queer indie and self-published books to read during pride month
The indie and self-published community offers a great range of identities and diversification that you often can’t find in traditionally published books, but because of people’s prejudice against these books, or because of their laziness in trying to find them, indie books often go unnoticed.
Category: Book Recommendations
The best memoirs to celebrate Pride
From Amazon.
Categories: Book Recommendations, Memoir
Adult Books for Fall 2023
This is the landing page for Publishers Weekly’s recommendations for reading in the following categories: art, architecture, & photography; business & economics; cooking & food: history; lifestyle; literary fiction; memoirs & biographies; mysteries & thrillers, poetry, politics & current events; romance & erotica; science; SF, fantasy, & horror.
Category: Book Recommendations
Summer Books 2023
Landing page for The New York Times’s of summer reading in these categories: thrillers, beach reads, historical fiction, romance, crime, audiobooks, science fiction & fantasy, horror.
Category: Book Recommendations
Opinion: A map of 1,001 novels to show us where to find the real America
I always love these interactive features that allow you to look whatever aspects of a topic most appeal to each person. In this offering in the Los Angeles Times, Susan Straight explains, “Over the last five years, I’ve read or reread 1,001 books of fiction in my project to create a literary map of this country. The idea for this “library of America” was born in 2016, when the news and the elections told of a country being irrevocably divided by politics, by ideas of red and blue, by arguments over who is American and who is not.”
Category: Book Recommendations, Life Stories in Literature
Illinois set to become first state to end book bans
Read this piece in The Guardian for a refreshing change of pace on the censorship issue here in the U.S.
Category: Censorship
California officials aim to halt book bans to “preserve freedom”
And Axios reports that California may follow Illinois’s example.
Category: Censorship
Publisher Drops Author After TikTok Backlash and GoodReads Review Bombing
I severely restrict my participation in social media, but I love a juicy story just as much as the next person. Here’s one such story about a writer, a reader/reviewer, and a publisher, and what happens when people behave badly.
Categories: Publishing, Reading, Reviewing
I Won a Prize. So What?
Roger Rosenblatt, an essayist and novelist who received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2023, writes about literary awards. He acknowledges that “Winning a prize is an undeniably thrilling, magical thing. It is, in essence, the world’s way of telling you that you’ve done something noteworthy and valuable.”
But, he asks, “on the whole, do prizes do any good?”
Category: Awards & Prizes
© 2023 by Mary Daniels Brown
