Food and romance are tightly linked. Dates often happen at restaurants, cooking a lavish meal for your partner is an act of affection, and major relationship milestones are celebrated with food. There’s intimacy in both cooking and eating, in sharing the experience of making and consuming dishes that nourish the body…

Thanos is dead! Long live Thanos! It should surprise no one that the supervillain’s recent decapitation isn’t the end of his story, and the new Guardians Of The Galaxy series reveals that while Thanos’ body may be dead, his consciousness has been transferred to a new living host. Reuniting frequent collaborators Donny…

I am a 56-year-old heterosexual man, and I have lived with ALS for the past six years. I am either in a wheelchair or in a hospital bed, and I have very little motor ability in my limbs. Like most or all male ALS patients, I still have full sensory ability, including a fully functioning penis. Are there safe websites…

A road novel. A critique of the United States’ immigration system. The protracted dissolution of a marriage. An epistolary collection. All of these stories (and more) can be found in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, her latest incredibly eloquent and ambitious novel. Luiselli’s philosophical and literary…

It’s a clever detail that one might not notice at first, but the title of Gimlet Media’s brand-new podcast miniseries has a double meaning. While it might outwardly appear to be a show focused on the abysmal state of the criminal justice system, at its heart it is actually an investigation into a much more personal…

If you’ve ever played Myst—the 1993 video game with zero exposition—you already know what it’s like to read The City In The Middle Of The Night. Instead of marooning you on a mysterious island, Charlie Jane Anders drops you into a city on another planet. Like Myst, it’s disorienting at first, fascinating when the…

Creators have changed Hawkman’s history many times over the years, but the current Hawkman series gives the character a clearer mission statement by tying his resurrections to a spiritual debt that must be paid. Millennia ago, an alien man name Ktar helped the Deathbringers rain destruction upon the universe, and he…

In our monthly book club, we discuss whatever we happen to be reading and ask everyone in the comments to do the same. What Are You Reading This Month?

This week’s entry: Mona Lisa (Prado’s Version)

Captain Marvel is being set up as the most powerful character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so it’s time for the comics to lean into that strength and reinforce Carol Danvers as a heavy hitter. That’s exactly what you get in the new Captain Marvel series from writer Kelly Thompson, artist Carmen Carnero, colorist…

First published in 1982 and re-released in late 2017, Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban concerns a lonely woman named Dorothy and her brief affair with a kind, gentle frogman, escaped from a local laboratory. Ingalls relates both joy and pain quickly, her prose swift and unsentimental, even when detailing the tragic. Mrs.…

The personification of death has been a part of human storytelling for millennia, helping people come to terms with this inevitable part of existence by giving it a form and face, even if it’s just a skeleton and bare skull. In his new book, Death Wins A Goldfish (Chronicle), Brian Rea carries on this tradition by…

Can I still be considered sex-positive if I personally do not have sex? I’ve never had sex or masturbated—all my life, any type of sexual stimulation has been very painful and I’ve been unable to experience orgasm. I simply get a migraine and feel mildly nauseated instead. I am not looking for a possible solution, as…

Biographies are a difficult genre to tackle gracefully, and graphic biographies especially so. Unlike fiction and even autobiographies, biographies require a deeply intimate understanding of the subject but also a rigorously sourced and researched understanding of history. David F. Walker has shown in works like Shaft …

In Elizabeth McCracken’s novel Bowlaway, the recently widowed Dr. Leviticus Sprague writes a biography of his wife, Bertha Truitt, and sends it to a publisher. His work is rejected and sent back with “an irritated note: yes, yes, but to what end?” It’s a similar sentiment to the one expressed in the first pages of…

After seven brilliantly silly episodes, Finding Drago has finally emerged from the taiga to stand victorious at the summit of its own personal mountaintop. The show, a comic mystery documentary program from Australia, has followed hosts Alexei Toliopoulos and Cameron James as the pair have become wrapped up…

Marlon James announced his intention to write a sprawling fantasy trilogy shortly after his previous novel, 2014’s A Brief History Of Seven Killings, won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. The word on it was always that it would be an “African Game Of Thrones,” and this description has been used in what appears to be a…

Every month, a deluge of new books comes flooding out from big publishers, indie houses, and self-publishing platforms. So every month, The A.V. Club narrows down the endless options to five of the books we’re most excited about.

Every year there’s a new crop of comic publishers trying to carve out a place for themselves in a crowded landscape, but very few of them are experimenting with new strategies to help them stand out. So when TKO Studios debuted at the end of last year with some genuinely ambitious ideas for publishing and…

I’m a 21-year-old woman, and I have an IUD. I’ve had sex with quite a few men, and one thing seems to be almost constant among them: trying to fuck without condoms. Many of the men I’ve been with seem to be perfectly fine and terribly eager to have sex without condoms. This has always angered me. They generally assume…