Books Are My People Weekly Newsletter
out today, paperback releases and more!
Yay fall! (It’s 90 degrees in Los Angeles, but, whatever.) It’s been a busy week. It was my husband’s birthday, we went to an art reception, I officially submitted my completed manuscript to my agent (book number 4!), I interviewed Louis Bayard for my Books Are My People podcast (see below), went to my son’s college hockey game (he scored another goal!), took the dogs to the beach and edited videos for my Books Are My People bookclub here on Substack! Phew!
My latest episode of Books Are My People is out! I accidentally hit publish a day early, so that’s why it published on a Sunday instead of my usual Monday date! I interview historical fiction author Louis Bayard, author of The Wildes: A Novel In Five Acts and we also get a guest author recommendation from Shannon Bowring, author of the beautiful novel, Where The Forest Meets The River. You can listen by clicking here.
Let Me Help You Discover Books You Might Not Otherwise Read! You can learn more about me by visiting my introductory post here.
The best way you can support this newsletter is to click on the books below and purchase them through my Bookshop.org affiliate store. A portion of your spending goes to independent bookstores! A win-win-win! (You win, I win, indie bookstores win!)
Books Out Today (I’ve starred the ones I’ve read.)
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
For fans of literary fiction in North Dakota: The Mighty Red tells a story of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people's lives. It’s about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor written by a contemporary tour de force writer.
The Sequel by Jane Hanff Korelitz
For fans of meaty page-turning, thought-provoking suspense that satirizes the world of publishing: This is the sequel to The Plot, a suspense novel that I loved! In The Sequel, Anna Williams-Bonner seems to have found peace as a literary widow and it’s time to write her own debut novel, The Aftereword. But when Anna publishes her book and indulges in her own literary acclaim, she begins to receive excerpts of a novel she never expected to see again, a novel that should no longer exist.
Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner
For lovers of stories about sisters: I recently purchased this one, but I have not yet read it. Two sisters relationship is explored over two decades as one grapples with mental illness and one tries to preserve her carefully curated empirical world.
Society of Lies by Lauren Ling Brown
If you like dark academia: What should have been a dream weekend at Maya’s Princeton reunion (and her sister, Naomi’s graduation) becomes her worst nightmare when she receives the news that her sister is dead. The police are calling it an accident, but Maya suspects that there is more to the story than they are letting on, namely, Naomi hid a lot of secrets from her sister.
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera
Are you in to speculative 19th Century New Orleans imagined history? A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship.
Model Home buy Rivers Solomon
For lovers of haunted-house novels: The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things--the strange and the unexplainable--began to happen in their house.
As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents' death arrives, they are forced to return and question whether their death was natural or supernatural.
Paperbacks Out Today:
*North Woods by Daniel Mason
A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries.
*The Vaster Wildes by Lauren Groff
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.
Starter Villain John Scalzi
Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place.
*The Maniac by Benjamin Labutat
The Maniac places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.
Paid Subscriber Corner:
I’ve pinned the reading schedule to my Substack homepage for easy access. I’ve also added an audiobook listening guide, in case you’re consuming your book that way!
Read With Me Series: It’s not too late to upgrade and join my Read With Me reading series!
November: Book to Film Series: Poor Things by Alasdair Gray. Read the book, watch the movie, or both!
UPDATED: December - I will be pausing Substack for the month of December in order to recharge. What does this mean for you? If you’re a paying subscriber, you won’t be charged for December. And there will be no paying subscriber activities. For free subscribers, this means no newsletters for the month of December. I WILL still be publishing my book recommendation podcast, Books Are My People during December. And business as usual will resume in January.
January: Independent Reading - read a book! Let’s discuss at the end of January.
In case you don’t follow me on Instagram, I am reposting the photo of the exclusive to Barnes & Noble edition of Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, in orange instead of the yellow chess board. I just had to have one, especially since it reminds me of this piece of art I own by Samuel Fleming Lewis.
I hope you all have a wonderfully bookish week! What are you looking forward to reading on or off this list! Share below.
Books Are My People: A Podcast Companion Newsletter
(click here to listen to the most recent episode of my book recommendation podcast.)
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Congratulations on submitting your manuscript!!!!