more heady, intellectual medium of novels. And many film adaptations of literature leave viewers and critics saying… “The book was better.” But why do adaptations of beloved stories tend not to live up to the source material?

Where did YA come from, and how did it get so big? “Young Adult” fiction is a term whose meaning has varied wildly over the years. It can apply to coming of age tragedies or Serialized adventures of babysitters, or insert really dated twilight joke here. But where did this “young adult” genre come from? And why did it get so big?

Stories, tales, and myths from all around the world posing speculative questions around technologies have existed long before Ray Bradbury and Frank Herbert, from the time-traveling Japanese fairy tale "Urashima Tarō” to some of the speculative elements of 1001 Arabian Nights. But there are a few eras that begin to shape what we’ve come to know as science fiction today.

The romance novel has been the subject of intrigue, derision, and shame in literary discourse long before the modern genre as we know it today existed. Romance novels are relegated to your Aunt Muriel’s bathroom, thrift store book sections, and that one aisle in Barnes and Noble that you pretend to walk through because you got “lost” looking for cookbooks. But it deserves a closer look than that - it is after all the highest grossing of all literary genres, out-selling its next nearest competitor twice over.

Fantasy is a lens to explore what we as a society find important to our pasts, our presents, and future. Fantasy and science fiction often fall under the umbrella of “speculative fiction” - as a result they are often grouped together, especially in bookstores. But science fiction is a forward-looking genre propelled by the possibilities of technology (and the things that worry us about it), fantasy is … more backward looking.

Literary critics, writers, philosophers, bloggers--all have tried to tackle where and why and how an author may strike such lightning in a bottle that their works enter the pantheon of “Classical Literature”. Why this book is required reading in high school, why other books are lost to history.

Despite the adage of not judging a book by its cover, there’s a lot of time, intent, and money spent creating memorable book covers. Get to know the story behind some of literature’s most iconic book covers.

You might being asking yourself-- Why do ghostwriters even exist? Isn’t that cheating? Isn’t literature supposed to be the result of one person’s agonizing need to create? Aren’t books supposed to be the blood, sweat, and tears of the tortured auteur? Well, the answer is more complicated than you think!

Who is the most powerful character in fiction? Villains may doom the world, heroes may save it, but no one has more control over the plot than the narrator - expositing the who, what, where, when and how directly into the reader’s mind. But how can you tell that the person telling you the story is telling you the whole story?

Food varies wildly from place to place and from culture to culture; since humans are such sensory creatures, using words to evoke the experience of eating is an excellent way to bring a text to life.

Death as a character reveals how we process one of life’s greatest mysteries, and there’s a lot more breadth to how the grim reaper is depicted than you might think.

Ancient Greek Mythology has worked its way into modern pop culture so deeply that it would be an almost Sisyphean task to compile every way it’s manifested!

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is one of history’s most famous novels and one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history. On this special episode of It’s Lit! we explore how Les Miserable became both a national and revolutionary anthem, and so publicly adored that all 1,900 pages never went out of print.