NYT Books

John Schu is a best-selling author, a children’s librarian and a tireless evangelist for the power of a blank page.

“I mean that as an organizing principle,” says the U.S. poet laureate, who has edited a new anthology of nature poetry called “You Are Here,” “and also as a slight against prose.”

Crafting the arguments in “You Get What You Pay For,” her first essay collection, “felt like pulling apart a long piece of taffy,” says the author of “Magical Negro.”

Circus tigers, giant spiders, shifting borders and motherhood all threaten to end life as we know it in comics this month.

Men’s personal narratives are dissected; women’s are “dismissed as merely autofiction or memoir,” says the author of “The Light Room: On Art and Care.” Her 2012 “Heroines” has just been reissued.

Some familiar San Franciscans turn up in the British countryside in “Mona of the Manor,” which the author vows is the 10th, and last, in the series: “That has a nice symmetry.”

The feisty title character of her new book, “Ferris,” has a sharp eye for detail, and so, its author hopes, does she. Meanwhile, she is on an Alice McDermott reading jag.

“I’ve been prank-calling Justin Torres for like two decades,” says the poet and performer, whose new book is called “Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt: A Memoir in Verse.”

Oni Press will revive the beloved horror and sci-fi name with new stories starting this summer.

“Only then can I surrender to the spell of reading,” says the director of “Glory” and the author of “Hits, Flops and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood.”