Author: Rebecca Joines Schinsky

2016 National Book Award Winners

Black lives and stories took center stage at this year’s National Book Awards, hosted last week by Larry Wilmore. The highest honors for fiction (The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead), nonfiction (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi), and young people’s literature (March: Book Three by Congressman John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell) all address America’s racist history and its ongoing impact. These books would have been important and worthy in any year, but they feel especially necessary in these post-election days. What a timely reminder of the power of literature.

Let us all follow the advice Whitehead gave in his acceptance speech: “Be kind to everybody, make art, and fight the power.”

Teen Vogue Introduces ‘Lit Review’ Book Club

Look, I know it says “teen” in the title, but this is one publication we should all be paying attention to. Teen Vogue is under new leadership, and its content and social media presence have been on fire for the last several months. They’re doing the work to encourage young people to be worldly and socially conscious, and the new Lit Review book club is one more fantastic piece. The inaugural selection is Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. With a tone-setter like that, this is bound to be a project to follow.

Fox Commits to Passage Pilot

Justin Cronin’s Passage trilogy fizzled to an end with the May release of The City of Mirrors, but the story will find new life on the screen. Fox has committed to produce a pilot to be written by Liz Heldens (of Friday Night Lights) and directed by Matt Reeves (co-creator of Felicity). Perhaps most interesting among the details is the note that Fox 2000 won rights to the first book all the way back in 2007–when it was only half-finished!–in a bidding war for $1.75 million. Hold onto your hats. If this one gets picked up, none of us will be getting much sleep.

Thanks to Letters of Note: Volume 2 compiled by Shaun Usher for sponsoring This Week in Books.

From the editor of the New York Times bestseller and instant classic Letters of Note, comes this companion volume of more than 125 captivating letters. Each turn of the page brings delight and discovery in a collection of correspondence that spans centuries and place, written by the famous, the not-so-famous, and the downright infamous. Entries are accompanied by a transcript of the letter, a short contextual introduction, and a spirited illustration—in most cases, a facsimile of the letter itself. As surprising as it is entertaining, Letters of Note: Volume 2 is a book of endless enjoyment and lasting value.

Statistics About the “Girl” Book Title Trend

Over at FiveThirtyEight (take a break from election stats, y’all!), novelist Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven) takes a deep dive into the numbers–courtesy of Goodreads–to find out what, exactly, is going on with all these books with “girl” in the title. You’re not imagining it; they really are proliferating. Up from about 0.4% in 2008, when Lisbeth kicked off the trend with the US publication of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, nearly 1% (that’s a lot!) of all book titles this year will contain “girl.” Mandel presents several interesting findings, most notable among them the fact that the titular girl is three times more likely to be dead at the end of the book if the author is a man.

New Pricing Structure in Amazon’s Physical Bookstores

When Amazon first opened bricks-and-mortar bookstores last year, book prices in-store matched the discounts available at amazon.com. Now, though, Amazon’s discounts are available in-store only to Prime members, while non-members are charged the book’s full list price. It’s clear that Amazon wants to sell more Prime memberships, but any increase this in-store change yields will be a barely detectable drop in the bucket for the behemoth company. So what remains unclear is: what larger strategy are they trying to clarify with this small experiment?

Voting Opens for Goodreads Choice Awards

The first of three rounds of voting in the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards launched November 1. Each of the twenty categories includes fifteen books identified by Goodreads’ undisclosed statistical analysis method, and the results are indicative of not only trends in reading but ongoing systemic problems in publishing. At Book Riot, Jamie Canaves examines why not a single title in the Best Mystery & Thriller category is by a person of color.

A Party Game for the “Rude and Well-Read”

Electric Literature has launched a Kickstarter to fund Papercuts, a Cards Against Humanity-style party game for the bookish set. The deck contains prompt and answer cards, and when the Editor reveals a prompt, each player selects an answer from the eight cards in their hand. A random draw from the deck we received at Riot HQ revealed references to literary characters and events, industry trends, jokes about authors’ bad behavior (“incendiary Facebook post from Anne Rice,” LOL forever), and some deep cuts from the world of MFAs and writers’ colonies. Get your book club to chip in for a shared deck.

Thanks to Swoon Reads for sponsoring This Week in Books.

Swoon Reads publishes the latest and greatest in YA fiction with the help of readers and writers like you. We’re dedicated to the undiscovered, and we seek out the very best in bright, new bookish talent. From heroic epics, to alien adventures, to all-the-feels romance—if you’re loving it, we’ll publish it. We involve our community in every step of the publishing process, and work closely with selected writers to get their book ready for publication. Together, we bring new stories to life, because we believe that great books are better shared.