Ghosts and ghouls and spirits, oh my! Blame it on my early obsessions with Halloweentown and the Addams Family, but I just can’t get enough of the creepy, kooky, and ghostly every year when fall comes around. I want some frights, but I want them in a sort of cute and tame way, you know? Which is exactly what these 10 ghostly middle grade books are perfect for. They’ve got chills and thrills, sure, but nothing that’ll keep you up at night. (Well, probably. I guess I’ll let you be the judge of that.) And whether you’re a young reader or an adult looking for some spooky season nostalgia — like me! — these ghostly middle grade books are just the thing for some good fall reading.

From ghost girls trying to prove they can be just as terrifying as any other spirit to amateur sleuths piecing together clues to solve a haunting, these middle grade mystery and horror novels have all the spooky delights you could ask for this fall. You might even find a few witches and exorcisms in their midst! And if you’d rather read about witches or zombies or vampires, I guess that’s okay, too. But you and I both know there’s nothing quite like a ghost story on a fall night.

Happy haunting, readers! And maybe keep the nightlight on, just for good measure.

The Girl and the Ghost by Hanna Alkaf Having a ghost for a best friend might sound like a dream come true for a shy girl like Suraya, but the pelesits she inherited from her grandmother — who she names Pink — has a dark side. And when she makes a human friend for the first time, Pink’s jealously gets the better of him, finally forcing Suraya to confront the possibility that the ghost she loves might be doing more harm than good.

Ghost Squad by Claribel A. Ortega Ghosts are part of the family business for Lucely Luna, whose father runs a ghost tour and has breakfast with her family’s spirits that reside in a backyard tree. But when she and her best friend Syd accidentally cast a spell just before Halloween that awakens malicious spirits, they have to reverse the curse and save the town they love along with Syd’s witch grandmother, Babette, and a cat named Chunk. It’s a wonderfully fun story with all the best parts of a Halloween tale from ghosts to witches to curses.

 

Nancy Lemann’s work is deceptive in its meandering. She is thinking deeply even when it seems as if her thoughts are floating. Her laser powers slice into idiocy (and dice it) while they also beam sympathetically onto, as she would call it, the folly of the human condition. Her work evokes something old-fashioned in its manner and tone, and this proves to be a way she keeps herself from being subsumed in the clichés of modern culture even as she is examining it. But she is observing the human being of today. One of her passions is history, with particular attention to architectural preservation and travel. Though she is describing us, we feel she is looking at us from another time, through the lens of the ages.

Nobody writes like Nancy Lemann. You might recognize slivers of other writers within her work, writers whom she first revered: Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Hardwick, Barry Hannah, and her beloved mentor, Walker Percy.

Ted Berrigan was the first in the circle of poets around the Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church to ask me to design an announcement mailer for one of his readings. He encouraged others to do the same. In the late sixties, I designed a number of flyers and covers for mimeographed poetry books. These gave me the first public exposure for my work.

Ted and I saw one another off and on for about five years. In the spring of 1970, we lived together on Saint Mark’s Place in the East Village, until June, when Ted went to teach a course in Buffalo. I moved into the artists Rudy Burckhardt and Yvonne Jacquette’s loft on East Fourteenth Street while they summered in Maine. Ted stayed with me for a number of weekends that summer, and he proposed that we undertake a collaborative book. As I remember, I began the collaboration by making drawings with empty word balloons. I’m pretty sure Ted provided the project’s title at the outset. Ted would take the drawings—I think I made them in batches of four or five—back to Buffalo, where he began to fill in the words. We went back and forth this way, sometimes in person, sometimes by mail. I had forgotten all about this collaboration by the time Ted Berrigan’s youngest son, Eddie, contacted me in the summer of 2018. He wanted to bring me something his father and I had done together, which had recently turned up. As I looked at sixteen pages of my drawings and Ted’s handwritten words, the memories came back. These diaries describe some of them, along with the artistic milieu I was in in New York at that time—which included the painter Martha Diamond and the poets Bernadette Mayer, Michael Brownstein, Anne Waldman, and John Giorno.

The summer of 1970 was a turbulent time in our relationship. Where would Ted be in the fall, and with whom? Could I live with someone and make my work in the same space? In September I moved out of Rudy and Yvonne’s place and into a loft on Grand Street in Little Italy. One day, Ted came to pick something up while I was at work. I had left him a note saying that I couldn’t go on with the relationship. He left a note in response, clearly upset. Separately, we each created one more drawing for our collaboration. I made an angry alternative version of the cover and Ted made an angry drawing for the end. Neither of us ever saw these private expressions of pain and disappointment until Eddie brought the long-ago collaboration to me in 2018. I had kept mine over the years, and now here was Ted’s.

In the end, Ted and I remained great friends. When I completed a new piece, he’d often be the first to see it. His enthusiastic reactions and always interesting observations meant the world to me. When he died in 1983 at age forty-eight, I realized that he had been my mentor. One thing I learned from him was to always finish what I began. I learned that when I kept going, past the hope of creating anything good, I often had my breakthroughs. 

When we asked Terrance Hayes to make a playlist for you, our readers, he wrote us a poem. Of course he did. As Hayes told Hilton Als in his Art of Poetry interview in our new Fall issue, formal constraints offer him “a way to get free.” Many of Hayes’s poems derive their titles from song names and lyrics; others are influenced by the mood of a particular album or track. Music, he tells Als, “changes the air in the room.” This particular playlist-poem has a track for almost any kind of air—or room—you might find yourself in this week. Read and listen to “Occasional Soundtracks” below.

Soundtrack for almost any morning: “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You” by James Ray

Soundtrack for twelve minutes in the bathroom: “Mind Power” by James Brown

Soundtrack for grooming: “Look” by Leikeli47

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Curious what it looks like to run for school board? Wondering if now is your time to step up and help provide governance for your local education system? Let’s dive in.

It’s no secret that school board elections right now are crucial. It’s also no secret that some school board candidates — even in nonpartisan elections — are being funded by right-wing political action committees to infuse the board with specific conservative agendas. Groups like Moms For Liberty run trainings across the country, hoping to get their agenda on the local level to further remove the voices of any non-white, non-straight, non-Christians from schools (and to help accelerate the process of destroying public school funding more broadly). While certainly these groups have money and people behind them, they do not speak on behalf of an entire community, and it is crucial that those with talent, passion, and an interest in serving all of a community, rather than a cherry-picked portion of it, put their name into the hat of serving on the local school board.

The following is applicable to most school boards in the US, but because no information is uniform across the country, spend a little time ensuring you know the steps and process for your municipality. Each state has an association of school boards, and those websites will be flush with updated information and insight into the rules specific to your location.

How To Run for School Board

Determining Eligibility and Time Commitment

Familiarize yourself with what school boards do. It might sound silly to say that, but it is vital to know what you may or may not be able to do with a role on the board. Know when your next school board election is and how many seats will be up for election. Research the candidates in those seats currently to determine if you want to run against them or wait to run until another candidate’s seat is available. In some cases, you may see an open seat you want to run for, but your residency does not meet the boundaries of that seat. Some are district wide “at large,” meaning you represent the entire district and some come from specific limits within a community, meaning you’d represent a specific part of a community. (Note: you can access some school board information for eight states in the US with our School Board Project Part 1 and Part 2). Make sure you are eligible to run. Every state is different, but in general, you must be 18, have no felony convictions, are not employed by the district for which you’re running, and you live in the district. Some states have educational requirements as well. Prepare to volunteer — most school board positions are unpaid. School boards are, by design, inequitable and thus, those without financial strains have more ability to serve. Know that you’ll spend 15-20 hours a month, if not more, doing school board related work. Some state school board associations clock that time much higher. School boards are, by design, inequitable and thus, those without work, family, or extracurricular strains have more ability to serve.

Qualities of Good School Board Candidates

I’ve written about my book club for Book Riot before. It’s been one of my favorite things for almost ten years. How our book clubs works, generally, is that each member takes a turn choosing a book. Everyone reads it, and then we meet once a month to discuss that pick. When you choose the book, you lead the discussion. That means, yes, if you choose the book, you ask the questions. 

At my book club, each meeting begins with the discussion leader sharing why they chose the book and what they thought about it. Maybe they chose the book because it’s a buzzy new book that they’re excited about or maybe it’s a classic that they have been meaning to read for years. Their initial thoughts are usually just a quick summary — they thought it was exciting, they thought it was boring, it was a slow start but got better — and then they, popcorn-style, ask someone else in the group for their initial thoughts. This primes the pump for the rest of the conversation, and often the book club discussion goes fairly smoothly from there. But, if it doesn’t, then the person who chose the book is in charge of keeping the conversation going. 

This has led to varying degrees of panic over the past ten years — less now than then, but still sometimes now. But after more than 100 book club meetings, I’ve learned a few things about what makes a good book club question. 

A good book club question invites your book club to get talking. My book club’s first question is sort of a no-judgment zone. The point is just to start talking. The first few quiet moments of book club can feel a bit like staring at a blank page that needs to be filled, so your goal with your first question is just to break that silence. A good book club question is concerned about character. Even the most plot-driven story is driven by people on the page making decisions and going about their days. So what do you think about the characters in your book? But don’t just ask if they were likable. Were they believable? Do their decisions make sense? Would you do the same in their situation? A good book club question is an investigation. Authors love to leave clues in their work, little allusions to work that inspires them. Is there an epigraph in the beginning of the book? What book (or movie or play or song) is it from? What might that have to do with the book you hold in your hands? Do the characters listen to a particular song? Is it a real song or invented for the book, like “Never Let Me Go” was invented for the book of the same name? A good book club question directs the conversation outwards. Does this book have something to say about the larger world? If it’s an old book, does it still feel relevant, or do the ideals of the characters seem dated? If it’s a new book, does it talk about the world in an interesting way, or does it seem to beat a dead horse? A good book club question might be the result of — or inspire — a Google search. When you read the book, did you come across any questions that drove you to a web search? Maybe you’re curious about the bookstore the characters visited. Is it real? Is it based on a real store? Or maybe you want to know where the author is from, and how that influenced the book. Ask your book club members what they think! A good book club question imagines what might have been different. My book club recently read a book where the first quarter of the book was about a conversation in a graveyard. Would the conversation have been different if it had taken place in a barn? Or in a restaurant? What if it was a different genre? Sometimes imagining something different about a book shows you what is essential about the book. A good book club question might come from a reading guide — or it might not. These days, many books have a URL on the back flap or maybe on a back cover that invites you to download reading guide questions. (If not, you can Google “BOOK TITLE + discussion questions” and usually come up with something.) These can be a great starting point, and there was a point in my life when I was committed to printing these guides out or saving them in my notes app so I knew I would always have a question handy. They’re useful, especially when they provide some background to the book, but I wouldn’t rely on them. Going down the list of questions often feels like you’re going through a school assignment. A good book club question gets various — and sometimes conflicting! — answers. The most boring book club conversations I’ve ever been a part of were the meetings where everyone liked the book. When you just sit in a circle and agree with each other, there’s just not much to go on. The most fun, on the other hand, were when we had a 50/50 split of people who loved the book and people who absolutely hated it. The fun of book club is in learning about your book club members through their opinions of the book. The best book clubs are the ones where I leave with a head full of different ideas about the book than I had when I walked in. A good book club question inspires respectful and kind conversation. The fastest way to kill a conversation is to make someone feel silly or stupid for their opinion or because they misremembered a plot point. Book club arguments are a delight, but everyone has to understand that the stakes at book club are low: you don’t need to agree, and you don’t have to convert someone to liking the exact same things about a novel that you do.

Hopefully, this list gave you some great ideas for how to keep the conversation rolling at your book club! If you want great book club discussion questions that can work for any book, check out this list!

Want some rules to keep your book club running? Here’s what my book club does. Here are some great picks for your book club to read this fall!

With a backlist of over a dozen novels and novellas, Colleen Hoover isn’t a new author. Since publishing her first novel in 2012, the romance writer has earned the loving nickname of CoHo and has worked to cultivate a huge following of devoted fans. She started a Facebook group in 2016 called Colleen Hoover’s CoHorts that is still active today with over 130,000 members gushing about her work. Other groups have sprung up dedicated to talking about her individual novels, like this one for Verity with over 30,000 members. Hoover is the 2nd most followed author on Goodreads.

Since TikTok’s emergence into the literary scene, she’s been dubbed the “Queen of BookTok,” accumulating over 800,000 followers and hundreds of videos under the hashtag #colleenhoover. According to Hoover’s publisher Atria, her most popular books on TikTok have spent a combined 151 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Novels like It Ends with Us published in 2016 were back on the list in 2022 with staying power. What about Hoover and her books has resonated so much with TikTok?

Her TikTok Content

It doesn’t take long to see why Hoover is so engaging on her TikTok. Videos with her mom and family and the realities of authorhood give viewers a glimpse into who she really is. She posts updates about her books of course, glimpses of a new manuscript, and announcements about release dates along with duets with readers sobbing at the end of her emotional rollercoaster books. But she also posts videos of her “hot mess” life, posting even when her mic cuts out or when she forgets her mouse and keyboard on a writing getaway eighty miles from home. 

As someone with chronic depression and anxiety, wild mood swings are just a normal part of my life. Sometimes, I’m bursting with frenetic energy, barely hanging on for dear life as I do All The Things. Other times, I’m flattened by chronic fatigue, barely able to function.

But a new emotion has been building up inside me these past few years, coating my insides with acid and leading me to isolate myself from others: rage.

The source?

Manifold.

There’s the growing resentment that comes with being a woman who engages in a huge amount of emotional labor, who makes sure things are running smoothly before she attends to her own career and mental health. There’s the fear and frustration that come from seeing entire communities controlled and silenced and erased via fascism, the fall of Roe v. Wade, the varied legislation attempts that seem born out of cruelty more than anything else. There’s the growing impatience that comes with seeing seemingly rational people radicalized, seeing them embrace individualism over collectivism.

I always get excited for September — even though I’m long past back-to-school days, September feels like a new start, and it’s the time when I’m ready to learn a ton of new things. I’ve got my shiny new school supplies ready, and now I’m looking forward to diving into books that will teach me new things and take me new places. Fortunately, September is also an excellent month for brand-new books to gobble up to do just that! 

From memoirs of all kinds to true crime to graphic nonfiction, there’s something for everyone in this month’s batch of new releases — I also have my eye on a paperback release, Thicker than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis by Erica Cirino, which comes out September 22. This month’s nonfiction new releases also take place all across the world, so they’re perfect for learning about new places and a bit of armchair traveling. 

There are many more books coming out over the month of September, but here are 10 nonfiction new releases I am particularly excited to check out, and I think you should be too! The publication dates are listed after each title to make it easier to add to your never-ending TBR pile.

Regardless of how much weight you subscribe to awards — they are, after all, from humans subjectively picking their favorite — award lists can still be a great place to find your next read from. There are so many awards that it’s definitely like standing in the cereal aisle, inside another cereal aisle. It’s hard to know or hear about all of the awards and then there’s the most recent awards and all the previous years and an immediate feeling of “Where do I even start?”

Since I love and read so many crime books (mystery, thriller, suspense, true crime — and everything related!) I decided to take a look at the many annual mystery awards to pick out the ones that are my favorites. So now you have the subjective judgment of the judges, and me! Basically we’ll pretend they’ve been judged twice so double murdery seal of approval for must-read best award winning mystery novels!

I checked out all the info I could find on about 16 different annual awards for mystery novels and picked out the ones that I was like “Yup, yup, great book, all the awards!” Below you’ll find a range of mystery books, and one true crime, with the year and award they were honored with (While I listed one award for each many of them are multiple award winners!). But first you may want to whisper some sweet encouragement to your TBR list because it’s about to get heavy with these 20 great reads.

It’s September! September feels like one of those weird in-between months, not quite summer, but not quite fall either. At least, not here in Tennessee. While October is full of pumpkins and Halloween prep, and August is full of pools and playgrounds right before school starts, September is just sort of there. But while the month may feel a bit nebulous, September children’s book releases are spectacular. I had the hardest time ever narrowing down my selection to 12 books. I could’ve easily made a list of 20. In picture book new releases, some of my favorite authors and illustrators, like Julie Flett, Ryan T. Higgins, and Kate Messner, return with new books. In middle grade new releases, Kwame Alexander returns with possibly his best book yet, and several books explore mental health in really meaningful ways. 

Many authors on this list have tweeted about how their books will not be carried by Barnes & Noble after B&N’s decision to shelve only the top 1-2 bestselling children’s books per publisher. This decision disproportionally affects marginalized authors. I encourage readers to buy locally or buy online from places like bookshop.org. If a local bookstore isn’t carrying a book you want, call and ask them to stock it. 

September Children’s Book Releases: Picture Books

During the COVID confinement and afterward, I watched around sixty films starring Cary Grant. What a comfort to have him in my mind before I slept. No matter if he is comic or desperate, self-possessed or wounded, romantic or cool, he is ridiculously good-looking and seems never to know this. I love it when he puts his hands on his waist and pushes his hips forward as if about to dive or perform some acrobatic trick. His slim, athletic torso and long arms are always tanned. Sometimes he wears a fine shimmering gold medal around his neck. I love his dark eyes that have not forgotten his youthful suffering. He makes me laugh when he rolls his eyes around with his own special brand of sophisticated nonchalance. Though he isn’t aggressive, he doesn’t seem weak either. I find him buoyantly masculine. I can’t resist watching him. A few days ago, on a flight to Los Angeles, I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s hugely entertaining thriller North by Northwest again. Grant was fifty-five when he made this film and long past his box office peak in the screwball comedies that made him famous. In the Hitchcock film he wears a nice-fitting, light gray suit with a gray silk tie and cuff links. The suit gets dirty, sponged off and pressed, then dirty again. Grant’s hair is a little gray, too. I don’t wear ties anymore, but I would wear a tie worn by Cary Grant. North by Northwest appeared in 1959, around the time that he was experimenting with medical LSD and searching for more “peace of mind,” as he called it. I don’t really know what a great actor is, but I think Grant is sensational.

—Henri Cole
Read Henri Cole’s recent essay on James Merrill here.

In a scene midway through Whit Stillman’s Barcelona, which I rewatched this week, the Spanish Marta (played by a not-so-Spanish Mira Sorvino) is explaining to patriotic American naval officer Fred why her friend Montserrat has left his also American cousin, Ted.

I took over the Paris Review softball team this year because the former captain, Lauren Kane, left the magazine for a big job at The New York Review of Books just before I was hired, and someone noted during my first week that I might be a good replacement because I “like sports” (i.e., I sometimes watch Premier League soccer on weekend mornings). I am not, strictly speaking, an athlete, and had never played a full game of softball; still, wanting to be amenable, I agreed and found myself on the phone intermittently all spring with the New York City Parks Department, trying to get our field permits nailed down. At one point I was arguing with someone about the timing of sunset on a specific day in July.

The list of things I didn’t know about softball when the season began in May is long and comical. Among them: Not every field has bases—if you don’t bring them, you might need to use your shoes as second and third. Turf can be very slippery and you should expect bloody knees and have a first aid kit on hand. The play is often at second, and even more often at first. Pitching badly is sometimes actually preferable to pitching well. You can run through first base but not the other ones. You have to shift over in the field when a lefty is batting. You should not attempt to catch with your bare hands, even if it seems like the ball is coming at you very slowly. Right field is actually kind of a chill place to be, except when it isn’t. It all comes down to the quality of your ringers—and sending people shamelessly pleading emails to get them to show up to your games.

When I arrived to play our first game, against Vanity Fair, I didn’t even know how many outfielders a team required. It was a bleak beginning of the season, pre–Memorial Day; there were only seven of us, most of whom had never played and the rest of whom hadn’t practiced. I had expected  a few people hitting around jovially in the summer twilight, and instead we arrived to face a team of guys who were saying things like, “My favorite spring ritual is dusting off my cleats!” One of them got really mad at me over the way I was standing at first base. (I was standing wrong.) We lost 27–1. I was surprisingly demoralized by the experience and wasn’t relishing the concept of forking my summer evenings over to what seemed like the perfectly miserable pastime of taking the subway up to Central Park to get crushed. All in all it seemed like it was going to end up being a raw deal, being softball captain—the kind of thing I would try to foist on someone else next summer. In our second game, we lost 11–3 to The Drift.

DAY ONE

I sit at the long blond pine table I use for a desk. Nothing happens. Maybe I can make something happen.

A few years ago there was a popular self-help book called How To Make Sh*t Happen, never mind that peristalsis is involuntary. I eat some mango slices and a green apple and a banana. I drink twelve ounces of whole milk with a scoop of whey protein. I find a leftover fried artichoke in the fridge, wrapped in aluminum foil.

I listen to Michael Gielen conducting Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, but it’s not loud enough.

Johann Peter Eckermann was born in 1792. In 1823 he sent Johann Wolfgang von Goethe a collection of his essays about the writer’s works, and he became Goethe’s literary assistant till the latter’s death in 1832. The following is an entry from Eckermann’s diary that recounts one of their early meetings.

Thursday, September 18, 1823

Yesterday morning, before Goethe left for Weimar, I was fortu­nate enough to spend an hour with him again. What he had to say was most remarkable, quite invaluable for me, and food for thought to last a lifetime. All Germany’s young poets should hear this—it could be very helpful.

He began by asking me whether I had written any poems this summer. I said that I had written a few, but on the whole had not felt in the right frame of mind for poetry. To which he replied: