| Dear book clubbers, Happy Memorial Day! We're coming to you a little early with this edition of the newsletter so that you have plenty of time to get settled with our June book pick as you head into the holiday weekend. It's truly perfect long weekend reading, too: Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind. Leave the World Behind was a finalist for last year's National Book Award for fiction, and it's a delicious read. It tells the story of a family of not-as-wealthy-as-they'd-like Brooklynites who take off for a vacation, only to have things go horribly wrong. It's a fantastic depiction of the worst vacation in the world, which will make whatever vacation (or staycation) you might be embarking on this summer feel even better by comparison. At the end of June, we'll be meeting up with Alam live on Zoom. You can RSVP here. In the meantime, here's a video recording of our May event with Sanjena Sathian, in case you missed it or just want to relive it. Sathian went through the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which has a notoriously difficult feedback process, and I love the ideas she laid out during our conversation about what you should do when you're getting bad feedback. | | | | | Friday, June 18: Discussion post on Leave the World Behind published to Vox.com. Wednesday, June 30: Virtual live event with author Rumaan Alam at 5 pm ET. You can RSVP here. Reader questions are encouraged! | | | THE LATEST IN BOOKS AT VOX | | | Stacey Abrams has a political thriller out this month! I spoke to her about writing fictional villainous presidents and why she had to cut out fun wonky scenes about the nuances of court-packing to make room for more car chases and kissing :( On the other end of the political spectrum, Mike Pence has a book deal with Simon & Schuster, and junior staffers who work there aren't thrilled. I did some reporting on how this conflict fits into publishing's larger existential crisis about who deserves a book deal. Meanwhile, last month's author Sanjena Sathian wrote about her search for Indian American representation in pop culture. And two new book-to-screen adaptations came out. Emily VanDerWerff reviewed the excellent Underground Railroad, and Alissa Wilkinson reviewed the not-at-all-excellent Woman in the Window. | | | NOTABLE BOOKS COVERAGE AROUND THE WEB | | | Here's some of the best writing about books and related subjects published across the internet in the past two weeks. - Relevant to the conflict over the Mike Pence book deal I linked to above: Zakiya Dalila Harris based her debut novel, the highly anticipated forthcoming The Other Black Girl, on her experience as an editorial assistant, when she was the only Black girl at Knopf. At the New York Times, she explains what she learned.
- For publishing analysis that is less sad and more gossipy: At Town & Country, the great Maris Kreizman explains what Younger gets right about publishing, and what it gets extremely wrong.
- Also at the New York Times, Elisabeth Egan has a lovely, nostalgic ode to the joys of immersive summer reading.
- I have long had a theory that all of Tana French's detective novels are secretly gothic house stories (I wrote about that briefly in my explainer on French's work), so I dug this LitHub essay by Nora Caplan-Bricker on how real estate functions in French's creepy, claustrophobic world — and, by extension, the role real estate plays in the millennial imagination.
- At Time magazine, The Handmaid's Tale author Margaret Atwood and The Underground Railroad author Colson Whitehead discuss what it's like to see their books adapted for television.
Happy reading! Constance | | | |
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