Zosia Mamet Signs Two-Book Deal with Viking Penguin
Actress Zosia Mamet (Girls/The Flight Attendant) has signed a two-book deal with Viking Penguin. Mamet’s first book My First Popsicle, which is set to publish in fall 2022, is an anthology exploring foods and the memories and emotions we associate with them, including contributions from Jia Tolentino, David Sedaris, Patti Smith, Rosie Perez, and Patti LuPone. Mamet’s second book is set to publish in Fall 2023 and will be a collection of personal essays reflecting on her relationships, bullying, body issues, and that one time she almost got into a fist fight with Axl Rose.
Winner of Waterstone Prize Says She Never Saw Autistic Girls in Books
Scottish author Elle McNicoll’s debut novel A Kind of Spark has won the Waterstones children’s book prize. The novel, which Waterstones’ booksellers praised as “eye-opening, heart-wrenching, sad, and inspiring,” follows the story of an 11-year-old autistic girl named Addie who is campaigning for a memorial to the witch trials that happened in her Scottish village. But McNicoll hasn’t always had the easiest time in the publishing world. When she first tried to get published, she was told that people didn’t want to read about an autistic heroine. “In job interviews, I was saying that I wanted to see more books with disabled characters in them that were not traumatic, boring or educational, but fun and full of life. A lot of the reactions were, ‘Waterstones don’t like books like that’,” she said in an interview with The Guardian. After winning the Waterstone prize—a unique prize in that its voted on solely by booksellers—McNicoll said, “I will never say “I can’t’ again.”
June Sarpong Launching Imprint with HQ to Publish and Develop Diverse Voices
Author, broadcaster, and diversity advocate June Sarpong is launching a new imprint with HQ that will focus on publishing and developing diverse voices. In its first year, the new imprint, named the HQ Creative Inclusion Lab, will publish four titles. From then on, the imprint will aim to publish six titles across adult fiction and nonfiction annually. The focus will remain on publishing authors with a disability, authors from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds, and authors from working class backgrounds. Sarpong told The Bookseller that she wants the HQ Creative Inclusion Lab to be a “home for untold stories, that’s really what we are, the home for untold diverse stories, there are far too many of them unfortunately.”
A Case Against Assigned Summer Reading
Assigned summer reading is meant to keep students reading and learning over the long break from school. But here’s how it does more harm than good.