When I was a baby queer, freshly out at 15, I dreamed of one day being a professional queer. You know, the kind of person whose brand is queer and whose day job doesn’t just tolerate their queerness but centers it. Running a Pride-themed B&B, say. Or starting an LGBTQ bookstore. Today, I get paid to write the Our Queerest Shelves newsletter (among other things). I’ve also been running a queer book blog of my own for over ten years, which occasionally makes money, so I can officially call myself a professional queer reader at this point.

Admittedly, the romance genre is not my particular expertise, but I’ve been enjoying the new abundance of traditionally published queer romances, and I have three that are absolute stand-outs. These are must-read queer romance novels, whether you’re new to the genre or a professional.

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I should probably end with a caveat that the “queer book professional” framing is tongue in cheek: these are just my personal favorites and aren’t actually an objective ranking of the best in queer romance, especially since I’ve read only a tiny portion of all the queer romances out there.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Before we get into the news, Book Riot is hiring an ad operations associate. Check it out, share with friends, and apply if you’re a good fit.

Authors Get In on Literary Activism

Book bans—and the issues of intellectual freedom and civil rights for people of color and the LGBTQ+ community that book bans aim to suppress—are on the ballot this November, and authors are getting in on the action. Roxane Gay and Gabrielle Zevin are among a group of well-known writers hosting Authors for Harris, a virtual reading being held on Monday, August 12th. Registration fees for the event serve as a fundraiser for the Harris-Walz ticket. (Did you know Walz signed a law banning book bans in the Minnesota?) We love two-fer, and what could be better than seeing your favorite authors read their work while you support candidates with a proven track record of fighting book bans and defending freedom? May their efforts succeed.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Thrillers

What do we mean now when we say a book is a thriller? For authors like Alma Katsu, the question is existential. Observing changes in readers’ preferences over the last decade or so, Katsu notes that the need for “increasingly frenetic, twisty stories” has given way to “greater tolerance from both readers and publishers for a slightly slower pace, but the need for unforeseeable plot complications.” So, what happened in the last 10ish years? My unhesitating answer would have been: Gone Girl, which came out in early 2012 and kicked off a trend of thrillers with unreliable narrators and shocking plot twists that is still going hard today.

Katsu pins the push for ever-increasing twisty-turny-ness on another early-aughts phenomenon that lingers on: binge-watching brought to us by Netflix, the 2013 debut of “House of Cards.” That would never have occurred to me when the book-related catalyst is so readily available, but it makes just as much sense, and the truth is probably that it’s both. Always nice to have a smart person with an insider’s perspective challenge my tidy explanation.

Out Now in Paperback

We’re hitting the point in an election year when new releases slow down because publishers (wisely) don’t want to compete with the news cycle, so it’s a great time to catch up on books you missed last year as they come out in paperback. The Guardian has rounded up some of the month’s best paperback releases, and friends, the getting is good. We’re talking Jesmyn Ward. We’re talking The Iliad as translated by Emily Wilson, who was the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English. We’re talking Mona Awad’s dark-and-twisty modern fairytales. And that’s just to name a few! Stock your last-gasp-of-summer beach bag and get to turning those pages.

I’ve mentioned this already, but there just wasn’t enough horror rep in the NYT‘s top books of the 21st century. So as I share with you some of my personal picks for the best books of this century, you had to know more horror was going to come up. This one is another one from Paul Tremblay, who I mentioned a couple months ago. But why not read two Paul Tremblay books this summer? Especially when this one is, again, one of the BEST BOOKS of the century. Hear me out.

Like much of the Internet population, I have been thoroughly enjoying all of the “Midwestern Dad” memes popping up around Tim Walz. But I am also very much enjoying this clip of him at the Wisconsin rally telling Republicans, “I sure the hell don’t need you telling us what books we’re going to read.” More of this energy, please!

Libraries & Librarians

News Updates

The Queens Public Library opens a new branch in Far Rockaway.

A group of far-right rioters set the Spellow Hub Library in Liverpool on fire, but an appeal for donations has raised over £120,000 in two days.

Worth Reading

5 strategies to verify facts in the age of AI.

Book Adaptations in the News

Everything to know about the new Game of Thrones prequel spinoff series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

Before I dive into your bi-weekly mystery goodness—which includes new releases, backlist titles featuring cold settings, and news—I have a new mystery film for you to watch. If you’re in the mood for a heist comedy starring Matt Damon, you can now stream The Instigators on Apple TV+. Watch the trailer here.

Bookish Goods

New Releases

Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill “learned to use a gun at eleven, got his first motorcycle at twelve, his first sailboat at fifteen, started studying medicine at sixteen, by twenty-three he was a sociologist, by thirty-eight a millionaire adman, and by forty he was broke,” the Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero once wrote. Fogwill was born outside Buenos Aires in 1941 and lived until 2010; as Guerriero illustrates, he was precocious as a young man, but it wasn’t until 1980, at the age of thirty-nine, after he’d lost the fortune he made in advertising, that his story “Muchacha Punk” won a prestigious writing contest and his literary career took off. In 1982, he wrote his most famous novel, Los pichiciegos. Set during the Falklands War and published while the conflict was ongoing, this sardonic exploration of the absurdities of war, a kind of Slaughterhouse-Five for Argentina, was an immediate sensation, and it cemented Fogwill as a touchstone for the literary resistance to the military dictatorship. A writer of short stories, novels, poems, and cultural criticism, he went on to publish more than twenty books across a thirty-year career.

Drawing on his background in advertising, Fogwill cultivated an iconoclastic public persona and turned his surname—Fogwill, just so, like Prince or Madonna—into a brand. He pursued controversy and manufactured scandal, relentlessly excoriating the sanctimony of the institutional and cultural elite. He wrote high-profile columns attacking and satirizing both the military dictatorship and what he called the “horror show” of Argentina’s transition to a neoliberal democracy. Described by contemporaries as “a holy terror,” with an “almost alien intelligence,” Fogwill’s exhibitionism belied, as Francisco Garamona writes, “an unassailable body of work, an idea, an inimitable way of being, and above all, an ethics.” Known as a generous friend and mentor, he guided younger writers and helped launch the careers of figures as notable as Osvaldo Lamborghini and César Aira.

Like his persona, Fogwill’s writing is provocative and irreverent. He absorbed the different strands of the Argentine tradition and produced a literature that defies classification: a literature of ideas and the body, the political and the personal, the ordinary and the ineffable. Nimbly traversing form and genre, he employs myriad styles while maintaining a singular and inimitable sensibility.

When asked if there was “a close intimacy” between him and his sister, André Weil replied, “Very much so. My sister as a child always followed me, and my grandmother, who liked to drop into German occasionally, used to say that she was a veritable Kopiermaschine.” Biographers have emphasized—overly so, according to André Weil—the episode described by his sister in a May 1942 letter to Father Perrin, known as her “Spiritual Autobiography”: “At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair which come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me.”

The largest part of the known correspondence between Simone and André Weil dates from the period when André was imprisoned for being absent without leave from his military duties; he was held first in Le Havre, then Rouen, from February to early May 1940. These circumstances gave Simone Weil an opportunity to explore scientific, and particularly mathematical, questions that were significant to her. In particular, one must note the importance given to the crisis of incommensurables in her correspondence. The reason this moment in the history of thought plays a central role at this point in Simone Weil’s reflection on science is well defined by André Weil in a letter dated March 28, 1940: “A proportion is what is named; the fact that there are relations that aren’t nameable (and nameable is a relation between whole numbers), that there have been λόγοι ἄλόγοι, the word itself is so deeply moving that I can’t believe that in a period so essentially dramatic … such an extraordinary event could have been seen as a mere scientific discovery … what you say about proportion suggests that, at the beginnings of Greek thought, there was such an intense feeling of the disproportion between thought and world (and, as you say, between man and God) that they had to build a bridge over this abyss at all costs. That they thought they found it … in mathematics is nothing if not credible.”

The crisis of reason that Simone Weil apprehended in contemporary physics led her to revisit the birth of the scientific spirit. The relationship between this crisis of science as a crisis of reason and her interest in the question of incommensurables is clear. Rationalizing irrationals was at the heart of the mathematical problem of incommensurables. According to Simone Weil’s interpretation, the same difficulty was encountered in her day with quantum theory (see her study “Classical Science and After,” as well as the article “Reflections on Quantum Theory”). How do we rationalize what appears—according to her interpretation—to be an “irrational” of this theory, in particular its uses of discontinuity and probability, notions on which the new physics rested? Could the crisis of reason, which is also a crisis of the notion of truth in contemporary physics, cause the same mental aberrations as the one produced by incommensurability, an aberration that led the Sophists to be skeptical of Logos and truth? Simone Weil’s references to Plato and her constant appeal to a new Eudoxus represent a desire to escape the skepticism of a new sophistry. She would write to her brother: “The popularization of this discovery casts discredit upon the notion of truth that has lasted to this day; it … contributed to the appearance of the idea that one can equally well demonstrate two contradictory theories; the Sophists spread this point of view among the masses, along with knowledge of an inferior quality, exclusively aimed at the conquest of power.” This marriage of a purely operative and combinatory science with the quest for power is what Simone Weil feared.

I think I am temperamentally a mystic. I feel very drawn to this form of experience and this mode of conceptualizing and, in particular, the deepening and layering of concepts with experience and experience with concepts that can be seen in mystical traditions. Skepticism is not an instinctual or default response for me. If someone tells me something, I am inclined to believe it, no matter how strange it sounds. Maybe I’m just gullible, particularly when it comes to profound experiences that I have never really had, or never had in the way that I would really like. Maybe I’m just a bad philosopher. The thought has certainly crossed my mind.

For example, I believe that Julian of Norwich had Showings, or revelations of Christ; that George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, was carried up to heaven; that William Blake was visited by Angels in his dark little dwelling off the Strand in London; that Wordsworth had a total sensuous apprehension of the divine in nature during his ascent of Mount Snowdon; and that Philip K. Dick had an intellectual intuition of the divine in February 1974. This list could be continued. In fact, it could be nicely endless.

I don’t doubt these things, at least not at first, and I sometimes wonder whether I (as someone who teaches philosophy as a day job) should always be cultivating skepticism or praising the power of critical thinking. There is a defensive myopia to the obsession with critique, a refusal to see what you can’t make sense of, blocking the view of any strange new phenomenon with a misty drizzle of passive aggressive questions. At this point in history, it is at least arguable that understanding is as important as critique, and patient, kind-hearted, sympathetic observation more helpful than endless personal opinions, as we live in a world entirely saturated by suspicion and fueled by vicious judgments of each other. I’m not arguing for dogmatism, but I sometimes wonder whether philosophy’s obsession with critique risks becoming a form of obsessional self-protection against strange and novel forms of experience. My wish is to give leeway for strange new intensities of experience with which we can push back against the pressure of reality. All the way to ecstasy.

In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country, Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?”

But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of.

Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as public events pressed in on his imagination.

Popop, who came home to raise me after his release from Holmesburg Prison in ’88, would have never let a white man in a white coat lay a hand on the D, let alone the vas deferens, had he the context to differentiate between the two. He never mentioned any experiments either. If he had, he wouldn’t have seen the wanton use of his body as some epic reveal of treachery but another quotidian instance he might describe by way of an exasperated sigh, shrug, or “Duh, dickhead” hurled at some scholar with the “real” details, or social reformer come to reimagine us in their image, to correct our supposedly devious sexual habits before it was too late, which often meant well before our twelfth birthdays. Given the early onset encroachments of power, that old black adage on suspicion and physicians was never an abstraction at home.

I got snipped anyway.

And I was late, by any reasonable measure, thirty-two with too many kids climbing up my leg, three boys and one girl whose temperaments have long since broken and rebuilt me in their images, the first of whom arrived too soon after his mother stopped taking birth control and forgot to tell me. And I’ve never met people more averse to independent play. Shouts of “Daddy!” and “Dada!” puncture my every attempt to think, coming on as tickles or itty-bitty terrors between each typed word, and so I write this from two worlds at once, where promises of the near future—the local pool or doggie park, Rita’s Water Ice, the school track, the bike trail, or playing Diablo and Super Smash Bros.—defang the demands on my attention for ten or so minutes at a time. The interstices allow collective laughter over new word enunciations—a six-year-old’s “feastidious,” or a question of the utmost importance: Who taught the twins to say “Fresh to def?” My daughter, twelve, takes credit, and my oldest son, two years her senior, is above it all until we remind him how the ticklish remain so, even chin hair deep into puberty. It’s there, between the laughter and all my pleading—“Stop, no, don’t” and “Put that dog down!” and “Stop chokin each other!”—that I give myself over to thought, which is writing, and in this case or every case, correlated with what the children mean to me, and what I might mean to them, and what it meant to ensure that I might conceive children nevermore.

The doctor was quite brown, if that counts for anything in this context, and not one of those people whose entire personality is dedicated to the hatred of children, who seem to be multiplying on every blunt “side” of the political spectrum. Gentler than most lovers, he cupped my testicles and said that everything would be all right. And in this man’s supple embrace I drifted off into a blissful nondream of future agency.

The evening before the fourth annual Great Florida Bigfoot Conference in the north-central horse town of Ocala, I was in a buffet line at the VIP dinner, listening to a man describe his first encounter. “I was on an airboat near Turner River Road in the Glades and I saw it there,” he said. “At first, I confused it with a gator because it was hunched over, but then it stood up. It was probably eight feet tall. I could smell it too. I froze. It was like something had taken control over my body.” His story contained a common trope of Bigfoot encounters: awe and fear in the face of a higher power.

I sat down at a conference room round table and gnawed on an undercooked chicken quarter, looking around at my fellow VIPs, or as the conference’s master of ceremonies, Ryan “RPG” Golembeske, called us, the Bigfoot Mafia. Most of the other attendees were of retirement age. Their hats, tattoos, and car bumpers in the parking lot indicated that many were former military, police, and/or proud gun owners. Many were Trump supporters—beseeching fellow motorists to, as one bumper sticker read, MAKE THE FOREST GREAT AGAIN, a catchphrase which had been written out over an image of a Bigfoot on a turquoise background in the pines, rocking a pompadour. The sticker was a small oval on the larger spare wheel cover of a mid-aughts Chinook Concourse RV. Above it and below it, in Inspirational Quote Font, was the phrase “Once upon a time … is Now!” The couple who owned the RV cemented their identities with a big homemade TRUCKERS FOR TRUMP window decal next to a large handicap sticker. As a thirty-six-year-old progressive, I was an outlier in this crowd. But, like many, I was a believer.

It bears repeating: I believe in the existence of the Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Wild Man, or, as it is called in South Florida, the Skunk Ape. There have been too many credible accounts and oral histories passed down over thousands of years to discount its/their existence. During my time working as a teacher on the Miccosukee Indian Reservation, I heard from students and elders very detailed and grave encounters with a large humanlike primate in the swamp. In the course of publishing Islandia Journal, a periodical of hidden local folklore and history, I also meet swamp enthusiasts—historians, hunters, hydrologists, et cetera—who describe encounters clearly. Though I’ve never had an encounter myself, I believe these stories intuitively, told by those who have nothing to gain from their telling. Unfortunately, no biological evidence supports the idea that Bigfoot exists. Attendees of the conference wax rhapsodically about what the future holds thanks to eDNA. The discovery of primate DNA in the water or dirt near an encounter location would rekindle the possibility of a biological Bigfoot, but for now, we’re waiting.

This absence of harder proof meant that the conference was, predictably, rife with speculation. At the VIP dinner, I sat next to Monica, one of my few fellow thirtysomethings in attendance.  She was sunburnt and wore small round gold-rimmed glasses. She’d moved to Jacksonville from West Virginia with her partner, Joey, who told me later that she was just there to support Monica’s varying interests. While looking down and shuffling BBQ beans and mac and cheese around her styrofoam plate, Monica asked if I’d heard about the latest paranormal goings-on at Skinwalker Ranch in the Utah desert. Talking about large objects under mesas and anomalies in the sky, she gestured wildly. This struck me as off-base: we were at a Bigfoot conference, not storming Area 51. “It’s all connected,” she said, before explaining that Bigfoot tracks disappearing into dry creek beds weren’t the product of hoaxes but rather because Bigfoot travels using interdimensional portals. I expressed some doubt. “You can either close your mind,” she told me, “or open it to the very real possibility of infinite dimensions.”

When I get dressed, I become a philosopher-king—not in the sense of presiding over utopia, but in the sense of trying to marry politics and intellect in the perfect imitation of God. Political considerations might include: destination, company, self-image, self-regard, in-group and out-group arrangements. The intellectual ones might involve: the weather, the way I am always too cold no matter the weather, the subway, the blisters on my feet, the laundry. When I get dressed, I have never once considered whether to add a belt. Belts have never struck me as a thing to “add”; pants either need a belt or they don’t. But some girls like to “add” one, and that’s fine too. I do consider the area where a belt might go—that stretch of midsection where the top of my pants meets the bottom of my shirt. It means a lot (to me), where exactly on my body that convergence takes place. If it’s lower, say a few inches below my belly button, I might get slouchier when I stand around, might remember being a kid in the early aughts, and I might in general feel more weighed down by the pull of gravity. If it’s higher up on my torso, I sit up straighter in my chair, I prefer a more substantial shoe, I feel more compact, more professional, more like my mother.

When I get dressed, I think about the last time I washed my hair and whether I’m going to wear my glasses or not. I am too much of a germophobe to wear shoes in the house, so I have no choice but to imagine the theoretical addition of a shoe, which I’ll put on last, when everything else is already a foregone conclusion. Lately, I can’t stop buying socks; it’s a compulsion. Wearing socks with no holes, that haven’t yet become limp from untold numbers of wash-and-dry cycles, has recently become crucial to my feeling of being able to face the world. On the other hand, I wear the same bra every single day, and it is such an essentially bland item of clothing that it feels like putting on my own skin. Nights are a different story: it’s important to invite spontaneity into your evening in whatever way you can.

When I get dressed I am confronted with the protean ecosystem of everything I have, everything I want, and why I have things that I’m not sure I want. Some things that I almost never buy, no matter their purported “quality,” are: dresses or skirts with slits, matching sets, sweaters with puffy shoulders, V-neck cardigans, Birkenstocks, tops where the pattern is printed only on the front and not the back, jeans that are ripped at the knees, and anything described as a “tunic.” I’m not saying that you shouldn’t buy these things, I’m just telling you that I don’t want to. One thing I do want is to compose an ode to the tank top. The tank top is the shortest route to luxury—one of the only designer items affordable to those of us on a budget. A beautiful sweater or a handbag from wherever is out of the question, but you might, if it’s your birthday or you take an extra freelance gig, treat yourself to the flimsiest, paper-thinnest $200 tank top, knowing that the construction and the material is worth a fraction of that and feeling unreservedly that every dollar of difference is a delicious indecency. There’s nothing noble about being frivolous. But it can be wonderful to choose to be part of something bigger than you, which has a history and an artistry and—in the best case scenario—a point of view. It can even be worth an inordinate amount of your hard-won money. Anyways, when I get dressed, I reign over my little shelf of needlessly fancy tank tops and I feel alive.

There are some eternal quandaries. If I have to wear a sweater, a button-down shirt becomes untenable. (I don’t ever pop the collar neatly above my sweater, though I have nothing against prep, per se). If I have to wear tights, the prospect of choosing a skirt and a top and a sweater and socks and shoes becomes monstrous to me. If I choose to inflict tights upon myself, I will end up in a longer skirt so that I can avoid at least fifty percent of the lines that all those layers will generate on my body. I want to wear a pointed-toe kitten heel, but it feels impossible to do. If I have to wear a hat for warmth, I usually don’t.

Welcome to Today in Books, our round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Here are the biggest stories from the last week.

The New York Times Best Books of the 21st Century is Moving Units

I have gotten emails from booksellers and librarians (and regular book buyers and borrowers too) that The New York Times Best Books of the 21st Century list is bringing people into stores and libraries in a significant way. And I have seen quite a few social posts like this one that make me think this isn’t just a BR-audience effect. 

Well, now I have some data for you to back these reports up. According to Circana, the top 10 books on the list saw an average sales boost of 113% last week. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald saw a sales boost of more than 600%, likely as it was one of the most under-known books at the top of the list. Pretty impressive.

Kamala Harris Book Sales Soaring

A 60,000% increase in book sales means (at least) two things are true: enormous surge in interest and a low starting point. If Harris were selling 1000 copies a week, say, before Biden dropped out and she became the presumptive nominee, a 600x increase (60,000%) would mean 600,000 unit sales per week after. I am going to go out on a limb and guess that is not the rate she is selling at—probably something more like 100-200 copies a week before the surge. (Remember, most books don’t sell that many copies, especially ones that have been out for a while). 

The God of the Woods is the Book of the Summer

Yesterday, Erica wrote about the cluster of high-profile book clubs have picked Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods as one of their summer selections, and after reading it last week, I can see why. It is zippy, creepy, smart, with a real sense of place. A compelling cast of characters and enough red herrings to keep even the most experienced plot queens round out what is a total summer read package. And Hollywood has been paying attention, as The God of the Woods (and one her previous novels have been picked up for adaptation. Get on board and welcome to the woods. Hope you brought comfy shoes…and an alibi.

Here are the Book Riot pieces that resonated most with readers this week. Catch up (or reread) whatever catches your eye:

Books By and About Vice President Kamala Harris for Readers of All Ages

In 2021, Kamala Harris made history as our first Black and South Asian American Vice President. Prior to that, she was also the second Black woman (and first South Asian American) elected to the Senate. She’s now running for President. Harris is a reader and is the author of several books. Her favorite books have been covered previously here at Book Riot. They include Native Son by Richard Wright and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. The Kamala Harris books below give readers of all ages the opportunity to learn more about our Vice President.

Assemble a Crew: 8 “One Last Heist” Mystery and Thriller Books

While these books all contain the trope for one last heist they’re all different from each other and should hit many kinds of readers’ tastes. There’s a graphic novel with three generations of a family, a YA novel with a heist competition, a getaway driver pulling off a perfectly planned heist, a socialite and her drag queen crew, a romance/crime novel starring a con artist, a teen pulling off a heist to save her dad, a space heist novel with a species existence at stake, and a thriller with a past and present heist with a ticking clock!

The Best Book Club Book of the Summer

As the writer for our In the Club newsletter, which focuses on all things book clubs, I stay knee-deep in some book club shenanigans. And this summer, there seems to be one book in particular that’s making the book club rounds. 

Now, a little overlap in book choice among the online book clubs I follow is not necessarily unheard of—last year’s Book Club It Girls were Yellowface and Chain-Gang All-Stars—but this instance seems to be a little more than those, especially since this one book in particular is the book club selection for several book clubs at the same time.

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

The 2024 TikTok Award Winners

Since the biggest TikTok books sell hundreds of thousands of copies, one could argue that the cash is the prize of being a BookTok favorite. But apparently you can get a trophy too, as Rebecca Yarros did after Fourth Wing was named International Book of the Year (yes it was a 2023 release, book awards we need to speed things up). A panel came up with the finalists for the 82,000 voters to revert to the mean. The most interesting categories to me were for breakthrough author and the two creator awards.

Lewis Lapham, Giant of 20th Century Journalism, Dies

For a long time, I didn’t realize Lapham was a) a real person and b) still alive and thriving while I was first reading Harper’s 20 years ago. The name had a mythic quality to me (like Mencken or Ellison or Woolf) that I couldn’t quite believe was of the modern moment. Harper’s own notice of his life and passing exceed anything I could write here, but I will offer this one quote as tribute: “I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.”

Why your local indie bookstore might not have Hillbilly Elegy in stock this week (or ever).

I do not envy the task of indie booksellers in moments like these. Where there is huge interest in a book (HarperCollins says more than 600,000 copies last week. Can that be right?!), but that book…well it sucks. On several levels. And yet, you have customers who want it and bills to pay. What do you do? The most common strategy seems to be to keep it off the shelves but take special orders. And I can understand why this feels a little better than having a stack of them ready to wrap. But is it all that different, really? Did one copy not find its way into the hands of a reader that it wouldn’t have? Are the dollars you forewent, crucial dollars as bestsellers are the bedrock on which most bookstores are built, really better for the world than JD Vance getting a couple of extra bucks (remember, a bookstore gets a bigger cut of the price of a book than the author does)? These aren’t rhetorical questions. I wonder about them mostly to help indie bookstores give themselves some grace in moments like these. Whatever strategy you choose probably feels compromised. And it probably is. And you are doing the best you can.

What is Going On With Book Sales?

On the most recent episode of First Edition, I am joined by Brenna Connor, Director & Industry Analyst for U.S. books sales for Circana. She has the goods: what is selling, what is trending, how retailers are doing, and much more. I learned a TON, and I bet you will too. I am tempted to drop some numbers here, but go listen and you can hear them. Curiosity gap, baby. You can find the episode here, or anywhere you get podcasts.