Whether you're looking to find yourself in a book or lose yourself in a story, there's a colorful and magical literary world to explore through the lens of Latino authors. 

You can discover the magic in reality with Gabriel García Márquez, the wonders of love with Pablo Neruda and the power of identity with Sandra Cisneros -- to name a few. 

With that in mind, we asked The Huffington Post newsroom to share a book by a Latino author that shaped their life or simply became a favorite. So if you want to find inspiring words between the pages of your next literary obsession, you're in luck.

Here are 23 books by Latino authors that should be on your must-read list: 

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Sarah Paulson won't be labeling her sexuality anytime soon, and she doesn't care what you think. 

In a remarkably candid PrideSource interview, the "American Horror Story" star opens up about having dated both men and women. Paulson, 40, said she understands why refusing "to give any kind of label just to satisfy what people need" can be problematic, but nonetheless sees it as a way to be true to her authentic self. 

 "All I can say is, I've done both, and I don't let either experience define me," Paulson told PrideSource's Chris Azzopardi. "I don't let having been with a man make me think I am heterosexual, or make me want to call myself that, because I know I have been attracted to women -- and have lived with women. So, for me, I'm not looking to define myself, and I'm sorry if that is something that is seen as a rejection of or an unwillingness to embrace [my sexuality] in a public way, but it's simply not. It's simply what's true for me, and that's all I can speak to." 

Like many celebrities and public figures, the actress says she's felt pressure from within the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community to be an activist, but clarified, "My reality is different than your reality." 

"I can meet a man tomorrow and fall in love with him and marry him and I wouldn't discount any of the experiences that I've had with women, or vice versa," she said. "I just don't think anyone is in a position to dictate what that is for me."

While she has generally refrained from discussing her private life in interviews, Paulson made headlines when she gave actress Cherry Jones, who was then her girlfriend, an excited kiss on the lips at the 2005 Tony Awards when Jones won for her role in Broadway's "Doubt." (Jones, who is openly lesbian, thanked "Laura Wingfield" in her acceptance speech, referring to Paulson's character in a New York revival of "The Glass Menagerie" that year.) 

Paulson, who split from Jones in 2009, now describes that moment as "accidental," and added, "If it happened to me today, I don't know what I would do necessarily. I really don't. I think what I'd like to think is that I would just be who I am and whomever I was with, if I had won an award or they had won award or if it was some kind of public thing, I would not do what I would do simply because I was afraid of being revealed." 

One thing's for certain: Paulson isn't afraid to play gay on the big screen, and can currently be seen as Cate Blanchett's ex-lover, Abby, in the critically-acclaimed period drama, "Carol." Blanchett, of course, sparked controversy after she was quoted as having said she'd had relationships with other women, later clarifying that they were not sexual in nature.  

Paulson came to her co-star's defense, arguing that Blanchett is the victim of a double-standard in the media. 

"Is anyone asking George Clooney what he likes about having sex with a woman? Nobody does," she said. "But you have a story about two women together or two men together and all of a sudden it becomes fair game and assumptions are made that are just never made in the reverse, and I just think it's terribly unfair."

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“What do you love most about Athens?” The most popular answer to that question is “the chaos.” Sometimes you’ll hear “the beautiful chaos,” other times “its ugliness” or “its contradictions,” but almost always, the answer will include a negative element used in a flattering way. But why should people have to compromise about the flaws of their city, or romanticize them to make them appear cute?

The City of Errors doesn't do either of those things, and it doesn't find the nuisances that pop up in every corner of Athens or any other Greek city cute. Instead, the production company tries to fix them.

City of Errors has been around for several years, but faced with Greece's socio-political crisis, it has changed its mission over time. It now approaches its goal -- civic engagement in big cities -- by offering inspiration and tools for people who want to make their homes a better place and build an active community of residents.

HuffPost Greece spoke with the team in Athens last week.

How did City and Errors come to be, and how does it work?

We started the City of Errors project with a group of volunteers in 2012. The idea was to create an Internet audiovisual platform with the aim to build a community of active citizens striving to maintain a relative quality of life in cities like Athens, cities that have been abandoned both by the local authorities and their citizens, cities that suffer from indifference and vulgarity because their residents are interested only in themselves and they neglect the collective interest.

The platform consists of a series of long-duration videos that feature citizens who make the city better every day with small and direct actions, as well as the City of Errorsapp, through which the user can take a photo story that showcases how he or she tries to make the city better and upload that on our web page, and a game that is played on the streets in which players are asked to solve as many problems as they can within a few hours.

Our education has a massive gap there, too. You are not born a citizen, you become one, and from what it looks like many of us never did. School is hugely responsible for that.

What is Athenians’ biggest weakness? What has brought the city to this predicament?

City of Errors is not just about Athens, but a lack of money meant we couldn't go elsewhere, so we worked with what we had. Most Greek cities suffer from the same thing; the self-centeredness of their citizens. They park wherever they want. They don't care about what others want. When someone tries to reason with them, they encounter verbal or physical abuse or total lack of responsibility regarding any kind of wrongdoing. This is a flaw. We don't assume any responsibility about what goes on in public space. Why? Doesn't it belong to us too?

It provides this small push that says, “We need to get off our couch and start offering something to society.”

How do you intend to make citizens of Athens aware and, most importantly, mobilize them so that they take action and start taking care of their city?

City of Errors provides the tools for each and every one of us to get inspiration and ideas. It provides this small push that says, “We need to get off our couch and start offering something to society.”

The platform of City of Errors came full circle after three years of operation. We did many things, but unfortunately nothing very substantial. Our aim was to make City of Errors an Internet school for citizens with documentaries, educational applications such as the one we created and street games for high school students. We started creating the features of this platform one by one and were looking for funding at the same time, while trying to promote a business model that would be sustainable.

However, everyone we approached paid us nice compliments but didn't go beyond that. Lack of support from the Athens municipality, as well as an unsuccessful crowdfunding campaign, led us to the conclusion that it is probably too soon for a project like this to work in Greece.

Of course we are not the only ones who’ve encountered these kinds of obstacles, so we decided to put our knowledge and experience into use and provide our services to others. At the same time, we have a new project underway which we hope to accomplish, although the conditions right now are very adverse.

What are the most important things you feel you have achieved to this day?

The most important thing is that we have managed to propose a kind of social and civic education that works. We believe that if it were applied on a big scale one day, it would change the lives of people living in cities.

Do you intend to expand to other cities beyond Athens?

We are open to such challenges, but it is very hard since we don't have any support in Athens, which is the project's pilot city. An expansion requires funds. However, in general we collaborate with institutions abroad, and we make videos to promote them on the Internet. Recently we made a video for the city of Jassy, Romania, which is running as candidate for “cultural city of Europe” in 2020.    

What are your future plans for City of Errors?

Our dream is to create more projects like these in collaboration with big or small agents, who will teach through interactive and audiovisual processes the real meaning of concepts such as solidarity, activism, love for the environment, cooperation and quality of life. The audiovisual art, which is essentially what we do, has enormous power, and it also includes the perspective to do good to the Greek society, which is now lost in ballot boxes, television shows and recycled soap operas.    

This story originally appeared on HuffPost Greece and was translated into English. 

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Darth Vader may be the galaxy's most notorious villain, but that doesn't mean he knows how to iron a button-down.

Turns out the Sith Lord shares many of our household struggles, as evidenced by this incredible photo series from Polish photographer Paweł Kadysz. Vader can't remember his groceries. He wavers when choosing craft beers. And he "forces" himself to complete all kinds of mundane household chores.

"We never think of movie villains as real people," Kadysz told HuffPost. "And yet, that’s usually what they are." A little too real, in the case of Vader:

H/T BoredPanda

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For adventurous travelers, Ireland is the ultimate playground. This blazing-green country is home to not only historic castles, quaint cobblestone streets and charming medieval towns, but also a robust national park system that boasts -- among other things -- one heck of a road trip along the country's rugged coast.

Call us crazy, but it's got to be the prettiest country in Europe... at least based on these photos. 

Drone photographer Raymond Fogarty, of AirCam Ireland, traveled more than 1,500 miles down the coast to capture a series of striking images that make Ireland look more like a Caribbean island than a country in western Europe. If these images don't inspire you to get up and book a flight -- or convince you that even a nation famed for beer can be this beautiful -- then absolutely nothing will. 

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The final installment of the "Hunger Games" franchise is opening in some 4,000 theaters this weekend. The Seth Rogen Christmas comedy "The Night Before" bows in nearly 3,000, and "Secret in Their Eyes" -- a thriller that finds Julia Roberts and Nicole Kidman sharing the screen for the first time -- is slated for a reported 2,400 auditoriums. But I would turn my back on all of them in favor of a comparatively tiny film whose quality can run circles around the others.*

The movie I prioritized this week is "Carol," the latest from gifted director Todd Haynes, who made two of the 2000s' best releases with "Far From Heaven" and "I'm Not There." Having first seen "Carol" back in September, four months after its euphoric Cannes Film Festival premiere, I cleared my schedule for a weeklong "Carol" blitz, and I've come away with an even fonder appreciation of the film. Technically, this blitz started last month during a quick conversation with Cate Blanchett, who was promoting "Truth," the other movie that has her name on every Oscar prognosticator's lips. Blanchett has the title role in "Carol," playing an affluent 1950s married New Yorker who sparks an unlikely romance with Therese (Rooney Mara), a younger photographer working a temp job at a department store, where she sells Carol a train set for her daughter during the height of the holiday gift-buying scramble.

"Her sexuality had no name, and Carol didn’t fit into a particular subculture, so that visual niche expression of that was not an easy thing to find," Blanchett said of her approach to the character -- a sentiment she took a step further during Monday morning's New York press conference at a hotel overlooking Central Park, where Blanchett called Carol's repressed existence a "quiet hell."

It's in that hell that "Carol" finds resplendent grooves, both on- and offscreen. For a movie that tackles homosexuality during a time when it was still illegal nationwide, "Carol" is a decidedly unpolitical tale. Yet its source material -- Patricia Highsmith's semi-autobiographical 1952 novel The Price of Salt -- quickly became a quiet pillar upon its publication, when there weren't many stories that portrayed queer people in a positive light.

After Monday's press conference, I sat down with two of the film's producers, Christine Vachon and Elizabeth Karlsen, who walked me through its lengthy development process. Phyllis Nagy adapted the script in the mid-1990s, after which it cycled through numerous hands. The rights to Highsmith's novel were locked up with another producer, and other filmmakers were considered, including "Boys Don't Cry" director Kimberly Peirce. But as stalled projects tend to do, "Carol" fell by the Hollywood wayside until Karlsen and Vachon produced 2005's "Mrs. Harris," which Nagy wrote and directed. It was then that Nagy mentioned wanting to resuscitate "Carol."

It took Vachon and Karlsen until 2010 to secure the rights from Highsmith's estate, and it wasn't until March 2014 -- after Haynes replaced John Crowley in the director's seat and Mara replaced Mia Wasikowska in the role of Therese -- that cameras rolled. The producers felt the script's central love story needed to be more enigmatic, so, working with Haynes, who usually writes his own movies, Nagy stripped some of the backstory to reflect an important line that Carol says to Therese early in the film: "What a strange girl you are, flung out of space."

The fight was worth it: "Carol" screened to a fervent standing ovation at Cannes, where audiences are quite transparent about their reactions. (For comparison's sake, a media crowd booed "The Sea of Trees," the latest from festival favorite Gus Van Sant.) Reviews have accurately called it "exquisitely drawn" and a "gorgeous time capsule." Those remarks are no surprise for a Haynes film, as 2002's "Far From Heaven" -- also set in the 1950s -- was caked in the glossy reds and oranges of Connecticut's fall foliage. He seeps "Carol" in the gray mistiness of a New York whose concrete is paved with melancholy. The whole thing looks like an Edward Hopper painting.

After chatting with Karlsen and Vachon, I sat down with Sarah Paulson, who has a small but pivotal role as Carol's longtime friend, Abby, who harbors a deep romantic affection for her. Abby was the catalyst for Harge, Carol's husband (an excellent Kyle Chandler), first discovering his wife's hidden sexuality, as the two women had a tryst several years before the movie takes place. Carol and Harge are in the midst of a divorce, and when he discovers Therese's sudden role in Carol's life, Harge threatens Carol's custody rights -- a loss that is unfathomable to her. Abby plays a vital part in salvaging Carol's peace of mind after the latter tells Therese she can no longer see her, providing another layer of devastating beauty that solidifies "Carol" as a portrait of unequivocal love of all kinds.

"It also speaks to the confines of society for gay women at that time," Paulson told me. "It was not a big-enough world, so if you found a person you could relate to and who was of your tribe, you weren’t so likely to want to let go of them, no matter what, even if it meant that person was in love with someone else."

Despite such a glowing reception, "Carol" opens on a mere four screens this weekend before expanding to additional theaters throughout December. If it's not already apparent, I'm anxious for the world to see this movie. I'm anxious for everyone to behold the grace of Blanchett's and Mara's performances. Both will be major players in the 2016 Oscar race, with The Weinstein Company, the movie's awards-friendly distributor, touting Blanchett as a lead-actress contender and Mara as a supporting candidate. Blanchett is reliably elegant, holding her cigarettes with sophistication and expressing her feelings with breathiness, like someone required to button them up for decades. But it's Mara's movie. She imbues Therese with an eternal longing, as though she's intelligent enough to know there is a bigger world out there but too naive to conceptualize a place within it, until Carol's arrival gives her the figurative vocabulary to understand herself.

Seeing the movie for a second time at an industry screening on Tuesday night, I appreciated that it also manages a refreshingly non-prurient look at blooming sexuality. Weinstein purchased distribution rights days after the 2013 carnal lesbian drama "Blue is the Warmest Color" won Cannes' coveted Palme d'Or prize, but "Carol" operates under a different lexicon. Its sensual gaze is delicate instead of revealing, roving instead of voyeuristic, and it ensures the characters' progression never feels like a product of Hollywood schmaltz. That may leave some viewers cold, but wait for the final scene, where a single exchange -- which I won't spoil here -- becomes the year's finest cinematic moment. In an era where actors are no longer box-office draws on name alone, it is proof that movie stars do, in fact, still exist. 

Complemented by a Carter Burwell score reminiscent of Philip Glass' music in "The Hours," "Carol" is a roaring achievement in contemporary film. Its patient storytelling and subtle characterization are unlike anything on the big screen right now, no matter how much you adore the impressive action sequences in "Mockingjay" or the chuckles of a caper like "The Night Before." I can't stop replaying scenes in my head because each one feels sublime, like a dream I had last night and cannot displace. I didn't cry at "Carol" the way I sobbed during "Room" or "Brooklyn" or even "The Martian," yet it's the most resonant film I've seen this year. Haynes has crafted a hallmark event so surreal you won't want to wake up.

*Actually, I liked "Mockingjay - Part 2" a lot, "The Night Before" is a tonally inconsistent series of likable clichés, and "Secret in Their Eyes" I sadly haven't caught yet.

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This is Graham. He is 58 years old. 

You may look at the photo above and think: I know Graham. I get Graham. You may think that with a guy like Graham, what you see is what you get. Case closed. But then you find out underneath that windbreaker and button-down, Graham is hiding a whole lot of ink.

Like, head to toe ink.

Graham is but one of London-based photographer Alan Powdrill's colorful subjects. For his series "Covered," Powdrill chronicles men and women covered in tattoos that they themselves often hide beneath clothes every day. "I was 51 when I started," Graham told Powdrill of his first experience with body art, "and my dad was already dead and my mum didn't say anything, as she was in the early stages of dementia." 

Camera in tow, Powdrill documents the unlikely individuals who have permanently transformed their bodies into vibrant expressions of themselves. In his visual universe, under one man's suit and tie, or another woman's sweatshirt, exists a body-turned-canvas, a colorful work of art that strangers may never see.

Viewers, be warned: Your expectations may be fractured, your assumptions overturned, your eyes entranced. 

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“We’re running out of time,” the hero of our story wails, “the villain will be here any minute!”

It’s a gripping, page-turning battle against world domination, and the good guys are totally losing. “But wait,” our hero notices, just in the knick of time. “I’ve just received an Outlook notification! Looks like everything’s going to be A-OK.”

“Thank God for Microsoft,” his pretty assistant chimes in.

It’s the kind of scene we’ve come to know well, at least in the context of blockbuster movies and popular shows. Tom Cruise pauses mid-Zombie apocalypse to down a Sprite. Jane the virgin does her pre-high school reunion shopping at Target -- how else is she supposed to avoid utter humiliation? The latter is a self-aware, cheeky take on product placement, while the former is just a distracting, face palm-worthy pause in the action.

Embedding brands within plots has become a fact of storytelling for some moviemakers (2014 alone saw a big surge in product placement spending). But it’s a considerably less common practice in the book world -- albeit not unheard of. As publisher Melville House points out in a blog post, big five publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has partnered with Weber grills, and writer William Boyd has penned an homage to Land Rovers. Its a trend that was parodied as early as 1915, when L. M. Montgomery wrote a funny scene speaking out about product placement. In it, protagonist Anne chides her friend for writing a blatantly promotional piece: “I think it would be perfectly disgraceful to write a story to advertise a baking powder,” she says.

Apparently a bevy of respected science fiction writers -- including well-known futurist Elizabeth Bear -- wouldn’t agree with Ms. Green Gables. A handful of authors who make a living crafting honest predictions of the future will be published in an anthology commissioned by and about Microsoft. CalledFuture Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft, it will “explore prediction science, quantum computing, real-time translation, machine learning, and much more.”

How’s that for dystopia?

To be fair, science-fiction authors penning visions for the future for corporations isn’t exactly a new trend. Earlier this month, we profiled a handful of self-described techno-optimists -- writers who believe science fiction has a responsibility to convey positive potentials for the future, especially when it comes to new, socially-minded technologies. One such writer, Madeline Ashby, has written about solutions to border security for fiction anthologies, but also about potential future scenarios for Intel Labs’ research group.

The difference, however, is that Ashby seems to separate her commercial work from her more artistic pursuits, whereas the writers in Future Visions blend the two strangely and seamlessly.

“Tasha’s avatar smiled from the screen, a little too perfect to be true,” contributer Seanan McGuire writes in her Microsoft story “Hello, Hello.” Later, she speaks to a woman using a software that translates verbal languages as well as body language, merging the two modes of communication into one. “It was a highly advanced version of the old translation software that had been rolled out in the late 2010s.”

Describing a fictional technology as "highly advanced" might sound like editorializing. But, you know, she's biased.

For more on tech-oriented science fiction:

The End of the End of the World 

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Here are some things I know about the art world:

• In 2013, every artist in the top 100 auction sales was a man. In 2014, there were no women in the top 40. 


• In 2015, only five of 34 art galleries surveyed by the feminist art collective Pussy Galore boasted rosters in which women constituted more than 50 percent.


• According to the Guerrilla Girls, less than four percent of the artists in the Modern Art section of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art are women, but 76 percent of the nudes are female. Since 2007, only 29 percent of the Whitney Museum's solo exhibitions were dedicated to women artists. MoMA's upcoming exhibitions schedule features a hefty majority of men.


• Women fair just about as well at art fairs.


• In 2013, women held only 24 percent of the museum director positions at institutions with budgets over $15 million. They also made 71 cents for every dollar men made.


• In 2014, when a group of 20 women were asked whether the art world is biased, Marilyn Minter actually answered, "Hahaha … Is the Pope Catholic?"


• Male painters are still perpetuating the myth that women make bad artists: “Even though the painting classes in art academies are more than 90 percent made up by women, it’s a fact that very few of them succeed," Georg Baselitz said earlier this year. "If women are ambitious enough to succeed, they can do so, thank you very much. But up until now, they have failed to prove that they want to. Normally, women sell themselves well, but not as painters.”

These are just numbers, yes, with a few anecdotes tossed in. And if I've cherry-picked my facts, I welcome a more comprehensive statistical overview (though I doubt it would tell a much different story). The reality is: women are underrepresented in the art world.

It's not just that women (and particularly women of color) don't get as many solo shows. They don't get as many directorial positions, they don't fill the top slots at art auctions. All of this, despite the fact that in most countries, women make up more than 50 percent of those graduating with degrees in Arts & Humanities. It's impossible to know just how many women artists exist in this world, but we know they're earning half the MFAs granted in the U.S. Compare that to the bullet points above.

The situation is ... frustrating. It provokes diatribes like "11 Women Artists Who Should Have Their Own MoMA Retrospective," or "The 19th Century American Women Artists You Don't Know, But Should," or even "10 Amazing Female Artists And Their Male Muses." These articles practically scream, "These Are The Women Artists You're Overlooking!" or, "Seriously, Women Aren't Just Nude Models Or Picasso's Sidekicks."

Alas, frustration comes from all sides. There are also articles like "Why Aren’t 'Women Street Artists' Just 'Street Artists'?" and "How Not To Write About Women Artists" both of which take issue with the nomenclature. While they don't always question the intention behind lists like the ones I cited above, critics often argue that the term "women artist," or its sister phrase "female artist," does more harm than it does good. They wonder: is the act of grouping women artists into one happy contingent reductive?

It's a valid concern -- one that we'll probably continue to debate as we inch closer and closer to gender parity in the art workplace. Our thoughts will evolve as women move out of the periphery and into more and more spotlights. But for now, let's address the critiques as they apply to us today. Here are some of the arguments against using the term "woman artist."

1. The term "woman artist" necessarily pits women against men, or it narrowly gauges women's success in terms of men's.

By separating women artists from the men, a critic might say, we're reinforcing the idea that men are the default when it comes to artists. Similarly, by choosing to highlight women in this way, we are accepting the terms of success set by men. Along this line of reasoning, headlines like, "In search of a female Banksy: Aiko and Faith47 take on a male-dominated street art world," might seem trite. 

We published a work titled "10 Women Artists Who Are Better Than Banksy," expressed with an ample amount of tongue in cheek. But still, words are powerful, and more than a few of our commenters took issue with the framing. 

Counterpoint: In these circumstances, I'm reminded of the Guerrilla Girls' salty list of the advantages of being a woman artist, which includes: Being included in revised versions of art history. (Cue a heavy dose of sarcasm.) It's true that revisionary history is not ideal, but success has been defined by men for centuries. And male, in sheer numbers, is the default gender for artists. By bringing to light the number of women reshaping success and our definition of the artist, we can only hope that we are combating narrow thinking, rather than augmenting it. And that is a risk.

2. Using gender as a filter through which we analyze creativity is limiting.

There are the artists who firmly state, "I don't consider myself a woman artist, I am simply an artist." And that is a perfectly legitimate response for an individual to take. An artist whose work has nothing to do with her gender should probably not be labeled, in a stand-alone piece, a "woman artist," particularly when that artist has expressed animosity toward the term. 

Counterpoint: Women artists are artists. But they aren't just artists. Not today. The numbers alone make women artists a minority in most sectors. Now, are women artists more than women artists? Of course. Women embody a panoply of identities, and choosing which ones they adhere to is a right, not a privilege. But we should also recognize that when an individual professes not to focus on gender or race in their work -- in turn, shirking the label "female artist" -- that doesn't mean that issues of gender and race are not at play. 

3. Gender is a spectrum.

This is very true. Rather than a counterpoint, I'd like to echo the language of the theater advocacy group The Kilroys or the Bindercon community, both of which include trans women and gender non-conforming individuals among their ranks of women.

4. Language like this perpetuates "fem-fluff." 

Critics often say that what we need more than "flem-fluff" -- superficial coverage of feminist issues that lack analytical substance -- is an understanding of the systemic problems that amount to underrepresentation and the broader practices that keep us from reaching gender parity in the art world. We can't comprehend the economics of gender discrimination in the art labor market without investigative reports that pinpoint the institutions, rules and behaviors that promote sexism and racism. This is all incredibly true -- and I hope to continue to help produce, edit and read thoughtful journalism like this. 

Counterpoint: At the same time, when young adults today are growing up in a world in which women are so poorly represented in the fields they aspire to join, what can we do outside of investigative journalism? We can pinpoint and honor the women who are otherwise overlooked.

So why do we use the term "women artists"? Because, in the words of fellow HuffPost editor Emma Gray -- leader of the Women's section here who thoughtfully spoke to me about this issue -- we believe a collective of successful women can be a powerful thing. It can be problematic when a male critic like Ken Johnson groups women together in order to generalize the pitfalls of a gender. But it can be empowering when a site like Broadly or an initiative like Ridykeulous groups women and gender non-conforming people together in order to build a coalition or a safe and productive space. Context is important, and our context is this: we want to celebrate and honor the women blazing trails in their fields, despite the narrative stats like the ones above are telling us.

At the end of the day, in order to confront disparity, we (curators, art collectors, regular people!) need more information. Perhaps lists like "10 Women Artists Who Are Better Than Banksy" aren't leading an educational revolution, but the point of lists like "14 Women Artists Who've Changed The Way We Think About Design" is to raise visibility for the female figures who are otherwise being ignored.

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No one can see their hands, but everyone wants to.

At least, that's the impression staffers at The Huffington Post left after they spent some time with Gear VR, the new virtual reality headset launching Friday from Samsung. (You can get it for $99.99 on Samsung.com, Amazon and Bestbuy.com.) It's probably the best experience normal consumers like you and me can have with virtual reality this holiday season -- even if it requires specific Samsung smartphones to work -- but it's not necessarily what our crew of VR newbies had in mind.

The headset is comfortable and easy to use. Most HuffPost testers -- new to VR -- were blown away by the visuals when we exposed them to an alien environment in Oculus 360 Photos, an app you can download and use with Gear VR. But they were disappointed that they couldn't move around and interact with the objects in front of them by reaching out to touch them with their hands.

In a sense, a lot of what we call virtual reality today isn't that at all -- rather, Gear VR and other platforms, like the budget-friendly Google Cardboard, offer a wealth of static environments and videos that you can occupy but not affect. You can't reach out with your hand and flip a switch.

It's a "look but don't touch" experience, but it's an oftentimes impressive one.

Here's how our staffers responded to"Neon Buddha," a virtual environment created by Miksim Loginov -- keep in mind that all of these photos are candid and that our test subjects (including me, at the bottom) only spent time in one app out of the many that are available:

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The terrorist attacks in Paris on Nov. 13 left the world shaken, but students at Léman Manhattan Preparatory School in New York are responding to this tragedy by sharing messages of peace through art.  

Celine Laheurte teaches sixth through 12th grade art at the Léman Upper School. After the events in Paris unfolded, she put aside her regularly planned lessons and devoted a day for students to create reflective artwork about the terrorist attacks. Fellow Léman art teacher Jenna Robinson also collaborated with Laheurte and had her students reflect on the tragedy through art as well. 

"The Paris attacks elicited such powerful emotions everywhere, but it also shed light on other issues [as a teacher]," Laheurte told The Huffington Post. "I thought: 'Will my students come in on Monday only knowing about Paris? Will they know of other events?' Thus this project would not just be about the Paris attacks, it would be about peace." 

"Given that Léman Manhattan is an international school, it's one of our missions to foster global awareness and explore the world's complexities through critical thinking," Laheurte said. 

On Monday Lahuerte gathered her students to start a discussion, beginning each class with one simple question: "What happened this weekend?" With each group of students, their first answer was the same: "Paris." 

According to Laheurte, the students had the expected reactions to the attacks. "The most common one-word shares were: horrible, shocked, upset, speechless, sad, angry, scared," she said.

Laheurte and Robinson provided their students with opportunities to express their feelings, and led conversations surrounding global awareness. Lahuerte said it was important for her to explain to her students that terrorism is a worldwide issue, and that Lebanon, Baghdad, and Syria were also impacted.

After their discussion, the students were allowed to use any material to respond to the following prompt: "If you could share or express anything with those who were directly affected by any of these tragedies, what might you say, or show?"

Lahuerte said that students interpreted the prompt differently, but each had powerful images that evoked the theme of peace. "I noticed that they were all an even mix of topics; some chose to express their emotions, while others expressed hopes and messages they would want to share, given the chance," she said.

The children's artwork has been celebrated by the school community as well. "Art can be a powerful tool in expressing emotion as well as healing; this project has had a positive effect on our students," said Lisa Nowicki, director of fine arts at Léman.

The beautiful artwork by the students shows the resiliency of young people in the face of tragedy and a universal sense of solidarity for victims of global terrorism.

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Does winter make you growl? Does the cold make you yearn for fur?

If your answer is, "Does a bear crap in the woods?" then you'll be happy to know there's a cure-all to your hibernation — a sleeping bag shaped as a gigantic bear. 

The bag, which one can only assume is soft enough to meet the fuzzy-wuzzy standards of Snuggle the Fabric Softener Bear, is called the “Great Sleeping Bear” is the work of Dutch artist Eiko Ishizawa.

Photos of the sleeping bag started appearing online in 2009, and the artist wrote in 2013 that she'd start selling a limited number of the bears -- all of which are handmade -- the next year. But the bags started seeing renewed popularity online this week, probably because it's the time of year when everyone is dreaming of hibernating until warmer weather arrives.

Ishizawa wrote about why she created the bag on her website:

By having the experience of transitional discoveries like finding a bear, realizing a little human face in his mouth, and recognizing details and shape of this commodity, I attempt to create this work as to be a medium for audiences to generate one's transitional perceptions and fantasies in reality.

Basically, if you ever wondered what it’s like to be a bear, this is your chance.

But you have to act quickly. “This work will be limitedly produced in unknown period, approximately only within these years,” the site states. on the site. Plus, this sleeping bag has a price tag that is sure to Baloo your mind — $2,350.

If you can bear the cost, you can order it at Ishizawa’s website.

h/t: The Dodo

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"For sale: baby shoes, never worn." 

The tragic story told in these six, simple words -- a story often, though perhaps apocryphally, attributed to Ernest Hemingway -- carries more emotional power than many entire novels. Six-word stories have become a popular, Twitter-friendly form of flash fiction, encouraging writers to think creatively about how to employ their words. 

Science fiction, a genre often driven by mind-boggling imagined technology and jarring future changes in society, lends itself particularly well to the six-word treatment. The sci-fi blog io9 periodically encourages its readers to write six-word opuses of speculative fiction. 

On Thursday, the hashtag #sixwordscifi briefly trended on Twitter, with tweeters conjuring their own futuristic worlds in a few well-chosen words. Some writers got goofy; some took it to a dark, dark place; and some even openly nodded to the classic "baby shoes" tale, with a speculative spin. Here are some of our favorites:

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Artists from around the world gathered in Florida this month to show off their stunning 3D chalk art skills at the Sarasota Chalk Festival. This is no sidewalk game of tic-tac-toe -- the colors are vivid, the details are meticulous, and the depth of field is so realistic you can almost fall in.

So check out these brilliant pieces, and remember to take a deep breath when things get too real.

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For a tale of a double life, Lily Tuck’s latest novel is remarkably seamless.

The Double Life of Liliane, a deeply autobiographical novel about a girl growing up in New York (with her mother) and in Rome (with her father), is Sebaldian both in its tell-tale use of unsourced, evocative photographs and in its hypnotically smooth flow of recollection. Even the cover echoes W.G. Sebald’s masterpiece, Austerlitz, both white save for a faded black-and-white portrait presumed to be of the narrator.

Liliane, born in Paris to German parents slightly before the outbreak of World War II, drifts around the Western hemisphere with her mother throughout the atrocities. Both of her parents, without advertising it, are of Jewish descent, and the Holocaust is both an ominous backdrop and the reason for Liliane's fleeing Europe with her mother. While her father, Rudy, spends the war in detention or mandatory service, her mother, Irene, travels circuitously to Peru, and eventually up to America. Rudy eventually becomes a movie producer in Rome; Irene -- young, beautiful, and magnetic -- divorces him and marries Gaby, a businessman from a moneyed background.

Around these nuclear players, characters both obscure and historically recognizable drift in and out. Tuck tells us immediately what each person’s fate will be: a crush of Liliane’s will one day die in a freak accident, a friend’s sister will be brutally murdered in a real-life case that made headlines in the 1960s. All the while, Liliane dips back and forth in time, from her own teenage years back to her early childhood travels, from her adolescence back to her family’s history as recounted to her by relatives. Photos -- all but one of which, the credits state, belong to Tuck -- appear without captions, glancingly referenced in the text if at all.

Tuck recounts these events in clear, matter-of-fact prose that seems to sand down the emotional resonance to one, almost clinical, plane. Liliane’s first time wearing a bikini and a family member’s wartime death both merit the same, just-the-facts-ma’am tone. This, as well as Tuck’s looseness with chronology, can leave the timeline muddled and confused.

Late in the novel, Liliane recalls a college seminar in which her professor, the eminent Paul de Man, speaks on autobiography: “I consider autobiography as an act of self-restoration,” he says, “in which the author recovers the fragments of his or her life into a coherent narrative.” The Double Life of Liliane carries an obvious debt to Sebald, who revolutionized literary portrayals of memory and historical trauma. But in its own right, it beautifully displays both the power of creative autobiography and its extreme difficulty. It pulls together Liliane’s two lives, and the lives of the family and friends surrounding her, into one superficially seamless whole, and yet the distance from the emotional rises and falls of real life serve as a constant reminder of the novel’s artifice.

As Liliane, and her real-life counterpart Tuck, know too well, resolving the gap between the real and the literary representation is a doomed task.  The Double Life of Liliane, while not entirely successful, offers one powerful path toward bridging the great divides in literature between reality, nonfiction and fiction.

The Bottom Line:

The Double Life of Liliane puts forward a hauntingly lovely, if emotionally flat, meditation on the author’s own life and the difficulty of resolving complicated reality into coherent narrative.

What other reviewers think:

The Washington Post: "Lily Tuck’s latest novel, The Double Life of Liliane, is a tight construction conveniently set up for easy deconstruction, as if it were an exercise given by Paul de Man in a seminar attended by the book’s main character, Liliane, during her last year at Harvard."

Kirkus: "The outbreak of war in '39 sees Rudy taken prisoner and Irène fleeing Paris with baby Liliane, to be reunited much later in Peru; but Tuck has no interest in exploiting these dramatic moments."

The New York Times: "The Double Life of Liliane will mean most to readers of a certain age who are able to recognize the cultural fence posts Tuck has hammered into the verge along her journey."

Who wrote it?

Lily Tuck is the author of two short story collections and several novels, including I Married You for Happiness and the National Book Award-winning The News From Paraguay.

Who will read it?

Readers who enjoy unconventional media in their texts, as well as lovers of memoir and novelistic nonfiction.

Opening lines:

“Liliane’s double life begins at New York’s Idlewild Airport when she boards a Trans World Airlines L-749 Constellation, the first commercial plane to cross the Atlantic nonstop thanks to its additional fuel tanks. The flight from New York to Rome usually takes from fourteen to sixteen hours depending on the wind, but on account of engine trouble, the flight Liliane takes is longer.”

Notable passage:

“French is Liliane’s first language, but, since at home now she speaks only English; her French is rusty and she finds it harder to express herself in it. In addition -- and she will find this to always be true -- she feels like a different person speaking French and not like her ordinary self. The difference is hard to explain but whether she speaks French or English at breakfast makes little difference. Busy eating, Liliane and her father are mostly silent.”

The Double Life of Liliane
by Lily Tuck
Atlantic Monthly Press, $26.00
Published Sept. 15, 2015

The Bottom Line is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.

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When U.K. mom Hollie Smith took her 17-month-old daughter Riley to see Father Christmas, aka Santa Claus, the toddler had an adorable reaction to seeing jolly Saint Nick. 

Positively gleeful!

H/T Tastefully Offensive

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In 1963, author Richard Scarry published Best Word Book Ever, which soon became a bestselling children's classic. 

Since then, the book has undergone a few changes to keep up with social progress -- from removing offensive cultural references to updating gender norms.

A senior editor at The Atlantic named Alan Taylor noticed these updates when he looked at his children's 1991 edition of the book and compared it to his memories of the 1963 edition, which he'd "read to tatters" as a small child. 

He went through both versions and put various pages next to each other for direct comparison.

Taylor originally posted the side-by-side photos on Flickr in 2005, but they reached a wider audience earlier this month, when Mental Floss syndicated a 2010 article from Sociological Images. 

Here are some of those images for comparison, with the 1963 edition on the left and top  and the 1991 version on the right and bottom.

H/T Upworthy

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The 16th annual Latin Grammys was a star-studded affair on Thursday night, with big names like Will Smith, Zoe Saldana, Ricky Martin and Rita Moreno stopping by the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas for the event. 

Jada Pinkett Smith stole the spotlight on the red carpet, going braless in a sheer silver lace dress. The actress' husband returned to his musical roots at the Latin Grammys, rapping in Spanish with Colombian trop-rock band Bomba Estéreo to their remix of "Fiesta."

But the Smiths weren't the only ones to light up the red carpet on Latin music's biggest night. Check out the best and most questionable fashion moments from the Latin Grammys red carpet below:

A previous version of this post was first published in Spanish by Mandy Fridmann on Voces. 

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My recent Sunday Review essay, adapted from my book “Reclaiming Conversation,” made a case for face-to-face talk. The piece argued that direct engagement is crucial for the development of empathy, the ability to put ourselves in the place of others. The article went on to say that it is time to make room for this most basic interaction by first accepting our vulnerability to the constant hum of online connection and then designing our lives and our products to protect against it.

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Most artistic genres -- cubism, impressionism, abstract expressionism -- are united by a common era, location, aesthetic ideal, and host of influences. Most artists active in these movements identify as such. "Outsider art" however, follows none of these rules. Somewhat fittingly of course, because the delicate genre is, in fact, defined by its lack of conventions. 

Yesterday I was joined on HuffPost Live by collector, dealer and owner of the Outsider Art Fair Andrew Edlin, as well as Creativity Explored artist Camille Holvoet and her teacher Paul Moshammer, to discuss what the term "outsider art" means to us. 

Is "outsider art" a useful term for aligning artists throughout time and space who don't fit the typical "artist" mold? Whose work is uninformed by art history, market trends, and the artistic institution? Who refuse to play by the art world's rules because they're blissfully unaware of them? 

Or is the term a bit more sinister, a way to put artists from unique times, places, circumstances and artistic perspectives into a box, running the risk of separating them further from the artistic success they deserve? 

It's a tricky question, one to which there is no correct conclusion. You can watch us discuss our opinions above, and to learn more, check out my earlier musings on the subject. You can also learn more about the fascinating artist and goddess that is Camille Holvoet in this interview with her from September. See more of her work below:

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