Riot New Media

Big Books in Busy Fall Publishing Season

It’s the biggest time of year in books. Most of the book-buying happens in the fall, and there are always major titles coming out in anticipation of holiday buying. Many media outlets are rounding up their picks, so I’ve gathered a few of them here for your perusal. A round-up of round-ups, if you will.

The Wall Street Journal’s Books Every Geek Should Read This Fall

Amazon’s Big Fall Books Preview

The Huffington Post’s 20 Books You Need on Your Shelf This Fall

BuzzFeed’s What Book Should You Read This Fall? Quiz

Entertainment Weekly’s 55 Books to Read This Fall

You might also be interested in the Fall Books episode of our own All the Books! podcast.

What Will Obama Write?

President Obama is already of course a best-selling writer, but it seems that his most interesting days as an author will likely come after he leaves the White House. Apparently, President Obama still has one book left on his existing contract with Crown (an imprint of Penguin Random House), though that contract was from before he was elected, and it seems unlikely that those terms will be met (either ripped up, re-negotiated, or otherwise altered to reflect his enormous sales potential). But the most intriguing detail here is that President Obama has always wanted to write a novel. Books by former presidents are nothing new, but a literary novel by one is news indeed. Here’s keeping our fingers crossed.

Alabama Willing to Put People in Jail for Library Fines

Under funding pressure, the Athens-Limestone Public Library in Athens, Alabama will begin enforcing an ordinance in which patrons who “fail or refuse to return” library materials are subject to up to $100 in fines and/or up to 30-days in jail. 

The library reports that it has over $200,000 in overdue library materials outstanding and that it would much rather receive the overdue materials than enforce the ordinance. The ALPL’s move runs counter to many recent amnesty efforts from some public libraries to combat the same problem.

Thanks to Still a Work in Progress by Jo Knowles for sponsoring This Week in Books.

In a return to middle-grade fiction, master of perspectives Jo Knowles depicts a younger sibling struggling to maintain his everyday life when his older sister is in crisis.

Noah is just trying to make it through seventh grade. The girls are confusing, the homework is boring, and even his friends are starting to bug him. Not to mention that his older sister, Emma, has been acting pretty strange, even though Noah thought she’d been doing better ever since the Thing They Don’t Talk About. The only place he really feels at peace is in art class, with a block of clay in his hands. As it becomes clear through Emma’s ever-stricter food rules and regulations that she’s not really doing better at all, the normal seventh-grade year Noah was hoping for begins to seem pretty unattainable. In an affecting and realistic novel with bright spots of humor, Jo Knowles captures the complexities of navigating middle school while feeling helpless in the face of a family crisis.

Baton Rouge School Library Destroyed in Historic Floods

There are many heart-breaking, jaw-dropping stories coming out of Louisiana in the wake of recent destructive flooding there. As is often the case in these kinds of situations, there is destruction of many kinds and help needed in many ways.

Glen Oaks Elementary lost its entire library collection. The school librarian there, Trey Veazy, is asking for donations to help refill the shelves for the new school year. They’ve set up an Amazon wishlist and are open to receiving mailed books as well:

Glen Oaks Park Elementary School
Attn: Trey Veazey
2401 72nd Avenue
Baton Rouge, LA 70807

Drive to Turn Langston Hughes Home into Cultural Center

The brownstone where Langston Hughes lived the last decades of his life is a national historic landmark, but that doesn’t mean it is insulated from a still-gentrifying real estate market in Harlem. Worried that his house would be turned into high-end condos, Rene Watson, director of the I, Too, Arts Collective, decided to try to do something about it.

After speaking with the owner of the building, she has launched a fund-raising drive to turn the the townhouse into a cultural center for the neighborhood. Under a lease agreement, the center would renovate and outfit the building for public use and sign an initial three-year agreement. The drive’s goal in $150,000 and there are a few days left in the campaign.

Penguin Random House Opens “Penguin Shop”

Penguin Random House Canada is opening a small (158 square feet, small) store on the first floor of its Toronto office tower. Featuring Penguin-branded merchandise and a rotating selection of about 300 titles, PRH Canada imagines the store as part reader-engagement and part R&D lab.

The store’s concept seems to me part and parcel of other company stores located in corporate buildings (the NBC store in Rockefeller Center comes immediately to mind). These outlets are there to sell stuff, to be sure, but as much as anything they are about establishing a brand and identity. And in publishing, Penguin’s iconic logo and classics series comes just about as close to a real consumer brand as exists.

There are always more books that need buying, so we have another $100 of spending money on Amazon to giveaway. Go here to enter, or just click the image below…