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Today In Books

Viral Hashtag #PublishingPaidMe Reveals Income Inequity Among Authors: Today in Books

#PublishingPaidMe Takes Twitter

YA author LL McKinney began the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe on Saturday to encourage authors, primarily those who are white, to share how much they received in book advance money. The goal was to break the silence around advance payments and show the massive disparities between how much authors of color are paid vs. white authors. The numbers have been eye-opening (N.K. Jemisin shared she only received a $25,000 advance for The Fifth Season, meanwhile Laura Sebastian received $185,000 for her debut, Ash Princess) and the conversation is ongoing.

Amazon Reverses Ban On Book Critical Of Coronavirus Lockdown After Decision Blasted By Many, Including Elon Musk

When a conservative news media personality self-published a booklet critical of the steps that governments and health organizations have taken regarding COVID-19, Amazon initially refused to publish it, citing the book’s misinformation and its potentially harmful impact. But that decision was reversed when the author shared the decision on Twitter and it drew criticism from many, including Elon Musk, who called upon Jeff Bezos to address the situation. The decision has been reversed.

A Statement From LJ On The 2020 Library Of The Year

Each year, Library Journal awards a different library their Gale/ LJ Library of the Year Award, and 2020’s Library of the Year is Seattle Public Library. This decision was met with protests from many librarians, who are criticizing Seattle Public Library’s decision to let an anti-trans group use a meeting room. LJ issued a new statement indicating that they stand by trans rights and disagree with SPL’s decision, but they also stand by their award.

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Read This Book

Read This Book: Hurricane Child by Kacen Callender

Welcome to Read This Book, a weekly newsletter where I recommend one book that I think you absolutely must read. The books will vary across genre and age category to include new releases, backlist titles, and classics. If you’re ready to explode your TBR, buckle up!

June is Pride Month, and I’d like to spend this month focusing on books written by LGBTQ+ writers about the LGBTQ+ experience. Of course, we can’t do that without acknowledging that the LGBTQ+ rights movement was led by trans women of color, and Black citizens are still fighting for their rights today. That’s why this week’s pick is an excellent novel by a Black trans writer whose work I admire a lot: Hurricane Child by Kacen Callender.

Content warning: mental health and suicide discussion, homophobia

In this middle grade novel, Caroline Murphy lives on the U.S. Virgin Islands, and attends school on St. Thomas. She hates school because she’s bullied by the other kids for being different–she was born during a hurricane (which is bad luck), her mother left without any explanation, and she sees a spirit that follows her wherever she goes. Caroline is lonely, but when Kalinda moves from Barbados to St. Thomas, Caroline makes her first real friend. It’s not long before Caroline realizes that her feelings for Kalinda are more than platonic, but same-sex relationships and attractions are frowned upon on their island. Just as Caroline reaches her breaking point, she decides to search for her mother, and heads out in the middle of a hurricane.

This is such a beautifully written story about what it means to be an outsider in your own home, and how one girl finds the strength to keep asking questions, and ultimately figure out how to be comfortable in her own identity. The descriptions of Caroline’s home are beautifully written, and are just as textured and lush as the gorgeous book cover. Although Callender doesn’t shy away from some of the big issues that Caroline’s journey touches upon, such as discussions of mental health and suicide ideation, and incidents of (nonviolent) homophobia, this book doesn’t feel depressing or heavy. Caroline’s journey to discover where her mother went is eye-opening, transformative, a little heartbreaking, but ultimately triumphant because along the way, Caroline discovers her own strength and her best friend is with her every step of the way. I loved the combination of magic and self-discovery in this book, and I hope you’ll pick it up (and continue to support books by queer Black writers this month, and every other month of the year).

Happy reading, and happy Pride!

Tirzah

Find me on Book Riot, the Insiders Read Harder podcast, All the Books, and Twitter.

If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, click here to subscribe.

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Today In Books

Twin Cities Bookstores Weather Riots: Today in Books

Riots Continue To Affect Twin Cities Shops And Bookstores

Bookstores in Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN have been affected by the ongoing riots protesting police brutality and injustice. At least two bookstores have burned down, one has been broken into, and two more have been boarded up and have suspended in-person operations until it’s safe to return on site. Although video footage shows protestors urging others to keep bookstores and libraries safe, Moon Palace Books tweeted, “Things that may be lost or damaged in our building are just things. But your life is precious, just like George Floyd’s life was precious.”

New Line Acquires Sarah Knight Bestseller ‘The Life-Changing Magic Of Not Giving A F*ck’

The satirical, no-nonsense guide The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck by Sarah Knight has been picked up by New Line, with Sarah Hirons set to adapt it. Hirons has previously adapted A Court of Thrones and Roses, and served as a producer for Bird Box and Let It Snow at Netflix, so she’s no stranger to book to screen adaptations. No word on what a feature film of Knight’s bestseller about getting your life in order might actually look like, but we’re excited to hear more!

Will China’s Entry Into U.S. Publishing Lead To Censorship?

The L.A. Times reports that a new, Chinese-backed publishing house is setting up shop in the U.S. Astra Publishing is a Beijing-based publishing house that is launching its first season of books in 2021, which include a Chinese memoir, a book about art world controversies, and a collection of short stories about the Latinx trans community in New York City. Although the publisher has insisted they are completely independent to publish whatever they like, the Chinese government’s track record of censoring publishers has some questioning whether or not that’s really true.

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Read This Book: Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram

Welcome to Read This Book, a weekly newsletter where I recommend one book that I think you absolutely must read. The books will vary across genre and age category to include new releases, backlist titles, and classics. If you’re ready to explode your TBR, buckle up!

This week’s pick is Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram.

Content warning: depression, discussion of suicide, bullying

Darius the Great is Not Okay is a memorable book about Darius, an Iranian-American teen who loves tea, lives with depression, and struggles with feeling like he’s “enough” no matter where he goes. When the book begins, Darius is being bullied at school and his white dad doesn’t seem to know what to do about it. The lack of empathy is frustrating for Darius because his dad is the only other one in the family also taking medication for clinical depression, so Darius thinks he’d understand how hard life can be. Then the family receives word that Darius’s maternal grandfather, who lives in Iran, is sick. The family drops everything and travels across the world, and Darius and his little sister meet his mother’s extended family in person for the first time. In Iran, Darius finds more reasons to stick out–at home, he’s too Persian, and here he’s too American. But he also meets Sohrab, a boy his age who lives next door to his grandparents, and in Sohrab, Darius finds his first real friend.

This book is surprisingly funny amidst all of its soul-searching and family angst, and Darius is a winning protagonist. He’s warm and sensitive, inquisitive and funny, vulnerable and so honest. I adored his love of tea, how he loves his little sister, and his bravery in connecting with people in a new place. This book also offers a great perspective on mental illness–at the beginning of the book, Darius’s depression is managed responsibly with medication, and a lot of his hang ups have to do with his relationship with his dad, who seems so distant to Darius that he refers to him by his first name. The mental illness discussion is further explored when Darius discovers that his Persian family views mental illness very differently, and he has to rely on what he knows to be true about his depression–that it’s manageable with medication–in order to stay strong. The friendship angle is so delightful. It doesn’t quite verge into the territory of romance, but the deep understanding that Darius and Sohrab share is uplifting and allows Darius to learn to be okay with who he is, and who he isn’t. This is a YA book, but I recommend it for fans of great family stories that get to the heart of cultural differences, mental illness, and what it means to find self-acceptance. It’s also great for readers who loved Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz.

Bonus: I listened to the audio, and it was narrated wonderfully by Michael Levi Harris. Plus, a sequel is on the horizon! Darius the Great Deserves Better will hit shelves on August, so now’s the time to read this great book!

Happy reading!

Tirzah

Find me on Book Riot, the Insiders Read Harder podcast, All the Books, and Twitter.

If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, click here to subscribe.

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Today In Books

Amazon Prime Day Moved to September: Today in Books

The Little Haiti Book Festival Is Going Virtual

It was announced on Instagram that the Little Haiti Book Festival is going virtual on May 31, 2020, in partnership with the Miami Book Fair. The even will be broadcast on Facebook Live, and will include panel discussions, readings, and storytelling and dance performances for adults as well as young readers. Get the full schedule.

Reese Witherspoon To Star In Two Netflix Romcoms From Hello Sunshine

Reese Witherspoon is wielding her book adaptation powers yet again! She’ll both produce and star in two new rom-coms headed to Netflix, one of which is an adaptation of The Cactus by Sarah Haywood. The Cactus is about a forty-something woman whose life is upended by an unplanned pregnancy at the same time that she loses her own mother. No word yet on when we can expect these movies, so now is a good time to read the book!

Amazon Bumps Prime Day To September

Each July Amazon hosts Prime Day, a sales spectacular for Prime customers with exclusive deals on everything from books to household goods. But this year it’s been bumped to September, all part of the company’s efforts to fulfill orders of essential items in a timely manner during the pandemic. This isn’t entirely surprising, as Amazon has previously de-prioritized book shipments from publishers to their warehouses, and the company has struggled to keep up with orders even after hiring additional employees.

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Read This Book: Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust

Welcome to Read This Book, a weekly newsletter where I recommend one book that I think you absolutely must read. The books will vary across genre and age category to include new releases, backlist titles, and classics. If you’re ready to explode your TBR, buckle up!

Girls Made of Snow and GlassThis week’s pick is Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust.

Content warning: None that I can recall!

Calling all fairy tale retelling fans! This is one of the best Snow White tales that I’ve ever read. Mina is a young woman with a heart of glass–her sorcerer father replaced her real heart and she grew up unaware, until one fateful day when she realizes just how different she is from other people. When her father secures them a place at court, Mina becomes convinced that she’s incapable of love, so the next best thing is being loved–so she’ll make the king fall for her. But marrying the king means becoming a stepmother to Lynet, the young princess.

Lynet has grown up in the shadow of her dead mother, pampered and over-protected when all she wants to do is run and explore. She adores no one more than her beautiful stepmother Mina, but when her father makes Lynet queen of the Southern Territories–where Mina is from–and then suffers a tragic accident, she sees that her stepmother is full of anger and hate, and she must flee her only home in order to survive.

This is a beautifully told, magical book about discovering who you truly are, and learning to be at peace with what you find. The fantasy world is also lush and intriguing, from a northern kingdom that’s destined to live in ice and snow, to a beautiful and exciting southern territory with universities, people, and exciting new opportunities. Bashardoust also rejects the idea of a prince character altogether, and instead creates a fascinating female surgeon who is keen to study medicine, and who intrigues Lynet to no end–it’s not much of a spoiler to say there’s a blossoming romance there! I loved how neither of the main characters is perfect–Mina’s guiding belief is that she’s unlovable, so she neglects to see just how much Lynet truly loves her, and Lynet believes that she’s destined to be just like her dead mother, failing to understand how she can bravely forge her own path. Bashardoust subverts the evil stepmother archetype by giving her a backstory and making her lovable, even if she doesn’t think she is, and the resolution to this story is so memorable that I can’t think of Snow White the same way ever again.

Bonus: The audiobook performance by Jennifer Ikeda is excellent, but I’m torn–I think I would love to experience this novel in print, since the language is beautiful and worth lingering over! Plus, look for Bashardoust’s newest fantasy book, based on Persian mythology, Girl, Serpent, Thorn out in July!

Happy reading!

Tirzah

Find me on Book Riot, the Insiders Read Harder podcast, All the Books, and Twitter.

If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, click here to subscribe.

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What the Royal Children Are Reading: Today in Books

The Murderbot Diaries: Fugitive Telemetry Cover Reveal

Murderbot Diaries fans, rejoice–there will be a new novella next year, and we have a cover! This series started out as novellas, but the first full-length Murderbot Diaries novel, Network Effect, just dropped this month. Fugitive Telemetry is a mystery novella, and it takes place between the events of Exit Strategy and Network Effect. Look for it in April 2021!

Legendary Paris Bookshop Reveals Reading Habits of Illustrious Clientele

Princeton University researchers have been working hard to digitize records acquired from Shakespeare & Company, an English language bookshop that first opened in Paris in 1919 and operated until the Nazi occupation of France (and was later re-opened under a different owner). The store also ran a lending library, and members included Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and many other influential literary thinkers of the 20th century. Their lending and reading habits are now on display, providing interesting insights to their creative processes.

The Royal Family’s Favorite Children’s Books

Want your kid to read like a royal? This round up includes picture books that members of the British royal family have either shared on social media, praised in interviews, or books that have been spotted in their photos and videos. Of course, Duck! Rabbit! is at the top of the list from Archie’s first birthday video, but there are some others that might surprise and delight you!

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Read This Book

Read This Book: The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

Welcome to Read This Book, a weekly newsletter where I recommend one book that I think you absolutely must read. The books will vary across genre and age category to include new releases, backlist titles, and classics. If you’re ready to explode your TBR, buckle up!

This week’s pick is The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich.

Content warning: Talk of genocide, alcoholism, sexual abuse/rape, brutality

I’ve not read Louise Erdrich’s entire (extensive!) backlist, but I picked up her newest book recently and I was completely blown away. Set in 1953 on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, this book follows Thomas, a night watchman, and Patrice, a young woman looking for her sister. Thomas guards the local jewel bearing plant at night, where he has plenty of time to correspond with various members of the Chippewa Nation as part of his job as council member. When he learns that Congress wants to revoke their treaties under the guise of setting the people “free” and selling their land out from under them, Thomas is alarmed and knows they must fight it. Patrice works at the plant, but her worries are a bit more personal–she’s scared for her older sister, who moved to Minneapolis and hasn’t contacted her since. Thomas and Patrice’s stories intertwine with others in their community as Thomas looks for a way to fight for their treaties, and Patrice’s eyes are opened to the dangers beyond her world.

All of Erdrich’s books are powerful, but this one especially took my breath away. She does such a brilliant job of setting the scene and she effortlessly contextualized so many historical events within the narrative. The people living on Turtle Mountain in the 1950s aren’t that far removed from the genocide and violence that first arrived on their land in the 19th century, and many of the young characters are survivors of the government schools. The phantoms of the past haunt the characters both literally and figuratively throughout the novel as they figure out how to keep living, even as the federal government wants to wash their hands of them. One thing that never fails to impress me about Erdrich’s writing is how she can write about such atrocities with a perfectly measured magical touch, so that you know exactly what she’s talking about without her ever having to spell it out for you, and as a result you feel what the characters are experiencing rather than simply absorb the facts of countless cruelties. This is a really powerful book that explores the past, but is a good reminder that these struggles aren’t over–they just keep repeating themselves.

Bonus: I listened to the audiobook version, which is narrated by Louise Erdrich herself, and it was a fantastic experience.

Happy reading,

Tirzah

Find me on Book Riot, the Insiders Read Harder podcast, All the Books, and Twitter.

If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, click here to subscribe.

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We’re Getting a Movie About Shirley Jackson!: Today in Books

The Shirley Trailer Asks: Who’s Afraid Of Elisabeth Moss?

Okay, Shirley Jackson fans, time to get excited–the trailer for a new movie titled Shirley dropped a couple of days ago, and it looks amazing! The film stars Elisabeth Moss as Shirley Jackson (the author of classics such as The Haunting of Hill House and The Lottery), who receives a young couple into her home as houseguests. It’s not long before the tension and strange events get to them all, and they go on to inspire one of Jackson’s horror novels. And to make this whole project even more Inception-like, the movie is based off of a book called Shirley by Susan Scarf Merrell!

Josh Malerman Announces Goblin

If you’re a fan of Bird Box author Josh Malerman, good news–he announced on Instagram that Goblin, a collection six short stories and novellas, will be released from Del Rey Books in 2021. Goblin was originally a Halloween 2017 release from Earthling Publications with a very limited print run that sold out, so this news is exciting for Malerman fans old and new!

Alison Roman Apologizes To Chrissy Teigen For Interview Diss

Chrissy Teigen, the author of the cookbook Cravings, tweeted on Friday what a “huge bummer” it was to read that fellow cookbook author Alison Roman disparaged her business model and success. In an interview, Roman called Teigen’s Instagram feed a “content farm” and said that her career choices “horrify me.” Teigen pushed back against Roman’s words (and Roman’s criticism of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up author Marie Kondo) by defending her business, hard work, and by pointing out that she’d always supported Roman–going so far as signing on to executive produce Roman’s new show. Roman has since apologized, but what a mess.

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Read This Book: The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen A. Flynn

Welcome to Read This Book, a weekly newsletter where I recommend one book that I think you absolutely must read. The books will vary across genre and age category to include new releases, backlist titles, and classics. If you’re ready to explode your TBR, buckle up!

This week’s pick is The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen A. Flynn!

Content warning: Chronic illness, nothing else that I can recall.

If you’re a Janeite who also likes speculative fiction of the mind-bending variety, this is a must-read for you! Rachel and Liam are two travelers who arrive in London in 1815 with carefully prepared aliases and the seams of their clothing sewn with a small fortune in bank notes. They’re from the future, where the Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics has discovered time travel and engages missions to the past–not to change history, but to study it. Rachel is a doctor who travels between disaster and war zones, and Liam is a famous stage actor. Their mission is complex, but has the potential to be groundbreaking back home: Befriend Henry Austen, a banker whose business is about to go under, and gain access to his sister, Jane. From there, they intend to steal Jane Austen’s unpublished manuscript, The Watsons.

This is a high-concept premise with a lot of heart. Rachel is our protagonist and narrator, and although this book begins with their arrival in the past, she seamlessly weaves in fascinating glimpses to her troubled home timeline (environmental disaster has brutally changed the landscape, and sentimentality for the past drives big endeavors) in between interesting tidbits about how to pass as a lady of the Regency era. Finding and befriending Jane Austen is a feat equal to any of the plots of her famous novels, with tense drawing room scenes, secret notes, and intriguing alliances behind closed doors. Flynn doesn’t sugarcoat what it was like to live in the early 19th century, but the advantage of a time traveler’s perspective is that Flynn gives the reader fascinating historical context for life in 1815 without being pedantic.

But what makes this book extra special isn’t necessarily the concept of time travel to meet Jane Austen, but the question of what if? Rachel and Liam have the opportunity to influence history, to try and save Jane Austen from an early death, even if it goes against their orders. Their dilemma puts them into an ethical gray area, and has them meditating about what it means to be famous after death, what artists owe the world, and how art endures. I love the journey that this book takes readers on–the destination might be unexpected, but the trip across centuries is memorable!

Bonus: I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by one of my favorite narrators, Saskia Maarleveld! She switches seamlessly between English, American, and Irish accents within scenes, making it a really fantastic performance!

Happy reading,

Tirzah

Find me on Book Riot, the Insiders Read Harder podcast, All the Books, and Twitter.

If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, click here to subscribe.