Category: This Week In Books

A bit of a light week in books and publishing with the Thanksgiving holiday, but a few noteworthy things:

J.K. Rowling Sends Books to Syrian Fan

Bana, a seven-year-old girl live-tweeting her experience in rebel-held Eastern Aleppo, (she has over 141,000 followers!) saw the Harry Potter movie and loved it. Her mom realized she couldn’t get the books in Syria and reached out to Rowling on Twitter–the author responded and sent Bana the ebooks to read. A tiny but bright literary spot out of Syria, where the news is rarely good.

Public Library Books Defaced with Swastikas

Evanston public librarians discovered several books about the Middle East had been defaced with swastikas and racial slurs in the days leading up to a public lecture on the Middle East. The library has reported the incident to both the police and the Southern Poverty Law Center, and states that “those who are caught defacing library materials will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” Hate crimes have been sharply on the rise since Trump’s election, and the fact that they’re moving into our libraries, which should be centers of tolerance and open-mindedness, is very chilling.

New Feminist Classics to Read

On the flip side of a rise in hate crimes, the election has also brought about a metric ton of lists of books to read about feminism, immigration, climate change, and other social justice issues. Flipping (or scrolling) through them often brings up the same titles over and over, so this list of 40 new feminist classics–only those published in the last 10 years, both fiction and nonfiction–is refreshing.

Thanks to Searching for John Hughes for sponsoring This Week in Books.

For as long as Jason Diamond can remember, he’s been infatuated with John Hughes’ movies. From the antics in National Lampoon’s Vacation to the teenage angst in The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink to the insanely clever Home Alone, Jason could not get enough. And so the seed was planted in his mind that he should write a biography of his favorite filmmaker. It didn’t matter to Jason that he had no qualifications, training, platform, or direction. Thus went the years-long, delusional, earnest, and assiduous quest to reach his goal. What he did get was a coming-of-age story that fills the pages of this unconventional, hilarious memoir.

2016 National Book Award Winners

Black lives and stories took center stage at this year’s National Book Awards, hosted last week by Larry Wilmore. The highest honors for fiction (The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead), nonfiction (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi), and young people’s literature (March: Book Three by Congressman John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell) all address America’s racist history and its ongoing impact. These books would have been important and worthy in any year, but they feel especially necessary in these post-election days. What a timely reminder of the power of literature.

Let us all follow the advice Whitehead gave in his acceptance speech: “Be kind to everybody, make art, and fight the power.”

Teen Vogue Introduces ‘Lit Review’ Book Club

Look, I know it says “teen” in the title, but this is one publication we should all be paying attention to. Teen Vogue is under new leadership, and its content and social media presence have been on fire for the last several months. They’re doing the work to encourage young people to be worldly and socially conscious, and the new Lit Review book club is one more fantastic piece. The inaugural selection is Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. With a tone-setter like that, this is bound to be a project to follow.

Fox Commits to Passage Pilot

Justin Cronin’s Passage trilogy fizzled to an end with the May release of The City of Mirrors, but the story will find new life on the screen. Fox has committed to produce a pilot to be written by Liz Heldens (of Friday Night Lights) and directed by Matt Reeves (co-creator of Felicity). Perhaps most interesting among the details is the note that Fox 2000 won rights to the first book all the way back in 2007–when it was only half-finished!–in a bidding war for $1.75 million. Hold onto your hats. If this one gets picked up, none of us will be getting much sleep.

Thanks to Letters of Note: Volume 2 compiled by Shaun Usher for sponsoring This Week in Books.

From the editor of the New York Times bestseller and instant classic Letters of Note, comes this companion volume of more than 125 captivating letters. Each turn of the page brings delight and discovery in a collection of correspondence that spans centuries and place, written by the famous, the not-so-famous, and the downright infamous. Entries are accompanied by a transcript of the letter, a short contextual introduction, and a spirited illustration—in most cases, a facsimile of the letter itself. As surprising as it is entertaining, Letters of Note: Volume 2 is a book of endless enjoyment and lasting value.

Tennessee Parent Wants Textbook Pulled 

A mother in Tennessee (and founding member of Sullivan County Parents Against Islam Indoctrination, because of course) is calling for the pulling of a history textbook because it “promotes Islamic propaganda” by saying factual things about Islam, like that it exists, and that it has a long and interesting history, and what that history is. This specific case has been going on for awhile, but in our new atmosphere of emboldened racism and xenophobia, I expect we’ll see a sharp uptick in this sort of thing.

Medieval Book Curses!

Hand-crafting a book during the Middle Ages was excruciatingly time intensive, and it turns out that scribes protected their work by adding medieval curses to the beginning or last pages of their books. The curses threatened painful death and excommunication for anyone who caused damage to the book. Perhaps a good idea for those of you who routinely have books people borrow from you returned damaged?

You’re More Likely To Land on the Best-seller List if Your Name is David Than If You’re a Minority

The Bookseller Magazine has analyzed the top 500 best-selling books of the year, and found that a writer has a better chance of landing on the list if their name is David than they do if they come from an ethnic minority background. There were only six authors of color on a list of 500 titles–and that’s actually an improvement over previous years. Yay?

Thanks to Swoon Reads for sponsoring This Week in Books.

Swoon Reads publishes the latest and greatest in YA fiction with the help of readers and writers like you. We’re dedicated to the undiscovered, and we seek out the very best in bright, new bookish talent. From heroic epics, to alien adventures, to all-the-feels romance—if you’re loving it, we’ll publish it. We involve our community in every step of the publishing process, and work closely with selected writers to get their book ready for publication. Together, we bring new stories to life, because we believe that great books are better shared.

Harry Potter Yoga Exists

Texan yoga instructors designed a Harry Potter-themed yoga class to boost attendance (which worked, the class sold out). It’s complete with Harry Potter-renamed posts like Slytherin Cobra and Downward Fluffy. Also, there are wands. And “invisibility cloaks” for savasana (those are just regular blankets). Yoga already has cultural appropriation issues, and this feels like taking that to a whole new level.

A Bookstore “Scream Room”

Bab Aldonia, a Cairo bookstore, is now providing a sound-proof Scream Room where customers can go and yell away the stress of daily life and of living in a large city (there’s also a drum set in the room, if banging on a thing makes you feel better). This is an excellent idea, and it seems like tomorrow is a good day for American bookstores to install something similar. We all have some stress to scream out.

The Most Valuable First Editions of 20th Century Literature

Keep your eyes peeled when you’re at used bookstores–these five books are the most valuable first editions of 20th century literature in existence. There aren’t many surprises here, though I would count the presence of the first James Bond novel and the absence of any books by women at all as a little eyebrow-raising. None of Virginia Woolf’s books are more valuable than a James Bond novel? Really? Ok then.

Thanks to Swoon Reads for sponsoring This Week in Books.

Swoon Reads publishes the latest and greatest in YA fiction with the help of readers and writers like you. We’re dedicated to the undiscovered, and we seek out the very best in bright, new bookish talent. From heroic epics, to alien adventures, to all-the-feels romance—if you’re loving it, we’ll publish it. We involve our community in every step of the publishing process, and work closely with selected writers to get their book ready for publication. Together, we bring new stories to life, because we believe that great books are better shared.

Statistics About the “Girl” Book Title Trend

Over at FiveThirtyEight (take a break from election stats, y’all!), novelist Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven) takes a deep dive into the numbers–courtesy of Goodreads–to find out what, exactly, is going on with all these books with “girl” in the title. You’re not imagining it; they really are proliferating. Up from about 0.4% in 2008, when Lisbeth kicked off the trend with the US publication of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, nearly 1% (that’s a lot!) of all book titles this year will contain “girl.” Mandel presents several interesting findings, most notable among them the fact that the titular girl is three times more likely to be dead at the end of the book if the author is a man.

New Pricing Structure in Amazon’s Physical Bookstores

When Amazon first opened bricks-and-mortar bookstores last year, book prices in-store matched the discounts available at amazon.com. Now, though, Amazon’s discounts are available in-store only to Prime members, while non-members are charged the book’s full list price. It’s clear that Amazon wants to sell more Prime memberships, but any increase this in-store change yields will be a barely detectable drop in the bucket for the behemoth company. So what remains unclear is: what larger strategy are they trying to clarify with this small experiment?

Voting Opens for Goodreads Choice Awards

The first of three rounds of voting in the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards launched November 1. Each of the twenty categories includes fifteen books identified by Goodreads’ undisclosed statistical analysis method, and the results are indicative of not only trends in reading but ongoing systemic problems in publishing. At Book Riot, Jamie Canaves examines why not a single title in the Best Mystery & Thriller category is by a person of color.

A Party Game for the “Rude and Well-Read”

Electric Literature has launched a Kickstarter to fund Papercuts, a Cards Against Humanity-style party game for the bookish set. The deck contains prompt and answer cards, and when the Editor reveals a prompt, each player selects an answer from the eight cards in their hand. A random draw from the deck we received at Riot HQ revealed references to literary characters and events, industry trends, jokes about authors’ bad behavior (“incendiary Facebook post from Anne Rice,” LOL forever), and some deep cuts from the world of MFAs and writers’ colonies. Get your book club to chip in for a shared deck.

Thanks to Swoon Reads for sponsoring This Week in Books.

Swoon Reads publishes the latest and greatest in YA fiction with the help of readers and writers like you. We’re dedicated to the undiscovered, and we seek out the very best in bright, new bookish talent. From heroic epics, to alien adventures, to all-the-feels romance—if you’re loving it, we’ll publish it. We involve our community in every step of the publishing process, and work closely with selected writers to get their book ready for publication. Together, we bring new stories to life, because we believe that great books are better shared.

Shakespeare Gets a Co-Author

The Oxford University Press (no slouch when it comes to the academics of Shakespeare, obviously) is officially crediting Christopher Marlowe as co-author of Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays. The new co-authorship credit is based on comparison of the language used in the Henry plays to other Marlowe works, and this is the first time a major publisher has gotten behind “Shakespeare trutherism.”

Real-Life Hogwarts to Open in 2017

We’re all a little bummed we didn’t get our letter to Hogwarts as kids, and now you don’t need one. A real-life school of witchcraft and wizardy is opening next year in France, complete with a sorting ceremony and classes in potions and charms. Two catches: only 100 students will be admitted, and all lessons will be conducted in French. Opportunity to do your best Fleur Delacour?

A Strange History of Books Bound in Human Skin

Because it’s Halloween, have a long-read about the (naturally) dramatic history of books bound in human skin. My favorite tidbits: doctors were some of the first to bind books in…people…, often using the skin of executed criminals to bind books about the criminal’s exploits. Also, someone bound Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in skin, which seems especially inappropriate and icky.

Chimamanda’s Feminist Suggestions

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the best fiction writers doing things with feminism today, and she gave us a gift on Facebook of all places in her Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. It’s a letter to a new mother about raising a daughter in a feminist way, and she recommends everything from considering the language you use to speak to your children, to never speaking of marriage as a woman’s ultimate achievement. Well worth a read, whether you have children or not (and no matter their gender, if you do).

Thanks to Thrill Me by Benjamin Percy for sponsoring This Week in Books.

In Thrill Me, best-selling author Benjamin Percy dissolves the boundaries between literary and genre fiction. He explores how Cormac McCarthy, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stephen King, and others engage plot, character, dialogue, and suspense. He also makes clear the literary importance of “exploding helicopters, giant sharks, robots with laser eyes, pirates, poltergeists, were-kittens, demons, slow zombies, fast zombies, talking unicorns, probe-wielding martians, sexy vampires, barbarians in hairy underwear…”Percy’s distinctive blend of anecdotes and advice, round out a perfectly thrilling roadmap for writers and readers hoping to understand how and why the best fiction keeps us riveted to the edge of our seats.

POTUS’s Essential Reads

President Obama is serving as a visiting editor of Wired magazine in November, but prelude to that, he has given them a list of 10 books everyone should read. It’s a mix of a couple of more recent titles and some all-timers, which is a bit Obama in a nutshell–a little pop-culture, a little old-time politics.

Bob Dylan Isn’t There

Here it is a couple of weeks after Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature, and Dylan still hasn’t said…anything. No acknowledgment of any kind. And the Nobel committee isn’t happy. At this point, it’s not clear that Dylan will show up for the ceremony, take the money, or have anything to do with the most prestigious artistic award in the world. If I were a betting man, I would not put a thin dime on Dylan doing anything more than what he has already done.

Claudia Rankine To Open Racial Imaginary Institute

Fresh off her Macarthur “genius award,” Claudia Rankine is planning to start a institution that will be a “space which allows us to show art, to curate dialogues, have readings, and talk about the ways in which the structure of white supremacy in American society influences our culture.”

It isn’t clear yet what form it will take, but it will be located in lower Manhattan. Also, whiteness will be an explicit topic, which isn’t (or perhaps even often) a focus of projects that center on race. Culture, Rankine, thinks is at the leading edge of how people talk and think about race, so policy isn’t currently part of the plan.

Thanks to TryAudiobooks.com for sponsoring This Week in Books.

Listen While You Cook!  While spending hours in the kitchen prepping meals for the holidays, put on a good audiobook and let the story help you along.

Cooking for Picasso and The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living are great cooking memoirs or you can listen to Where Am I Now? Read by Mara Wilson herself!  Let audiobooks be your secret ingredient this holiday season.

Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

Many people were surprised at the news this week that Bob Dylan had won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Rumors, though, that Dylan could win the prize have been circulating for years, and 20 years ago, Allen Ginsberg himself wrote to the Nobel committee nominating Dylan. Dylan is the first American to win the award since Toni Morrison in 1993, and it will likely be some time before another American wins.

For my part, I think Dylan is absolutely deserving of the Nobel, but I wish someone else would have won. The Nobel exists to recognize outstanding achievement in literature and has unparalleled power to introduce underknown writers to the world. There is probably no Nobel literature winner who was and is better known than Bob Dylan. Even if the Nobel committee was interested in expanding the range of what can be considered literature, surely there are myriad singer-songwriters from countries around the world they could have chosen.

I will close, though, with my favorite “literary” Dylan song, “A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall,” a Woody Guthrie/Allen Ginsberg mash-up that manages to become its own aesthetic.

HarperCollins UK Launches a Site Dedicated to Literary Events

Literary events range from tiny book groups in local libraries to enormous, multi-day literary festivals. And even in a medium-sized city, it is very difficult to keep track of what is going on at bookstores, college campuses, libraries, arts centers, and on and on.

BookGig, from the UK division of HarperCollins, is trying to solve that problem for readers, though just for UK literary events for now. The site is meant to be publisher agnostic, so that events from all kinds and sizes of publishers will be included (smart) and submitting an event for inclusion is open to all (tricky). The underlying premise of BookGig seems to be that more people would go to literary events if they had better information. This is possible. It is also possible that people make the effort to find out about the events, authors, and venues they care about despite the difficulty, and that more information won’t necessarily lead to more attendance. We shall see.

Random House Experiments with Short-form, Direct to Readers

Publishing has started dipping its collective toe in the direct-to-reader world, from branded ereading apps, to ebooks deals newsletters, to exclusive deals on publisher websites.

Season of Stories, from Penguin Random House, is a twist on these experiments: free, email stories from PRH authors, including Anthony Marra, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Adam Johnson. Through the fall and winter, subscribers will get a complete story emailed to them weekly.

What does PRH want from this? Could be exposure for its authors. Could be finding out if there is appetite for direct, short-form content. Could be email acquisition for other projects. It seems like a low-cost, innovative effort with a definite beginning and end. So, it clears several of the requirements for a useful experiment.

Before you go, check out this pretty great giveaway we are running. We’ve got 5 advanced, signed copies of George Saunders’ upcoming novel, Lincoln in the Bardo to give away. And not just that: winners will also receive the complete Saunders backlist. So go here to enter if that is interesting to you, or just click the image below.

National Book Foundation Announces Its 2016 Finalists

The 20 finalists for this year’s National Book Awards were announced early last week, five each in Fiction, Poetry, Non-Fiction, and Young People’s Literature. Based only on buzz, here are my predictions for the winners in each category:

Fiction: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Non-fiction: Nothing Ever Dies by Viet Than Nguyen
Poetry: The Collected Poems by Rita Dove
Young People’s Literature: Ghost by Jason Reynolds

New Arundhati Roy Novel Coming in 2017

Next year, Arundhati Roy will publish her second novel, a full twenty years after her debut blockbuster The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize. Her new novel will be called The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and will come out sometime next year. Roy, though, has been extremely productive in the intervening decades since her last novel, writing a range of essays and non-fiction books.

Amazon Prime Now Includes 1,000 Free Books and Magazines

Starting on October 5th, Amazon Prime members now have access to a rotating list of 1,000 ebooks and magazines as part of their membership. Some big-time magazines like Cosmopolitan and National Geographic are included, and among the books are a number of best-selling, if not recent, titles, including The Hobbit and the Harry Potter series. Each month, the selection will switch, though it’s not clear if it will be a complete turnover or if some of the included material will always be part of the deal.

This Week in Books is sponsored by The Lovely Reckless by Kami Garcia:

Frankie Devereux would do anything to forget the past. Haunted by the memory of her boyfriend’s death, she lives her life by one dangerous rule: nothing matters. At least, that’s what Frankie tells herself after a reckless mistake forces her to leave her privileged life in the Heights and transfer to public school in the Downs, where illegal street racing is more popular than football.

Marco Leone is the fastest street racer in the Downs. Tough, sexy, and hypnotic, he makes it impossible for Frankie to ignore him. But the risks Marco takes could have devastating consequences. Will Frankie risk what little she has left to follow her heart?

The Exposing of Elena Ferrante

For the past several years, Ferrante has been the darling of literary fiction. Her quartet of books known has The Neopolitan Novels have sold exceptionally well, especially for fiction in translation. And her real identity (Elena Ferrante is a pen-name) has been the subject of rumor and speculation.

But last week, The New York Review of Books published an investigation that seems to have discovered her real identity. The tone and attitude, not to mention the intrusion into her financial records, though, have much of the literary world unhappy with the NYRB. I have to say I agree. Ferrante is now a genuine literary figure, and as such is part of history. In due time, I think knowing who she was would have been an inevitable part of literary history, but how and why and when we do history matters. In this regard, the NYRB doesn’t seem like an historian, it seems like paparazzi.
New Dan Brown Novel Coming in Fall 2017

Dan Brown announced last week that his next novel, called Origin, will be published in September 2017. It will again feature Robert Langdon, this time involving a plot that will center on humankind’s “two biggest questions.” Presumably, one of those questions will be about something in the area of the origin of the universe and/or humans. You don’t, however, need to be a symbologist to figure out that it will also be about history, art, and a series of delightfully implausible clues.

The National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35

Each year, the National Book Foundation honors five debut novelists under the age of 35 who show exceptional promise. The cash value of the award is only $1,000, but what it provides in status is incalculable. And it is always an extremely interesting list. This year’s honorees are:

Brit Bennett, author of The Mothers
Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing
Greg Jackson, author of Prodigals
S. Li, author of Transoceanic Lights
Thomas Pierce, author of Hall of Small Mammals

This week in books is sponsored by Last Seen Leaving by Caleb Roehrig.