So you’ve seen Jordan Peele’s Nope and you’re looking for what to read next? Here are a few ideas. Warning: minor spoilers connected to the themes of the movie Nope to follow.

You’re probably here because, like me, you haven’t been able to stop thinking about Nope, the latest film from everyone’s favorite horror director Jordan Peele. There are a lot of moving pieces in Peele’s latest film that all add up to one thought-provoking and terrifying whole. It’s a surprising take on alien invasion/UFO horror. It’s a monster horror film that includes social commentary about media spectacles, exploitation, and more. It’s a horror film about the art of filmmaking. And of course, because it’s Jordan Peele, there are also plenty of moments that are funny.

Part of the reason Nope is living rent-free in our collective minds at the moment is because it is such a unique film. There’s nothing out there that’s exactly like it. However, there are lots of novels that you’re sure to love if you’re looking for fiction that contains certain elements of Nope. So if you’re looking for smart alien invasion/UFO fiction, monster horror with social commentary, or horror novels about filmmaking, I’ve got quite a few recommendations for you! Nothing will be quite the same experience as watching Nope for the first time, but these books come close. And they’re also just excellent in their own right. Read and see for yourself!

Smart Alien Invasion Fiction

Should we still study Shakespeare? There isn’t a simple answer. For one thing, it depends what is meant by “study” — perhaps a better question, at least as far as answerability goes, is should we still read Shakespeare? Yes, read Shakespeare if you want to. Essay over.

Should academics still analyze and interpret and research Shakespeare? That is a little less easy to answer. Certainly there are not likely to be new discoveries made at this stage, but why limit new people from asking “Who was Shakespeare?” as if he didn’t write his own dang plays, as if we haven’t been down this road a million times. But why not, right? Academia does not inherently object to repetitiveness in subject. If anything, it thrives on it.

Should Shakespeare still be taught in high school? Now that is interesting. And the answer is: Maybe. But I would argue that the value of his writing is not as much its historical importance (though that exists) but its lasting influence. What can we learn from Shakespeare? Quite a lot, actually. Should we still read Shakespeare? Eh, whatever. Should we still learn from his work? Actually, I don’t think we can avoid it.

I truly cannot overstate the influence Shakespeare’s work has had on the English language. He invented — or is the first recorded usage of — over 1700 words, some of them compound words or verbed nouns, others wholly original; these include eyeball, bedroom, and…kissing? Was he the first person to call a dog pup a puppy? Apparently!

But he also invented common phrases and idioms. If you’ve seen better days, you’re quoting As You Like It. Haven’t slept a wink? Cymbeline. If what’s done is done, Macbeth, but if it was a foregone conclusion, Othello.

Many readers, when they hear about audiobooks for the first time, or when someone encourages them to try them out, often show concern about the medium. They worry that consuming a book in this manner will be something difficult to do, or not give them the same joy reading in print does.

I completely empathise with this worry, and I accept that audiobooks aren’t for everyone. While several readers rejoice about how audiobooks made it possible to have a reading life again by helping them focus on a story when print became too demanding, many others claim exactly the opposite: that they can’t seem to be able to focus on what they’re listening to.

Both experiences are valid, and although I am a massive audio fan, I can envision how and why it may not work for some.

In my own personal experience, listening to audiobooks wasn’t an entirely straight path either; I even wrote about that, and how I found ways to practice my focus, going from radio comedies and dramas to podcasts, all the way to audiobooks.

There is a reason why we at Book Riot have written several articles giving tips to those who wish to pick up audiobooks but don’t know how, or tried it and found out they couldn’t. Because, sometimes, it indeed requires practice and persistence.

Every year, a ton of queer books come out during Pride Month. I lost track of how many it was this year, but a quick glance at my new release spreadsheet (yes, I have one) reminded me that there were 10 queer releases on June 7th alone that I’d either read or was planning to read. And that was just one release day, and just the books that interested me, one reader.

All of these new queer books are very exciting, but, news flash: queer people exist year round. The deluge of queer books in June sometimes feels a little bit like publishers appeasing us — like as long as they release a ton of LGBTQ+ books in June, they can ignore us the rest of the year.

No, no, no, no. Around here, we read queer all year. And, happily, there are tons of amazing queer books coming out this summer and fall, even if they haven’t all gotten the buzz they deserve. These are 20 of the ones I’m most excited about. Some I have already read and fallen head-over-heels for, and some are at the top of my TBR. A few are already out (July 12 was a big day for queer books!) and the rest are ready and waiting for your preorders and library holds.

As always when I make lists like this, I am amazed and delighted at the breadth of queer lit we’re being treated to right now. From poignant family dramas and middle grade retellings to fantasy adventures and environmental essays — there is truly something for everyone.

Hopeful stories for kids are so necessary right now. After all, it isn’t an easy time to exist in the world. I feel perma-stressed, and it gets worse each time I check Twitter or look up the news. And I’m not alone. I see the tension in my friends’ hunched shoulders and dark-ringed eyes. Many of us aren’t having the easiest time coping with the world — dealing with the harsh realities of COVID, racism, and the environmental crisis, plus much more — and kids can feel that stress in us.

As a librarian, patrons constantly ask if I have any recommendations about books that can gently, intelligently, and honestly explain to kids about all the Big Scary Topics. You know, those big themes that we adults still barely comprehend. But the good news is that the answer is yes — there are hopeful stories about difficult topics and this list holds a few of my favourites.

I’m defeatist when it comes to taxes (meaning: I don’t understand deductions and pay whatever TurboTax tells me to), but I’m fascinated by those who aren’t. In 2001, for example, eighty thousand Black Americans filed for reparations with the IRS. Some made this their actual business. For $500, you could pay a self-taught financial advisor named Vernon James to apply on your behalf for a “Black Investment Tax Credit,” as he did for more than three hundred clients. James, who is Black, had a capacious “yes, and” attitude that bound together the case for reparations with workaday “Taxation is theft” libertarianism. Speaking to CBS in 2002, James asserted that Americans, whether Black or white, didn’t have to pay up come April. “The IRS took money from slaves. They are taking money from Americans. That is an investment. They have a right to get it back.” The IRS cut a number of claimants their requested checks, ranging from $40,000 to $100,000 per return and totaling more than $1 million. On realizing what had happened, the agency swiftly demanded their money back. James was sent to prison for six and a half years for tax fraud.

I discovered James in the midst of a depressive spell—that is, post my filing in 2015. It was a summer of right-wing memes about white slavery. After Dylann Roof’s attack on a church in Charleston renewed opprobrium of the Confederate flag’s public prominence, Southern Cross supporters began trotting out claims about Irish ancestors in American bondage. “At some point, you just have to get over it,” a Mississippi man told a Washington Post reporter at a rally in support of the banner of Dixie, the you being Black people, the it being slavery’s legacy. 

It was also the summer of Rachel Dolezal. Sometimes, especially when you’re broke, your brain attempts a haphazard alchemy with the elements at hand: why not appropriate and invert James’s enterprise? One could set up a fake service, analogous to James’s: the White Inheritance Tax Credit, for which, for a mere $500, the supposed descendants of Irish slaves could apply—only, rather than filing their IRS Form-2439s on their behalf, one would just keep the service fee. The WITC has remained a speculative exercise. Every year after tax season—while recovering from the handover of my ill-begotten gains—I’ve found myself instead doing some ritual tinkering with a half-formed novella about a Vernon James figure serving white customers. (He’s usually white in this telling, for some reason, though he doesn’t have to be—perhaps it’s a nod to Dolezal.) 

Over time, I’ve compiled a five-page document collating my research that I should probably retitle. This year, I made it through the reading list in SHIT ABOUT WHITE SLAVERY.docx to John Hersey’s 1964 novel White Lotus. Like many works of alternate history, the book concerns an American populace vanquished, the victor in this instance not Hitler’s Germany or Hirohito’s Japan but warlord-era China. The titular narrator recounts her experiences following the U.S. defeat in the “Yellow War,” beginning with her capture as a teenager in Arizona, where her village is ransacked by a group of white jazzbo musicians in a Packard touring car, blasting “Stormy Weather.” She’s marched to Los Angeles, where captured whites are billeted in abandoned film lots before being shipped across the Pacific. In Hollywood she sees a Chinese person for the first time, describing his skin as “the underside of the stretching foot of a desert snail” and “the color of curds.”

At my old job, I wrote descriptions of objects; at my new job, I write descriptions of talks, concerts, classes, Jewish holiday services, and other events.

Once I was in the business of selling matter. Now I am in the business of selling time.

But how to use it?

“For me as a kid,” writes Darryl Pinckney in a memoir in the Review’s Summer issue, “the film had everything I couldn’t have: cigarettes and train stations, late nights and drinking. Sex.” The film in question is Paris Blues (1961), directed by Martin Ritt and starring Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman. In honor of Pinckney’s essay, the Review and Metrograph cohosted a screening of the film on the evening of Sunday, July 10—the first in an ongoing series of cohosted evenings. Before a sold-out theater, Pinckney greeted the enthusiastic audience with a talk that spanned the glory of Sidney Poitier, the changing role of race in postwar cinema, and dreams of integration and artistic integrity. Today, we are publishing his remarks in full.

The black character entered mainstream postwar cinema as a social problem. This is the milieu of Sidney Poitier’s debut, in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out in 1950. He is a doctor, and the black community beats off the white mob come for revenge on Poitier’s character after a bigot’s brother dies in his care. Two decades went by before a network television station was willing to air the film in prime time. In Richard Brooks’s Blackboard Jungle (1955), Poitier is thirty-one years old but completely convincing as a bright, ambivalent black student at a high school troubled by violent ethnic rivalries and nihilistic juvenile crime. In The Devil Finds Work (1976), James Baldwin recalls that Harlem audiences bayed at the Sidney Poitier character at the end of Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958). A black convict is suddenly free of the white convict he’s been chained to for more than an hour on-screen, but he falls off the train he hopped on to escape, because he extended his hand too far to the white convict, who had been giving him such an awful, racist time. Poitier found a film world opposed to the Hays Code, segregation, and McCarthyism by temperament as well as from principle. He fit right in. He worked with the best people right off. These films were made with studio commitment, if not entirely wanted by them. The black director Lloyd Richards made a Broadway hit of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun in 1959, but he was passed over when it came to the making of the film, which featured the original cast, including Sidney Poitier. The film came out in 1961, a few months ahead of Paris Blues.

As the sixties went on, Poitier’s characters saved white women: a blind girl in A Patch of Blue (1965); a suicidal woman in The Slender Thread (1965); a rich girl who doesn’t need saving in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967); and the peace of mind of the widow of a murdered factory owner in In the Heat of the Night (1967). No wonder Poitier went in for comedies in the seventies, light detective fare, his version of the blaxploitation film that provided professional relief from social-problem dramas, not to mention a chance to project images of black characters formed by pressures not having to do with a white executive’s ability to accept them. But we identify Poitier with those daring social dramas. He embodied the moral superiority of—what to call it—blackness, black spirit, black people when in conflict with the dupes of their own white racism. His intelligence and good looks and poise and strength left race theorists on their own ground. Like Paul Robeson, Poitier didn’t have to be accounted for. He was box office magic.

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For someone who spends most of life reading and writing, dance is a miracle. Literature twists language to get at truth, but dance circumvents it altogether. Of course, this is only true at the moment of performance; the work of dance is full of language–often commands, usually unheard by the audience. Milka Djordjevich’s CORPS, which I saw at NY Live Arts a couple of weeks ago, invites us to consider the interplay of communication and labor in dance. It opens with a two-word command, “Snaps, go,” spoken by one of six dancers in drab gym uniforms as they march into view, fingers obediently snapping. When another says “no-head, go,” they begin to shake their heads, still snapping. This continues, with about forty moves in different combinations—from sources including military drill, ballet, and cheerleading—for the first half of the piece. (My personal favorite was “pointers,” a raffish shaking of double finger-guns that I plan to try at my cousin’s wedding). It’s a strangely anarchic, nonhierarchical performance of command-giving: any dancer can call the next move, and the official vocabulary is interspersed with chatty asides. Controlling their own collective fate, they still end up doing things that none of them seem to want—like jumping up and down for what feels like ten minutes, breathless, awaiting instruction. Anyone who has had a job, or a family, will recognize the inertia of the group project. In the second half, the drill team, now in gold-spangled, softly jingling, not-quite-matching costumes, begins a magnificent disintegration, each dancer interpreting the moves from the first sequence in their own ways, then getting weirder, ultimately collapsing into a pile on the floor. There they chat, all speaking at once, repeating everyday phrases until they morph into new ones (“in or out/in and out/In-N-Out/have you been to In-N-Out?/best burgers…”). This psychedelic segment is a bit more exciting than the flawed austerity that precedes it, but you can’t choose a favorite—each half relies on the other for meaning. 

—Jane Breakell, development director

For his 1973 anthology The Oxford Book of Light Verse, W. H. Auden included poetry that took as its subject “the everyday social life of its period or the experiences of the poet as an ordinary human being.” The collection, which includes Byron and Pope, confirms that “lightness” doesn’t preclude “greatness.” I wonder: would Auden consider Tim Key’s Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush light verse? Certainly, it tackles contemporary social life from the perspective of an everyman—it takes place during COVID lockdown in London, featuring a poet-narrator who traipses around the capital while talking on his iPhone. 

The book, subtitled “an anthology of poems and conversations,” is difficult to classify. It has theatrical and fantastical touches, and Key revels in an absurdity that verges on nonsense poetry—but this isn’t that. Maybe if you squint a bit—or a lot—you could call it vers de société. As with Key’s first lockdown anthology, I felt I was encountering a comic novel. It’s a preposterous volume, in which “the Poet” is contemptuous, rash, insecure, ridiculous, and farcically ordinary. His personality comes through so strongly in these pages that it’s easy to imagine him delivering each line, exasperated mumbles and all. Here’s a silly example, from “Leaning”:

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Amazon has released the first full-length trailer for its upcoming series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It’s set in Middle-earth thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. 

The new trailer promises to live up to the epic fantasy descriptor, with end-of-the-world stakes, a huge and beautiful world to explore, and an ensemble cast, including a young Galadriel and Elrond. Galadriel has seen an apocalyptic vision of death and destruction set to shatter the peace currently reigning over Middle-earth, and she is unconvinced by Elrond’s attempts to reassure her. As usual, though, there is also a group of hobbits, the Harfoots, that seem poised to take center stage.

The trailer shows glimpses of Elven and Dwarven realms, the home of the Harfoots, and more. We also see what appears to be Two Trees of Valinor.

The eight-part series will premiere September 2nd on Amazon Prime.

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.

“This report was birthed in trauma.” It’s a striking and heartbreaking opening statement for the groundbreaking 2022 Urban Library Trauma Study Report, released in late June at the 2022 American Library Association Annual Conference. While the beginnings of the study were rooted in library trauma before the COVID-19 pandemic, the initial grant application was written as the virus hit New York and days before many city libraries were closed. The two year long study was delayed and redesigned due to the pandemic, allowing researchers to capture some sense of the difficult working conditions urban library workers experienced pre-pandemic but possibly more importantly the increasing demands and disruptions because of the pandemic, resulting in extensive trauma, stress, and burnout for urban library workers.

The study and report were executed in a partnership between the New York Library Association, Urban Librarians Unite, and St John’s University. On the Urban Librarians Unite website, they introduce the report writing, “Almost every library worker has a story about one event at work that left them shaken. Sometimes it’s an abusive patron, sometimes it’s workplace bullying, and sometimes it’s that haunting feeling left behind when a patron needed more help than you could provide. The Urban Library Trauma Study looked to take these anecdotal stories, quantify them and build a pathway to practical solutions for the issue and move the library industry towards a culture of community care.”

The study included four stages including a comprehensive review of current literature on the topic, a survey of urban library workers, a series of virtual focus groups, and lastly a two-day forum of urban library workers to go over the research and create plans for the future.

Key Takeaways from the Urban Library Trauma Study

The survey was distributed between August 7, 2021 and September 29, 2021. The survey received 568 responses, of which 435 were from urban public staff. Responses from rural, suburban, academic, school and special library responses were filtered out to focus the scope of the study but the report does mention that library workers at all kind of libraries are dealing with many of the same issues raised in this report.

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Whether you’re in public schools or libraries or aren’t but support your local public institutions, one thing you can do right now to prepare for the fall and its inevitable wave of “parental rights” discourse and book challenges is get ahead of the misinformation. By openly addressing what has been happening over the last year and setting the record straight, you become the transparent organization that these groups are desperately demanding (even when they then are mad when it happens exactly as they demanded).

Build a guide to the current climate on your website, your social media, and affiliated groups to challenge the narrative being pushed by Moms For Liberty, No Left Turn, and others. Be upfront about the claims being made against libraries and schools in a broad way, then focus it on your local institutions.

Here’s a stellar example.

The Forest Hills Public Schools (Michigan) has been subject to a local group’s demands to things like “removing CRT” from the curriculum and “focusing on fundamentals.” They’ve been especially intent on highlighting the so-called Critical Race Theory being taught in the schools, beginning their quest for information via FOIAs last spring. The school board meetings have also become a space for right-wing political rallies.

A Political Action Committee in Forest Hills — developed and run by parents in the district — has stepped forward to right these claims through their group SupportFHPS. Included on their website is a thorough guide to all of the claims being made about education right now, both nationally and locally, with links to credible sources about why such claims are wrong and why they’re being made. It is a handy, easy to use guide that is accessible and understandable to people who are not staying on top of all of this news — which is impossible! — and it is a vital tool for passing along and ensuring that everyone has the same correct information at hand. What makes this guide especially good is that it’s usable to people inside the community specifically, as well as broadly applicable to those outside it.

If you’re a millennial on Twitter, or at least if you follow millennials on Twitter, you’ve likely come across the “We need an American Girl doll who…” meme. It’s a hilarious trend that combines one of the most sought-after toys of the ’90s with hyper-specific situations, and book lovers are not immune from getting called out by it. Because we can’t resist catching the latest social media wave, we’ve collected the best bookish American Girl doll tweets for your reading pleasure.

Since their introduction in 1986, American Girl dolls have highlighted a variety of different points in history and unique experiences. Fans could even create a doll to look like themselves and buy matching outfits! But leave it to Twitter and Instagram to find the gaps in American Girl doll representation.

Wow, meme one and I’m already feeling attacked!

For those of us who grew up obsessed with books, taking trips to the library every chance we got and memorizing the check-out limit, books have always been our safe spaces. They’re where we go when we have too much to do, or we’re going through something, or just need to escape for a while. I’ve spent many an hour with my head tilted sideways, reading every title on the shelves of the library or hunched on the floor, flipping through a book before buying it at my favorite bookstore. Libraries, bookstores, they’re my favorite places in the world!

With all of that time spent in the quiet of a library or lost in the shelves on a darkening afternoon, I realize just how quickly that setting can turn sinister. A scream in the silence, eyes peering from the other side of the spines. The quiet is only comforting until you want — no, need — someone around to help you.

And some authors have tapped into that fear, turning the places we love so dearly into an accomplice to a crime. Have used the darkness and the silence and the wandering as a way to heighten tension rather than relieve it. If you want to read about the ways a bookstore or library — and not the books inside — can scare you, here are eight novels to get you started.