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Header image by Leza Cantoral

Ariel is a notorious poetry collection that is often interpreted as one long suicide note, a sort of burn book of all those in Sylvia Plath’s life who did not know how to love her and did her wrong. As a confessional poet, her burns go inward as well as outward. She takes painstaking inventory of her own shortcomings, inviting the reader into her dissociative mind, her dark obsessive thoughts, her nightmares, her petty jealousies, her endless yearnings for a deeper kind of experience.

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As a writer and voracious reader of young adult literature, I find lit for teens to be incredibly important. Not for me (though I do find it entertaining and I love it to death); I think the reason lit for teens is so important is in the name — it’s for teens.

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If you are not familiar with the wonderful world of #bookstagram on the Instagram app, let me get you caught up as quickly as I can. There are readers all over the world who have dedicated their Instagram account to posting photos of the books in their collection. Much of what you’ll find is bright, sunny book worms who love contemporary literature, mainstream or traditionally published books and Young Adult fiction.

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Original header images via Sofia Garza & Andrea Piacquadio

Before Rian Johnson became a symbol of the last decade’s nerd cultural proxy war, he made a great neo-noir-YA film called Brick. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a loner who still knows all the highs school cliques and uses them to help find his lost girlfriend. I relate to the character in how I interact and intersect with all the macro and micro literary scenes.

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Original image via Aa Dil

There are a lot of ways to get cross-genre stories wrong. If you are well read in multiple genres, you are in good shape. Knowing one genre well and another just a little might work, too, but ultimately knowledge reigns supreme. You need a firm grasp on the rules of each genre before you break them and mix them together in your literary blender. If you are not familiar with the various genres you’re blending, you are playing a risky game.