Happy Friday, shipmates! It’s Alex, and I’ve got new releases and a couple of recent indie books for your perusal to close out the week. I ended up dipping out of the genre this week and read Courtney Milan’s The Marquis Who Mustn’t, which I just devoured. I laughed, I chortled, I cackled, and I respected the heck out of Courtney keeping the personal stakes high while avoiding every single trope the genre-savvy gremlin that lives in my brain insisted was definitely going to turn up. If you like a romance, I heartily recommend it. Have a wonderful weekend! Stay safe out there, space pirates, and I’ll see you on Tuesday!
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Bookish Goods
Devil With a Cocktail Sticker by FreshDesignsBySummer
This sticker is so dang cute, I couldn’t resist. And of course, it really goes with the first of our new releases below. Devils just wanna have fun (and definitely not do their work). $3
New Releases
The Witchstone by Henry H. Neff
The Drakeford Curse has been going on for centuries, mutating its victims and generally making a family’s life deadly and deeply unpleasant. And now Laszlo, an 800-year-old demon, has been put in charge of the curse…except he’s entirely uninterested in doing that nitty gritty duty, and his ratings show it. He’s given six days to shape up to be melted back into primordial ooze. This brings him to the doorstep of Maggie Drakeford, who is 19 and desperate to save herself and her family—desperate enough to take the chance Laszlo offers her, even if it’s a certainty that he’s lying.
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima
This collection of interconnected short stories starts with a writer sleeping with the devil at a Halloween party in 1999…and then as her life unfolds, that writer produces stories for him, telling tales that are both utterly impossible and fundamentally true.
For a more comprehensive list of new releases, check out our New Books newsletter.
Riot Recommendations
Here are a couple of small press releases that came out recently, leaning into strange manifestations of emotion and trauma as reality.
Hollow Tongue by Eden Royce
Maxine Forrest is reluctantly driven back to her childhood home by a financial situation best described as “dire.” She finds the old house empty, her parents missing, and the memory and history of the house a force that wreaks change on her, both metaphysically and physically.
Things I Want Back From You by Elizabeth Stix
This collection of 20 linked short stories chronicles the bizarre, angsty, and astonishing lives of those who live in the fictional suburb of San Encanto, California.
See you, space pirates. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me over at my personal site.