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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower Opens in July 2024. It is wildly prescient.
The link of the day is actually a tweet in which Michiko Kakutani sketches the eery, upsetting prescience of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: “Octavia Butler’s 1993 dystopian novel Parable of the Sower begins in July of 2024. Climate change is turning the globe into a hellscape with droughts, fires, and calamitous weather events. Racial and class inequities have soared, women’s rights are under threat, and white nationalism and radical fundamentalism are taking hold.” Go read the rest of the tweet, because the similarities (regrettably, even Butler would admit) don’t end there.
What The New York Times Missed: 71 More of the Best Books of the 21st Century
LitHub drew up a list to supplement The New York Times‘s 100 Best Books of the Century survey, and I think they catch most (perhaps all?) of the books I have seen most often mentioned as surprising omissions (this is rather simple when your appendix list is almost as long as the list it is responding to). I am most surprised not to see Gone Girl on the list, followed by Educated and A Little Life. I am not surprised there is not a Murakami (the author I see most mentioned) only because there isn’t one or two Murakami titles that readers have coalesced around. If you were to do a similar asking for the Best Authors Who Published Books in the 21st Century, I would expect him to be in the top 10, perhaps even top 5. But 100 is not all that many books, and I find it helpful to remember that this is really only four books per year. And for voters, it means picking your favorite book of the year–only once out of every four years. This is tall cotton, people.
Hachette Reorgs Workman, with Admired Imprint Algonquin Young Readers Moving to Little, Brown
This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, as there was a clause in Hachette’s acquisition of Workman that restricted layoffs for three years after the deal closed. Well, here we are three years later and the layoffs, with the euphemism of the day “reorg” carrying the human cost water, are here. I am a bit surprised to see that Algonquin Young Readers will be discontinued—it is a greatly admired imprint in the YA space. And though Algonquin on the adult side isn’t affected by this current round, I am nervous. A loss of an autonomous, even in the context of a major publisher, Algonquin would be lamentable.
15 Books About Appalachia to Read Instead of Hillbilly Elegy
So random that I would link to this list of books to read about Appalachia that are not Hillbilly Elegy today. Just sort of came to me as a good link. No real reason to include it other than a whim, right?
