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.
10 Books That Expand a Classic’s Universe
All kinds of things can happen when a classic book enters the public domain. Most of them are nothingburgers. Some of them are cash grabs (how many spins on Gatsby from Daisy’s perspective do we really need?). A few of them are wonderful. From POV switches to gender-bent tales, here are 10 riffs on the classics that are actually worth reading.
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