Banned Books Week is over, but we’re not done celebrating yet! Tomorrow is your last chance to get our banned books tote, socks, and notebook for just $25!
Speaking of last chances, the new Book Mail box is flying off the shelves! Get yours before they’re gone.
It’s only 44 days till Book Riot Live! Which means that we’ve got to start printing this year’s t-shirts. You’ve got until this Friday, September 30th to pre-order yours, in our super-comfy unisex crewneck.
Other things you can (and should!) preorder:
– Your favorite speaker’s books, from conference bookstore WORD!
– A Book Riot Live 2016 water bottle — hydration for all.
– Your ticket to Booze & Books at the Strand, which includes drinks and a $15 gift card. Certified sommelier Diane McMartin will be pairing wines with speakers’ books, and will you just look at the selected authors!?
See you in November!
Today’s Riot Rundown is sponsored by Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo.
From #1 New York Times–bestselling author Leigh Bardugo comes the much-anticipated sequel to Six of Crows.
Kaz Brekker and his crew have just pulled off a heist so daring even they didn’t think they’d survive. But instead of divvying up a fat reward, they’re right back to fighting for their lives. Double-crossed and badly weakened, the crew is low on resources, allies, and hope. As powerful forces from around the world descend on Ketterdam to root out the secrets of the dangerous drug known as jurda parem, old rivals and new enemies emerge to challenge Kaz’s cunning and test the team’s fragile loyalties. A war will be waged on the city’s dark and twisting streets—a battle for revenge and redemption that will decide the fate of the Grisha world.
Banned Books Week is here! Celebrate the freedom to read by rocking our banned books tote, socks, and notebook for just $25!
Want some swag that comes with reading material? Our new Book Mail box is flying off the shelves! Don’t forget to snag yours before they’re gone.
And for those who prefer a more freestyle shopping experience, get free banned books socks when you spend $40 or more.
Four Writers Among 2016 MacArthur Winners
The MacArthur Foundation awarded its prestigious fellowships last week (the so-called ‘genius’ awards), and four writers were among the 23 winners.
Gene Yan Lueng, graphic novelist and cartoonist
Claudia Rankine, poet
Maggie Nelson, non-fiction
Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, playwright
I’ve read at least something by all four of these writers, and from what I have read, all are extraordinarily deserving. Here’s looking forward to what they do next.
Google Play Books Grows Up
Google has been a sleeping giant in the world of ebooks, just by virtue of controlling the operating system on hundreds of millions of smartphones in use right now. To this point, Google Play Books hasn’t been much more than a search-and-find store, but with the launch of Discover, Google is trying to make its ebook store into a recommendation powerhouse.
Using the enormous amount it knows about your reading habits, Google Play Books Discover will recommend both books and news articles and essays based on your reading habits. Read a book recently about baseball? It might then recommend popular baseball-related stories from the web. If it sees that you read a lot online about movies, it might suggest a new book about Hollywood. You get the idea.
It isn’t leaving the recommendations completely up to algorithms, though. Discover will have robust recommendations chosen by editors as well. Not even Google, the masters of machine learning, think human input is out of date.
Bernie Sanders Gets into YA
Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution, which is scheduled to come out just after the election, is also being adapted for readers ages 12-18. It’s not exactly clear what will change from the version for adults, but it makes sense that Sanders, who was most popular among younger Democratic voters, would be looking toward the next generation of voters. The YA version of Our Revolution will be released November 17.
Book Riot Book Mail
A quick plug for Book Riot’s own Book Mail boxes. Get books and bookish items hand-picked by Book Riot, exclusive content from authors, and first crack at new items in the Book Riot Store. A new Book Mail box will be available every few months, and the contents will be a secret! Find out more here.
This Week in Books is sponsored by Afterward by Jennifer Mathieu:
When Caroline’s little brother is kidnapped, his subsequent rescue leads to the discovery of Ethan, a teenager who has been living with the kidnapper since he was a young child himself. Caroline can’t help but wonder what Ethan knows about everything that happened to her brother, who is not readjusting well to life at home. And although Ethan is desperate for a friend, he can’t see Caroline without experiencing a resurgence of traumatic memories. But after the media circus surrounding the kidnappings departs their small Texas town, both Caroline and Ethan find that they need a friend–and their best option just might be each other.
The line-ups are finalized for Nerd Jeopardy and Friday evening’s Books & Booze pairing — let the muppet-arms commence! And there are a bunch of new panels added to the schedule, which you should go check out immediately. Don’t have your tickets yet? Go get them and get $20 off with code BOOKNERD.
Time for a Did You Know: You can pre-order speakers’ books from WORD, our conference bookstore! They’ve got a running list here, and you can search their website for more. Then all you have to do is tell them they’re for Book Riot Live and pick them up at the event. Easy peasy, and less things to pack on your way to NYC!
Good morning, readers. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to check out a big list of awesome books coming out in the rest of 2016. As always, should any of the books you already own go unread, the librarian will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This newsletter will start recommending in five seconds. Good luck, readers.
Okay, but seriously, I’ve been traveling for work and I am behind in my reading, so I thought a big sneak peek might be fun. You’re going to want to mark these down now, before next year’s books start getting attention and these get lost in the shuffle. Because I have seen some of the 2017 books in my journeys, and the future is WOW.
And on this week’s episode of the All the Books! Rebecca and I talked about – SPOILER- more books, including A Change of Heart, Big Magic, and The Tale of Shikanoko series.
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Book Riot’s new Book Mail box! Get awesome books and bookish goodies handpicked by Riot editors, with free shipping worldwide! Supplies are limited; get yours now!
The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Chang
The Trespasser by Tana French
My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg
The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine
You Can’t Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain by Phoebe Robinson
I’ll Tell You in Person by Chloe Caldwell
Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford
Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down by Anne Valente
All That Man Is by David Szalay
Nicotine / Private Novelist by Nell Zink
Ghost Songs by Regina McBride
When the Sea Turned to Silver by Grace Lin
The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin / The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Motion of Puppets by Keith Donohue
Brief Histories of Everyday Objects by Andy Warner
The Mortifications by Derek Palacio
Fractured by Catherine McKenzie
We Know It Was You by Maggie Thrash
Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq by Sarah Glidden
News of the World by Paulette Jiles
A City Dreaming by Daniel Polansky
Dog Years (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize) by Melissa Yancy
The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky
Rani Patel in Full Effect by Sonia Patel
The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham
Brat Pack America: Visiting Cult Movies of the ’80s by Kevin Smokler
The Hidden Keys by André Alexis
Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood
Never Look an American in the Eye: A Memoir of Flying Turtles, Colonial Ghosts, and the Making of a Nigerian American by Okey Ndibe
The Mothers by Brit Bennett
Him, Me, Muhammad Ali by Randa Jarrar
Still Life with Tornado by A. S. King
The Annie Year by Stephanie Wilbur Ash
The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher
The Loved Ones by Sonya Chung
IQ by Joe Ide
Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction by Benjamin Percy
A Gambler’s Anatomy by Jonathan Lethem
Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge
Float by Anne Carson
We Show What We Have Learned and Other Stories by Clare Beams
The Sick Bag Song by Nick Cave
The Terranauts by T.C. Boyle
Land of Love and Ruins by Oddný Eir (Author), Philip Roughton (Translator)
The Boat Rocker by Ha Jin
Bruja by Wendy C. Ortiz
The Winterlings by Cristina Sánchez-Andrade (Author), Samuel Rutter (Translator)
Thus Bad Begins by Javier Marias (Author), Margaret Jull Costa (Translator)
Scratch by Steve Himmer
The Beach at Night by Elena Ferrante
Virgin and Other Stories by April Ayers Lawson
Fish in Exile by Vi Khi Nao
Valiant Gentlemen by Sabina Murray
Pull Me Under by Kelly Luce
Normal by Warren Ellis
Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
The Dispossessed by Szilard Borbely
Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout by Laura Jane Grace
Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away by Lisa Napoli
Hi, Anxiety: Life With a Bad Case of Nerves by Kat Kinsman
Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live by Peter Orner
Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital by David Oshinsky
Culdesac: A Novella by Robert Repino
Absolutely on Music : Conversations with Seiji Ozawa by Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin
Moonglow by Michael Chabon
Victoria by Daisy Goodwin
The Fate of the Tearling by Erika Johansen
Searching for John Hughes: Or Everything I Thought I Needed to Know about Life I Learned from Watching ’80s Movies by Jason Diamond
Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls, and Everything in Between by Lauren Graham
Slipping: Stories, Essays, & Other Writing by Lauren Beukes
Moranifesto by Caitlin Moran
The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis
Island of the Mad by Laurie Sheck
Show Me a Mountain by Kerry Young
Books for Living by Will Schwalbe
Civilianized: A Young Veteran’s Memoir by Michael Anthony
YAY, BOOKS! That’s it for me today – time to get back to reading! If you want to learn more about books (and see lots of pictures of my cats, Millay and Steinbeck), or tell me about books you’re reading, you can find me on Twitter at MissLiberty, on Instagram at FranzenComesAlive, or Litsy under ‘Liberty’!
I’ll be back next week with an October megalist. There are soooooo many good books out next month. MY BODY IS READY.
Liberty
Today’s Riot Rundown is sponsored by Penguin Random House Audio.
Life can be stressful. Book Club doesn’t have to be. Listen to your next book club pick on audio! Visit PenguinRandomHouseAudio.com/bookclub and get ideas, recipes, and recommendations to make your next book club meeting even more enjoyable.
Welcome to Fall, YA Fans!
This week’s edition of “What’s Up in YA?” is sponsored by Look Past.
Look Past is a gripping murder mystery involving a transgender teen and a fundamentalist religious sect. Avery is a trans boy who was in love with his friend Mary, but was shunned by her conservative reverend father. Mary is murdered in a brutal way because of her love for Avery, and he could be next. With the entire town caught in the grip of fear, the killer remains at large. Avery is torn between finding the killer and saving himself—not just from the hands of a vicious murderer, but from everyone who thinks he should try to be “normal.”
In the next issue of “What’s Up in YA?,” we have a fun interview with an emerging YA powerhouse talking about Hispanic Heritage Month, magical realism, and a whole lot more. So for that, we’ll take it a little bit slower in this issue — let’s take a look at some of the big news from around the world of YA.
From Book Riot…
Thanks for hanging out with us another week, and we’ll be back with a fabulous author-reading-book discussion in two weeks. In the mean time, pick up a great YA book or two and have fun.
You heard it here first: the line-ups are finalized for Nerd Jeopardy and Friday evening’s Books & Booze pairing!
Mark Oshiro will be returning to defend his Nerd Jeopardy crown. His opposition this year? Sara Farizan and Mara Wilson, and Ryan Chapman returns as Trivia Master. Place your bets now!
And on Friday evening, Diane McMartin will be revealing her pairings for the books of Alyssa Cole, Ayize Jama-Everett, Phoebe Robinson, and Tara Clancy. There are still some tickets left, which include drinks and a $15 gift card to the Strand — do not miss!
You’re the first folks who will get access to Sched.com to RSVP and get your spot in limited-seating panels, and that invite will be winging its way to you in early October. In the meantime, don’t forget to preorder books from WORD, our conference bookstore, and use coupon code VIPBRL2016 for a discount!