Shaun Fitzpatrick

Since my first reading nearly a decade ago, my life has been changed by Harry Potter. With my wavy hair, bookish tendencies, and a classroom presence that veered wildly between brown-noser and arrogant know-it-all, I, like many Millennial women,…

It's ridiculous that fanfiction gets a bad reputation, because it's basically the best thing ever. Taking one of your favorite stories and expanding the plot, usually to involve extra adventures and sexy time? Hi, sign me up please. But there's…

Please raise your hand if you've ever been personally victimized by Stephen King's It. My first exposure to Pennywise the Dancing Clown (and the beginning of my subsequent coulrophobia) was when I was an ACTUAL INFANT. That's right, my father…

A few weeks ago, I noticed that some of my Facebook friends had participated in one of those reading roundup-style online quizzes. You know, similar to the Rory Gilmore book challenge. Instead of the typical good-natured geeky competition (I’ve read…

I first read excerpts from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales during my junior year of high school. (Brief synopsis: a bunch of pilgrims are traveling together and decide to tell one another stories.) We read a modern English translation, and I…

Some books are important. Not capital-I important, as in "important to the canon of English literature", but important like "I literally wouldn't be who I am today without this book." For a lot of us who began reading in the late 90's and beyond,…

As I’ve proven before, I get kind of weird about the love lives of Shakespeare’s characters. As in, I think entirely too much about them. In fact, I’m basically one step away from quitting my job and spending my days writing professional Shakespeare…

When it comes to insults, no one does it quite like William Shakespeare. What, you thought all he did was write tragic romances and a lot of vaguely problematic comedies? Well, in between writing about dead lovers and women with terrible taste in…

As a longtime fan of The Magicians (both the book trilogy and SyFy’s amazing TV adaptation), I’m always asked, “Quentin or Julia?” It’s commonly accepted that fans pick a side: they either relate more to neurotic, privileged Quentin or scrappy,…

March 12 is Jack Kerouac's birthday, aka the favorite author of all the guys in your creative writing class who consider themselves deep and too cool for genre fiction. He's known for novels like Big Sur and The Dharma Bums, and is arguably the most…

Not sure if anyone else is in the same boat (lol), but I'm feeling a little nervy about the next four years. No, I'm not just being a crybaby because my candidate lost; I'm unnerved by talks of a Muslim ban, a slew of attacks on women's healthcare,…

I was an odd child. Don't take my word for it; my parents will happily confirm this, insisting that my childhood fascination with the three hyenas in The Lion King over the kinder, more popular characters marked me as a weirdo from the start. My…

Like most of you, I was a Harry Potter kid growing up. And, like many of you of a certain age, I knew the pain of waiting a year or two between books (you whippersnappers nowadays can't understand that struggle. Youths!). So, I had to find other…

I'm a little bit of an 80's movie geek. I have a huge soft spot for anything with Molly Ringwald in it, Back to the Future is my favorite film of all time, and I dream of being serenaded with "In Your Eyes" a la Say Anything. But nothing quite gets…

As I'm sure you're aware, the 2016 election has basically been a dumpster fire of epic proportions — so much that everyone has nearly overlooked that if Hillary Clinton should win, she'll be the first female president in American history. Of course,…

I'm thankful to have grown up in the new golden age of children's literature: the years of the Harry Potter series. I was nine when the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was released, and would spend the next eight years of my…

Like many fans of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, I've been anxiously awaiting news of the upcoming Netflix adaptation of the series. The show premieres on January 13, 2017, and will star Neil Patrick Harris as the dreaded Count…

Once fall hits (and yes, despite this unseasonably warm East Coast weather, I'm still getting into full fall mode), I start craving the spookier things in life. Scary movies, haunted houses, and, of course, horror stories. While I could once again…

While I was still living with my parents, we watched a lot of NCIS. Like, a LOT of NCIS. God bless the USA Network, which would regularly air hours-long marathons of the show. Now that I'm no longer living at home, I've taken a step away from the…