A New ‘Game of Thrones’ Book You Should Get Excited About

We’re a couple of weeks away from the second season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, and I’m pretty excited to announce that SmartPop is putting out an essay collection about A Song of Ice and Fire that will drop shortly after the season concludes. Called Beyond the Wall, the book’s got a big essay from me up front about sexual assault and mythmaking in the world of the books that’s built on a number of our conversations here, but that goes substantially beyond them. If that’s not your jam, there are contributions from Elio and Linda, who run Westeros.org, and essays on book collecting in an e-book age, and the genre wars—in other words, it’s wide-ranging and I’m pretty psyched. Details on the book’s release are here. And I’m talking to the book’s publicists about maybe doing a party for its release here in Washington, DC, so keep an eye on this space for information about that as well.