About this season
A series of smart, funny video essays from PBS Digital Studios about their favorite books and why they love to read. Host Lindsay Ellis delves into topics like the evolution of YA, how science fiction mirrors our own anxieties, and why the book is sometimes just a _bit_ better than the movie.
Episodes (13)
1. When the Book is Better than the Movie
Aired 4 June 2018 • 6 min
Which is better, the book or the movie? Explore the question with host Lindsay Ellis.
2. The Evolution of YA
Aired 26 June 2018 • 6 min
Young Adult Fiction (YA) is dominating literature, and more young people are reading now than ever before. Lindsay Ellis explores how YA carved a place in publishing.
3. Why Sci Fi is a Mirror on Society
Aired 13 July 2018 • 6 min
While science fiction is associated with Mars, robots, and cyberpunk, its origin story is shaped throughout several centuries. Check out the origin of science fiction with Lindsay Ellis!
4. An Ode to the Romance Novel
Aired 30 July 2018 • 6 min
Love it or hate it, the romance novel is the highest grossing literary genre. Its history is long and winding (like your favorite romance novel), and romance novels are full of tropes reflected upon its history. It has been the subject of intrigue, derision, and shame in literary discourse long before the modern genre as we know it existed.
5. How Fantasy Reflects Our World
Aired 21 August 2018 • 6 min
Fantasy novels are more than just hundreds of pages worth of swords and magic! Okay, there's some of that. But it's also a lens to what our society finds important to our pasts, our presents, and future.
6. Why did they make me read this in High School?
Aired 30 August 2018 • 6 min
What makes a book important? Why are some books required reading in high school, while others are lost to history?
7. Can You Judge a Book by Its Cover?
Aired 21 November 2018 • 6 min
Despite the adage of not judging a book by its cover, there’s a lot of time, intent, and money spent creating memorable book covers. Get to know the story behind some of literature’s most iconic book covers.
8. Fear of Ghost...Writing!
Aired 7 December 2018 • 6 min
You might being asking yourself-- Why do ghostwriters even exist? Isn’t that cheating? Isn’t literature supposed to be the result of one person’s agonizing need to create? Aren’t books supposed to be the blood, sweat, and tears of the tortured auteur? Well, the answer is more complicated than you think!
9. Unreliable Narrators
Aired 17 December 2018 • 6 min
Who is the most powerful character in fiction? Villains may doom the world, heroes may save it, but no one has more control over the plot than the narrator - expositing the who, what, where, when and how directly into the reader’s mind. But how can you tell that the person telling you the story is telling you the whole story?
10. Food & Fiction: Memorable Meals in Literature
Aired 11 January 2019 • 6 min
Food varies wildly from place to place and from culture to culture; since humans are such sensory creatures, using words to evoke the experience of eating is an excellent way to bring a text to life.
11. Death, Personified
Aired 24 January 2019 • 6 min
Death as a character reveals how we process one of life’s greatest mysteries, and there’s a lot more breadth to how the grim reaper is depicted than you might think.
12. How Greek Mythology Inspires Us
Aired 7 February 2019 • 6 min
Ancient Greek Mythology has worked its way into modern pop culture so deeply that it would be an almost Sisyphean task to compile every way it’s manifested!
13. The Beauty and Anguish of Les Misérables!
Aired 18 April 2019 • 6 min
Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is one of history’s most famous novels and one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history. On this special episode of It’s Lit! we explore how Les Miserable became both a national and revolutionary anthem, and so publicly adored that all 1,900 pages never went out of print.