Author: Rebecca Joines Schinsky

New Films to Portray Mary Shelley and Virginia Woolf

We like to think we stay pretty on-top of book-related film news around the Riot, but this week brought notice of to new-to-us films about landmark female writers. A biopic of Mary Shelley, focusing on her relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, has (apparently!) been in the works for a few years now. Bop on over to Tor.com for a first look at Elle Fanning as the Frankstein scribe. Meanwhile, from the Department of We Couldn’t Be More Excited, Eva Green and Gemma Arterton will play Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf in a film about the historic pair’s longterm romantic relationship.

Anonymous Book Fairy Distributes Free Books to Support the Resistance

A customer of San Francisco’s beloved Booksmith purchased 50 copies of George Orwell’s 1984 last week and left them at the store, where they were displayed with a sign exhorting customers to “Read up! Fight back!” Booksmith owner Christin Evans reports that the copies were quickly snapped up, prompting the unnamed benefactor to a repeat performance with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts. Other customers have since been inspired to follow suit. This is rad in its own right, but could it be the start of a larger movement to use reading to encourage resistance?

New Salman Rushdie Novel to Take on Trump

Speaking of books as resistance, news broke this week that Salman Rushdie’s thirteenth novel, The Golden House, due out this September, will take on the last eight years in American politics and feature “the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain sporting makeup and coloured hair.” Rushdie is certainly no stranger to the intersection of literature and politics. His history makes him uniquely positioned to resist threats of retribution, and his record of success and critical acclaim will make him a tough target for the predictable backlash tweets asserting he’s a washed up has-been. Sad! This will be a good one to watch.

Thanks to The Cruelty by Scott Bergstrom for sponsoring This Week in Books.

Taken meets The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Bourne Identity in this action-packed debut thriller (optioned for film by Jerry Bruckheimer) about a girl who must train as an assassin to deal with the gangsters who have kidnapped her father.

Changes to New York Times Bestseller Lists

As part of a larger plan to revamp its coverage of publishing and give more space to coverage beyond bestseller lists, the New York Times has cut several bestseller lists. Weirdly, the exact number of removed lists could not be confirmed, but we do know that the lists for graphic novels/manga, mass market paperbacks, middle grade ebooks, and young adult ebooks will be among the missing. While some publishers lament the new challenges these changes will present as they attempt to communicate a book’s success in-house and in the marketplace, what I’d like to see is an industry finally acknowledge the arbitrary and incomplete nature of these lists and just…decide they don’t really matter.

Roxane Gay Pulls Book from Simon & Schuster in Response to Milo Yiannopoulous Deal

Roxane Gay, whose TED book How to Be Heard (how’s that title for a nice coincidence?) was due to be published in March 2018, has pulled the book from Simon & Schuster in response to the now-widely known $250K book deal with white nationalist Milo Yiannopoulous. In a comment published at BuzzFeed, Gay notes how “egregious it is to give someone like Milo a platform for his blunt, inelegant hate and provocation” and reminds readers that this is not about censorship. She also notes that she recognizes not all S & S authors are in a position to make this decision. Here’s hoping that more of those who can make the sacrifice will follow Gay’s lead.

Related: see this note from Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy, promising that the book will not include hate speech.

The Bronx Set to Have a Bookstore Again

When the Barnes & Noble Co-op City location closed in late 2016, the Bronx — home to 1.4 million people and 10 colleges in just 42.7 square miles — was left without a bookstore. That’s all about to change thanks to Noëlle Santos, who is currently raising funds to open The Lit.Bar, a bookstore-wine bar, in the South Bronx neighborhood. Some Riot readers may remember hearing about Noëlle on the Book Riot Podcast or meeting her at Book Riot Live. If you’re looking for a literary cause to support, take a look at the Indiegogo campaign–she has done her homework!–and consider chipping in. Rock on, Noëlle.

Thanks to The Girl in the Garden by Melanie Wallace for sponsoring This Week in Books.

When June arrives on the coast of New England, baby in arms, an untrustworthy man by her side, Mabel—who rents them a cabin—senses trouble. A few days later, the girl and her child are abandoned. June is soon placed with Mabel’s friend, Iris, in town, and her life becomes entwined with a number of locals who have known one another for decades: a wealthy recluse with a tragic past; a forsaken daughter returning for the first time in years; a lawyer, whose longings he can never reveal; and a kindly World War II veteran who serves as the town’s sage. Surrounded by the personal histories and secrets of others, June finds the way forward for herself and her son amid revelations of the others’ pasts, including loves—and crimes—from years ago.