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,…