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The prequels are upon us! Over the next few months, Ian Doescher’s epic William Shakespeare’s Star Wars trilogy will become even more epic, as Phantom of Menace, The Clone Army Attacketh, and Tragedy of the Sith’s Revenge hit bookstores everywhere.

Today, we’re launching the pre-order campaign for Phantom of Menace, due out April 7th. You’ll have a chance to get a free signed bookplate from Ian Doescher, and the opportunity to win all kinds of awesome swag, including posters and custom written sonnets! Note, the campaign is open to US and Canada only. 

Read on!

Leslie Knope is perfect. She’s smart, passionate, intensely loyal, a binder-making aficionado, caring, resourceful, honest, a gift-giving master, and driven to make Pawnee the best place to live for its residents. If Amy Poehler is even a tenth of her character—minus the Jerry/Terry/Larry/Garry bullying—I want to be her friend so we can eat waffles while discussing her favorite books.

While Parks & Recreation may have wrapped up its final season, I'm busy re-watching the older episodes. And as any fan of the show will tell you, Leslie Knope and her colleagues love their books, no matter how fake (well, except for one, kinda) they might be. Let's take a look at some of the titles that have appeared over the course of the show's run. 

Take a cue from Eric Foreman and read how to break down a door before trying it for real. (And only if it's completely necessary, of course!) Maybe if he had read The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, he would have been successful.

Thanks largely to the recently uploaded video What if Wes Anderson Directed X-Men?, and my own obsession with Wes Anderson films, I’ve decided to focus on Wes Anderson fans for this week’s Top 10 Tuesday.

Anderson is known for combining comedy with melancholic topics. He loves topics like grief, the loss of innocence, sibling rivalry, and unlikely friendships. Aesthetically, his films typically adhere to a color palette, make use of flat space camera moves, and involve hand-made miniatures or stop motion animation. If you’re a fan of his films, try out the following books the next time you’re looking for something to read.

BORN WEIRD by Andrew Kauffman: This book is focused on a group of siblings (family name: Weird), and the characters and setting are just as visual as any Wes Anderson film. Anderson would certainly approve of the relationships explored between the family and the very strange “curse” that plagues them.

THE POST OFFICE GIRL by Stefan Zweig: Wes Anderson has spoken at great lengths about Zweig’s work and how this novel in particular helped shape the inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014): “Many of the ideas expressed and/or explored in Grand Budapest we stole directly from Zweig’s own life and work.” So there you go.

I was browsing my copy of The Associated Press Stylebook the other day (because, really, how else could one possibly want to spend a lazy afternoon?), and I found myself in the food guidelines. Among the common culinary conversions and the proper spellings of all sorts of ingredients (from angel hair pasta to johnnycakes, to York peppermint patties), I was excited to find that the editors had included a delicious-looking example of the proper recipe-writing style. I started to drool a little, then I made a grocery list.

Tonight’s menu: PIZZA WITH RAINBOW CHARD, GOAT CHEESE AND EGG.

Hey, if it’s AP Style, it must be good for you.

As a person who grew up both loving comics and possessing lady-parts, I had a hard time seeing many representations of myself that didn’t involve the tiny costumes of Wonder Woman or the female-version-of-a-dude-ness of Lady Deadpool. And while Wanda Wilson is fabulous, I couldn’t really go around whipping katanas out of my backpack to slice up my bullies without facing, like, one or two consequences, so I still found myself sort of at a loss. Also, she wasn’t really her own person. Where were the regular ladies in comics? Where, moreover, were the people who weren’t necessarily white or straight or physically perfect in every way?

Fortunately for the young (and old) comics lovers of today, comics creators are coming out with some of the best representations of women that I’ve ever seen. The women in the comics on this list aren’t necessarily “super” (although some of them are), they’re just women relying on their natural awesomeness to get them through whatever insane situation they’ve encountered. It’s so great that all of these comics exist.