June 29 – August 10, 2024
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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. 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.
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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.
A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul TremblayI don’t reread books (I really don’t) but you’ll note that one of the things a lot of the books on my “best of the century” list have in common is that I have read them not once, not twice, but many times. That’s because books like Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts give you more and more to think about with each read. Is this book a psychological thriller or supernatural horror? It kind of depends on what you think happened. You might change your mind with every subsequent read. No spoilers here, though. The Barretts are your typical American family, but their lives are turned upside down when 14-year-old Marjorie Barrett begins to show signs of schizophrenia. When doctors are unable to help, the Barretts start wondering if something supernatural is happening to their daughter. They turn to Father Wanderly, a priest and an exorcist, for answers. Setting up an exorcism isn’t easy, and the medical bills are piling up. On top of everything else the Barretts have been dealing with, Marjorie’s father, John, has been out of a job for the past year. With money problems looming, the Barrett family turns to a surprising answer to take care of the bills: a reality TV show. The Possession becomes a hit reality TV show that people can’t stop talking about. And 15 years after the events at the Barrett’s home in New England, people are still talking about the show. |
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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.
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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
Library Card Sticky Note by cwazyclubI am of the belief that you can never have enough sticky notes. $6. |
New Releases
Not What She Seems by Yasmin AngoeFor fans of stories about returning home and unsolved mysterious death. Jacinda Brodie, who goes by Jac, is a research assistant who returns back to her cliffside hometown in South Carolina after her grandfather’s heart attack. Being that years before her father died from a fall and Jac was a prime suspect, this isn’t a happy return. Her personal life is also not great since her boss is punishing her for ending their affair and he’s now writing a true crime book on her father’s death. Once home, Jac decides to point her attention to a woman who recently renovated the historic site where her father fell, wondering if she’s connected to the incident somehow. |
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Photograph by TBIT, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0.
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.
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It Ends with Us: What are Colleen Hoover's romance stories actually saying?
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The world’s biggest super friendly – aka the Community Shield – is here and Kevin De Bruyne has grown a man bun to celebrate the occasion. Marcus, Jim and Pete, on the other hand, are celebrating the occasion by spreading Luke Shaw conspiracy theories.
Elsewhere, Marcus and Pete question whether Jim is a pickpocket working for Mikel Arteta and we pay tribute to the great Pepe after his retirement. Oh, and if you think the conspiracy theories are bad, just wait until you hear Pete’s story about gerbils….
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