Welcome to your Saturday edition of Today in Books. Here’s a look at all the news from the world of books and reading we covered this week.

Welcome to your Saturday edition of Today in Books. Here’s a look at all the news from the world of books and reading we covered this week.

In response to the increase in attacks against trans rights, a group of crime fiction writers partnered with the Transgender Law Center to raise money to support them in their work to “champion the right of all transgender people and gender-nonconforming people to make their own choices and live freely, safely, and authentically.”

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

As we close out the first quarter of what is turning into the longest year in a nonstop series of long years, let’s take a few moments to look back at the biggest book censorship stories so far. Some of these stories will have links to read further, while others will be short summaries of what’s been going on. In an era where the news on book censorship is only continuing to escalate in number and in speed, pausing to catch up on the biggest stories helps give perspective on what’s come before, where we are now, and what to anticipate in the coming months.

From Individual School Bans to State Legislation

Though not a new phenomenon–and indeed, one written about here for years–this year’s collection of book censorship news makes something startlingly clear. What began as targeted attacks on individual books in individual schools, school districts, and public libraries has pushed upward to state-level legislation targeting these institutions and their staff. Just the number of librarian criminalization bills in 2025 alone shows how many state legislatures have folded to rhetoric spewed by high-level officials, as well as those on the ground.

None of this stops at the state level, though. The states are testing grounds for what the goals are at the federal level, as you’ll see shortly.

Utah and South Carolina Amp Up State-Sanctioned Book Bans

Severance is one of the most-talked-about television shows of the year. The Apple TV+ series starring Adam Scott, created by Dan Erickson, and directed by Ben Stiller is all anyone can think about. Especially after the season 2 finale.

It’s no surprise the show has been such a hit with horror fans. The thought of not having control of your own brain? The idea of a company doing things to you that are out of your control? Absolutely horrifying.

Unsurprisingly, these concepts have been played with in quite a few horror novels as well. Here are a few of the best horror novels like Severence to keep you entertained while you wait for season 3. Don’t worry. Ben Stiller promises the next season won’t take another three years to premiere!

The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris A lot of book lovers have dreams of snagging a job in the publishing industry. But much like Lumon, Wagner Books is potentially hiding some dark secrets. Editorial assistant Nella was the only Black woman at Wagner Books before Hazel arrives. Nella at first hopes to find an ally in Hazel, but something about her seems off. Then Nella starts receiving threatening notes at work telling her to “LEAVE WAGNER. NOW.” Nella is determined to figure out what’s really going on at Wagner and how Hazel is involved.

Lakewood by Megan Giddings Imagine taking on a job that promises to take care of your every need. The only catch is you have to basically sign away your humanity. Lena Johnson takes on a new job as part of a secret program in Lakewood, Michigan. They pay well. They take care of all medical expenses. They offer employees a free place to live. She just has to agree to participate in the company’s strange experiments, and she can’t tell any of her friends and family about what she sees there. She’s told the work their doing in Lakewood will change the world, but at what cost?

Howdy once again! Every other week or so, I collect some of the most intriguing comics-related headlines in one spot. Here is this week’s round-up.

News from DC and Marvel

Even as Superman is set to enter the public domain in less than a decade, the long, messy legal battle over who owns him right now staggers along with a new lawsuit concerning overseas copyrights.Speaking of which, a stage play about Superman’s creators, Jerry and Joe: Birth of a Superhero, will be performed in Rhode Island this May.NPR’s review of Daredevil: Born Again highlights a larger trend of superhero adaptations acting like they’re ashamed to be superhero adaptations.Stranger Things‘ Sadie Sink has been cast in 2026’s Spider-Man 4, but her role remains a mystery. The rumor mill suggests she will be playing Jean Grey, but only time will tell if that’s right or not. Get your bets in now, I guess!Playing the Penguin wasn’t enough for Colin Farrell, apparently. He is now up for another DC role: Sgt. Rock.

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News from the Wider Comics World

The Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics is open for submissions until May 1!Fans of the One-Punch Man anime can finally breathe a sigh of relief. After a six year gap, Season 3 will finally arrive in October of this year.The manga series Claymore is heading for a live-action adaptation on CBS. The show’s executive producer is Masi Oka, best known as the time manipulator Hiro Nakamura on Heroes. Whether he will also play an on-screen role is still unknown.HBO’s head of comedy talked a bit more about the cancellation of The Franchise, their superhero-film-themed satire, and why it might not have connected with audiences.Here at Book Riot, we revealed the cover and provided a sneak peek at Marker Snyder’s upcoming middle grade graphic novel First Kiss With Fangs.

Stephen Graham Jones is one of the most prolific authors, and this makes me extremely happy because his books are awesome. His latest novel is no exception: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is deliciously disturbing.

Now, I’ve read my fair share of vampire novels, but this one definitely leaves a mark on the body of literature about sun-averse, sharp-fanged, generationally-wealthy blood hunters. If you’ve read any Stephen Graham Jones before, you’ll be happy to know that he’s in fine form once again. (If you haven’t read SGJ yet, where on earth have you been? Get thee to a bookshelf quick and grab literally anything this man has written!!)

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones The novel opens with a frame narrative. It’s the story of a woman named Etsy teaching at a university and trying to earn tenure. When she’s granted access to a newly-unearthed journal from over a century ago penned by her great-great-grandfather, she seizes it as an opportunity to secure her job status. But what she discovers in this journal is nothing she could have expected. Her ancestor, Lutheran pastor Arthur Beaucarne, opens his tale amidst a series of disturbing murders in 1912 Montana. As the local authorities attempt to discover the killer in their midst, Arthur begins hearing the confessions of a new member of his congregation–a Native American man called Good Stab. As Good Stab’s incredible tale unfolds, it brings 19th century colonial histories of genocide into the 20th century. Deeper and deeper into the past we go, and as we do, SGJ’s inventive and bloody tale unfolds with increasing suspense. This is one of those books you don’t realize you can’t put down until you try to.

I recently shared my suspicions about the consequences of a lack of media literacy. The critical skills that allow people to apply context, curiosity, and proof of validity when consuming information have never been more important. A quote from Sam Wineburg, PhD bears repeating:

I’ve come to believe that reliable information is to civic health what clean water and proper sanitation are to public health. Never has so much information been at our fingertips as it is today. Whether this bounty will make us smarter and better informed or more ignorant and narrow-minded will depend on one thing: our educational response to this challenge.

What better place to start than the library? Whether it’s through the school or the public library system, there is a wealth of information available to help learners of all ages, and it falls to librarians to make these resources easy to find and navigate.

When I mentioned Ọlábísí Àjàlá to my Yoruba teacher she told me he died a bad death. He also liked women too much. I could tell because I was reading his travel memoirs, An African Abroad, and in them he describes almost every woman he meets as beautiful: his KGB-appointed travel guide, Natasha; a French-Arab sex worker in Damascus; the shah of Iran’s wife, Queen Farah; his friend of a former-Nazi-soldier friend, Barbara; Golda Meir. The book’s existence is itself proof of his dependency on women, as it was typed up and edited by his wife, Joane Àjàlá, the third of at least five separate marriages across four continents.

I’ve been doing my Yoruba lessons online for three years and forget most things I learn; in my Notes app I have long lists of words that passed straight through me. So I’d forgotten that we’d learned about Àjàlá already when I found a copy of An African Abroad, written in English and published just three years after Nigerian independence. I rediscovered that Àjàlá’s journeys began in earnest in 1952, when he set off from the University of Chicago to California on a bicycle wearing traditional Nigerian robes. This was also the start of a lifelong infatuation with statesmen, who are thanked as a group in the preface. An issue of Jet magazine from December 1952 records under the headline “Cross-Country African Cyclist Gets Movie Role” that he was given a small part in White Witch Doctor after screen-testing at the recommendation of Ronald Reagan.

After a valiant last stand involving a radio tower and a hunger strike, he was eventually deported from the U.S. for forsaking his UChicago studies and (allegedly) issuing fake checks. He reentered the U.S. and married, got divorced, moved to the UK and married there as well before resuming his travels, this time along the length and breadth of the Eurasian landmass from 1957 to 1963: A roundabout journey from Indonesia to Israel armed with a scooter and nowhere near enough travel documents. This is the period An African Abroad covers. He finds himself constantly in trouble. Borders often make themselves felt, in the simplest sense, as barriers placed between people and their desires. Even more so for citizens of the Global South. Àjàlá did not like these borders. At a farewell party thrown by Radio Jerusalem, in Jerusalem, where he’s been working for a few months, he lays out his plan to cross the militarized no-man’s land between Israel and Lebanon on scooter. His justification conflates the personal and the geopolitical. He says first that as an African he should not be legally bound by the rules of a conflict between Arabs and Israelis, and second that he can’t be bothered to go the long way around.

I was hooked. I sent many friends quotes from the book, and still more pictures. In this particular border-crossing attempt, he was surrounded by a convoy of Jeeps and soldiers only a few miles into Lebanon, and they negotiated for hours. To make clear his commitment to staying in the borderlands if they denied him entry, Àjàlá brewed coffee, put a tent up, and ate (apparently) preprepared sandwiches. With nightfall approaching, the soldiers reluctantly arrested him, but not before they took a photo, which appears in the book.

Richard Sharpe Shaver, born 1907 in Berwick, Pennsylvania, became a national sensation in the forties with his dramatic accounts of a highly advanced civilization that inhabited Earth in prehistoric times. An itinerant Midwesterner, he’d been employed as a landscape gardener, a figure model for art classes, and a welder at Henry Ford’s original auto plant. He gained public attention as a writer who asserted that descendants of those early beings still live in hidden underground cities, where they wield terrifying technology capable of controlling thoughts. Many readers agreed with Shaver, and a splashy controversy ensued.

Public fascination with his writings subsided during the fifties, but Shaver continued searching for evidence of a great bygone civilization. In about 1960, while living in rural Wisconsin, Shaver formulated a hypothesis that would captivate him for the balance of his life: some stones are ancient books, designed and fabricated by people of the remote past using technology that surpasses anything known today. He identified complex pictorial content in these “rock books.” Images reveal themselves at every angle and every level of magnification and are layered throughout each rock. Graphic symbols and lettering also appear in what he called “the most fascinating exhibition of virtuosity in art existent on earth.”

Frustrated that the equipment needed to fully decipher the dense rock books was lost to time, Shaver undertook strategies to make at least a fraction of the books’ content clearly visible. Initially, he made drawings and paintings of images he found in the rocks, developing idiosyncratic techniques to project a slice of rock onto cardboard or a wooden plank. Shaver also produced conventional black-and-white photos using 35 mm film, often showing a cross section of rock alongside a ruler or a coin to indicate scale. Sometimes he highlighted imagery by hand coloring the prints with felt pens. He attached photos to typewriter paper where he added commentary: he describes the rock books, interprets images, details his photo techniques, and expresses disappointment at the conspicuous lack of academic or journalistic interest in his findings.

Shaver and his wife, Dorothy, moved in 1963 to Summit, Arkansas, where he established his Rock House Studio on their small property. There, in addition to painting, he processed and printed film. His efforts at illuminating the rock books moved away from painting and toward photography in his final years. That shift may have been influenced by his perception that viewers interpreted the paintings as a product of his imagination rather than an objective record of ancient artifacts. Shaver wrote, “People will believe photos and won’t believe drawings or paintings… the camera wins, by being honest. Which doesn’t say much for artist’s honesty, I guess. We try… but people think we lie.”

Shaver made small books on paper at his studio—some illustrated with his drawings or collages of rock photos—which he produced with a local printer. He kept his manuscripts in file folders with colorful hand-lettered titles. As many as twenty booklets were planned; five of them, plus a brochure about “pre-deluge art stones,” are known to have seen print. Each one views the prehistoric library in stone from a different angle. “Giant Evening Wings” is named after swarming ape-bats that threatened the ancient Amazons; “Blue Mansions” features the undersea Mer people; “The Vermin from Space!!!” paints a bleak picture involving rock books, mind control, and flying saucer sightings: “We are a remnant of an ancient race, adrift on a dying world and the parasites of space circle us, looking for a place to sink in their sucking tube.”

Though he is most often associated with New England, Robert Frost (1874–1963) was born in San Francisco. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard, taught school like his mother did before him, and became a farmer, the sleeping-in kind, since he wrote at night. He didn’t publish a book of poems until he was thirty-nine, but went on to win four Pulitzers. By the end of his life, he could fill a stadium for a reading. Frost is still well known, occasionally even beloved, but is significantly more known than he is read. When he is included in a university poetry course, it is often as an example of the conservative poetics from which his more provocative, difficult modernist contemporaries (T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound) sought to depart. A few years ago, I set out to write a dissertation on Frost, hoping that sustained focus on his work might allow me to discover a critical language for talking about accessible poems, the kind anybody could read. My research kept turning up interpretations of Frost’s poems that were smart, even beautiful, but were missing something. It was not until I found the journalist Adam Plunkett’s work that I was able to see what that was. “We misunderstand him,” Plunkett wrote of Frost in a 2014 piece for The New Republic, “when, in studying him, we disregard our unstudied reactions.” We love to point out, for example, that the two roads in “The Road Not Taken” are worn “really about the same,” as though to say that your first impression of the poem—as about choosing the road “less traveled by”—was wrong. For Plunkett, “the wrongness is part of the point, the temptation into believing, as in the speaker’s impression of himself, that you could form yourself by your decisions … as the master of your fate.” Subsequent googling told me that Plunkett had been publishing essays and reviews, mostly about poetry, rather regularly until 2015, when he seemed to have fallen off the edge of the internet. After many search configurations, including “adam plunkett obituary,” I found a brief bio that said he was working on a new critical biography of Robert Frost, the book that would become Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He responded to my October 2022 email, explaining that he had “stopped writing much journalism as of 2015 so as to avoid distractions from a book project that I thought would take an almost unfathomably long time—two years or perhaps even three. Seven years later, I’m doing my best to polish the third draft.” Just as Plunkett is the unique reader of Frost interested in both our studied and unstudied reactions to the poems, he is the unique biographer of Frost whose work is neither hagiography nor slander. His is a middle way of which, I think, Frost would approve. Recently, we talked on the phone about why Frost has become uncool, Greek drama, and, relatedly, the soul.

 

INTERVIEWER

What makes you and Frost a good fit?

Welcome to Today in Books. In this weekend edition, a look at all the news Book Riot covered this week.

I love watching five-star prediction videos on BookTube, partly because we’re often so wrong about what we’re going to like. I can pretty reliably predict which books I’ll give a four-star rating because that’s where the majority of my reading falls: they’re books I enjoyed but haven’t risen to the level of all-time favourites. Five stars is a trickier prospect, though—almost by definition, they need to surprise me. They’re the books that really knock my socks off, and it’s hard to see those coming.

So, today I’m placing my bets on the next book I’ll give five stars. I have five options, ordered from least to most likely. There are two factors here: the first is which book I’m actually going to read soon, and the second is my rating.

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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

24 New York Times-Recommended Fiction Books for Spring

Spring is right around the corner! Time to make some decisions about which books you’re going to take outside while you breathe in that fresh, verdant air. If you need an assist with your seasonal TBR, The Times has a list of 24 novels to look forward to. Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping, is bound to be a bestseller, I’m looking forward to reading Tilt by Emma Pattee (full disclosure, I know her, but as you can see I’m not the only one excited about this book), The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones is also on this horror fan’s list, as are Ocean Vuong’s much-anticipated The Emperor of Gladness, and Flirting Lessons by Jasmine Guillory. This list is a great reminder that we’re set up for a sensational season of reading.

We Need Diverse Books Inaugural Reading Day!

Well this is the fun and uplifting news I needed at the end of an exhausting week. The esteemed and hardworking team over at We Need Diverse Books is organizing a day to celebrate diverse books and reading. Readers are encouraged to pick up books by people from marginalized communities on April 3rd. As many voices from the WNDB team, including Dhonielle Clayton (Blackout) and Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist), message, it’s important to make sure diverse books are on those shelves because everyone stands to benefit from reading books that represent the underrepresented. WNDB will be posting resources on how to find diverse books and will provide a diverse book to an underresourced school for every $10 donated. Schools and readers could use all the help they can get these days. Check out this article for more information on why diverse books are important and how you can participate.

Charlotte Beradt began having strange dreams after Hitler took power in Germany in 1933. She was a Jewish journalist based in Berlin and, while banned from working, she began asking people about their dreams. After fleeing the country in 1939 and eventually settling in New York, she published some of these dreams in a book in 1966. Below, in a new translation from Damion Searls, are some of the dreams that she recorded.

 

Three days after Hitler seized power, Mr. S., about sixty years old, the owner of a midsize factory, had a dream in which no one touched him physically and yet he was broken. This short dream depicted the nature and effects of totalitarian domination as numerous studies by political scientists, sociologists, and doctors would later define them, and did so more subtly and precisely than Mr. S. would ever have been able to do while awake. This was his dream:

Goebbels came to my factory. He had all the employees line up in two rows, left and right, and I had to stand between the rows and give a Nazi salute. It took me half an hour to get my arm raised, millimeter by millimeter. Goebbels watched my efforts like a play, without any sign of appreciation or displeasure, but when I finally had my arm up, he spoke five words: “I don’t want your salute.” Then he turned around and walked to the door. So there I was in my own factory, among my own people, pilloried with my arm raised. The only way I was physically able to keep standing there was by fixing my eyes on his clubfoot as he limped out. I stood like that until I woke up.