Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Here are the stories from the last week that readers cared about the most.
The 150 Most Anticipated Books of the Fall
It’s late August, which means it is time for lists of the fall’s Most Anticipated Books ™. I value Kirkus’ lists of anticipated books because as a review-heavy publication, there is a chance that the folks picking the books have read a bunch of the books on the list already, rather than regurgitating the lists of other publications (this happens quite a bit, and you can tell who is phoning it in). Still, 150…..is a lot of books. I am not sure what the ideal number for a list like this is–too few and it feels skimpy and too many and it seems less like an exercise in curation than one of cataloging. If the average American really does read 12 books a year, say double that for the kind of person interested in a list like this. That means two a month, or eight total through the fall season. So even with a smallish list of 24 books, this reader would read a only a third of them, even if all of their Fall reading came from the list.
Leonard Riggio, Who Built Barnes & Noble Into a Bookselling Titan, dies at 87: 10 Things to Know About Him and His Empire.
I was going to do a giant catalogue of book lists I have been collecting over the last few weeks, but the news that Leonard Riggio, who built Barnes & Noble into the Goliath we know today, died today is going to preempt that.
Instead, I offer the 10 most interesting things to know about Riggio, one of the most influential figures in American books of all time.
Anti-Racism Author Accused of Plagiarizing Minority Academics
Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility flew to the top of bestseller lists in mid-2020during the height of Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. Criticism came along with sales, and her follow-up book, largely went unnoticed. Now, according to a complaint filed by The University of Washington, DiAngelo’s doctoral dissertation copied passages from the work of multiple Asian-American academics. Having looked at the passages in the complaint, I am not sure how you defend this one.
Neil Gaiman Accused of Sexual Assault by Fifth Woman
When the news first broke of The Tortoise’s reporting on women coming forward about Neil Gaiman, I thought this was probably going to turn out to be much, much worse. This recent allegation, backed up by a phone recording of someone alleged to be Gaiman, is indeed worse. (A side note: The Bookseller did it’s due diligence and sought comment from multiple parties associated with Gaiman, including his US and UK publishers, and author associations of which Gaiman is a member. None of them responded. I don’t think that is going to work for much longer here).
Major Publishers, Authors Guild Sue Over New Florida Book Banning Law
The line-up of plaintiffs in this challenge to Florida’s bad, stupid, and probably unconstitutional H.B. 1069 is formidable: six big publishers, the Authors Guild, and some individual marquee authors (Angie Thomas, John Green, and more). The suit has a sort of pincer attack, claiming that the publishers’ and authors’ First Amendment rights are being violated and that the students’ First Amendment rights are being violated. Compelling. But possibly the most common sense argument for how unbelievably idiotic the bill is comes in the shape of just listing the books removed from schools because of it: “Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man; Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls; Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye; Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; Richard Wright’s Native Son; Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House Five; and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.”