Molly Templeton

Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links. The opening page of Malka Older’s new book says simply, “There are other ways to live.” That idea carries through so many of this year’s best science…

Like many people, I played a lot of Animal Crossing: New Horizons in 2020. Eventually, though, I walked away from my island, with its carefully terraformed ponds and a half-built castle and an entire rainbow of flowers. I have no desire to go back.…

There’s so much I want to talk about with this show—not just the ending, but so many moments along the way. I want to talk about all the episodes that made me cry; about the beauty of “A Life in the Day”; about Margo’s desert journey with lizard-king…

In the past five months, two debut young adult authors have chosen to postpone or cancel their books in the wake of intense social media scrutiny. Kosoko Jackson pulled his novel A Place for Wolves after criticism of how (among other issues) the book…

This week, Saga Press releases a gorgeous new omnibus edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Books of Earthsea, illustrated by Charles Vess, in celebration of A Wizard of Earthsea‘s 50th anniversary. In honor of that anniversary, this week we’re running a…

When the news broke that Buffy the Vampire Slayer would be coming back to TV in some form, it was… confusing. In a single Hollywood Reporter article, the new show was described as a “reboot,” a “new take,” an “adaptation,” and a show that would…

When you want something in life, how do you get it? Maybe you tell a story about it. Maybe you tell your parents about the toy you simply must have. It’s the best toy. It will allow all your tiny tyrannical narrative dreams to come true. You’ll scale…

Plenty of things about Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi have been divisive, but few have been as derided as the Canto Bight sequence. “The whole thing is just a disgracefully bad bit of storytelling.” “…feels pointless and tacked on…” “But the Canto…

Unlike many fantasy and young adult heroes and heroines, Frances Hardinge’s main characters aren’t chosen ones. They’re the other kind: misfits, orphans, oddballs, changelings. They’re young women chafing against responsibilities, sexist societies,…

What do you remember when you think of books you read long, long ago? Plot? Character? Setting? Or something more nebulous? I tend to remember how a book felt, which is about as nebulous as things get. There’s usually one lingering image in my very…

If you’ve got ten or so hours to spare between now and July 16th, I highly recommend binge-devouring season six of Game of Thrones, even—or maybe especially—if you watched it when it aired last year. What seemed, week to week, like an inconsistent,…

There exists no convincing argument that movies should never be based on board games, because Clue exists, and therefore disproves any such argument. That said, the game of Battleship is a categorically stupid idea for a movie. Battleship is…

It’s because of American Gods that I have a sprawling perfume collection. Ten years ago, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab—BPAL for short—released their first line of scents based on Neil Gaiman’s novel, and I found I could no longer resist the temptation to…

Choosing a Robin Hobb book to start with isn’t just choosing a series—it’s choosing a doorway into a huge, interconnected world. All but one of Hobb’s trilogies make up a giant tale told in many pieces (the oddball is the Soldier Son series). They…

I think I speak for a reasonable portion of the internet when I say I am both incredibly excited and super wary about the idea of a Raven Cycle TV show. How will they get it right? Will there be actual teenagers on the show? What if it turns into The…

The best thing about Logan is Patrick Stewart. No, it’s Dafne Keen. No, probably it’s Hugh Jackman, haggard and worn, playing this character with immense physicality and a strange grace. You can make an argument for so many things being the highlight…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that beer people love puns, plays on words, mangled references, increasingly creative uses of the word “Gose,” and just plain ridiculousness. They also love geek culture, as is immediately apparent if you, say,…

Neil Gaiman’s 544-page collection of his nonfiction, The View From the Cheap Seats, is due out May 31st—but if you poke around various corners of the internet, you can find a broad array of his essays, appreciations, introductions, and lectures that…