National Book Critics Circle Winners, Censorship Cases on a Collision Course with the Supreme Court, and more of the week's book news
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This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill. And I'm Rebecca Shinsky. It's kind of a mop-up.

Today, Rebecca, we haven't recorded in a while. I saw that you took the easy way out and republished my awesome episode with Stephen Graham-Jones last week. Listen, it was both the easy way and the good way. We had some... Everyone who could edit podcasts was out of the office at the same time, which I did not realize until it was too late. So I reached for a good one. Yeah, it's a good episode. I'm glad. I mean, of all the things to have there, I'm happy that was really special stuff from Stephen Graham-Jones.

over there. Programming Notes, speaking of first edition, came out today. So while you're listening to this, it'll be out. I did a solo effort where I ran through 21 books coming out in April that I'm interested in. There's a little bit of It book crossover, but not too much, not enough to make it not interesting. And I say at the top of that show, I will not be reading all 21 of those books. I do not read 21 books in a month, but it's kind of a behind the scenes of...

Kind of how I TBR. I don't really TBR in a conventional sort of way, but I have a list and I have a radar and they are to be MR, to be maybe read, to be interested in reading, to like sort of feel bad that I didn't get to or...

life is short and books are long. I don't know what you want to call the list. It's kind of fun. That's about how my reading list goes as well. Like I know what's coming out each Tuesday and then it's a vibe check basically for what's out and seems interesting to me in that specific moment. That'll be fun.

to listen to. We are off for bonus episodes this week. We've done a bunch of extra Patreon stuff over the last month or so. So we're just taking one week off, but we have fun things coming up next week on the Patreon. We will have a check-in on the hot list, which is our ever-

evolving. Speaking of vibe checks. Yeah, it kind of, you know, it takes different paths. It's always warm and molten, but it has different cadences. Sometimes it's long, sometimes it's short, just depending on what's happening in the world of books and reading. What are the big titles that have some heat going on around them? We'll also be doing a little mini book club discussion here in the main feed next Wednesday of Audition by Katie Kitamura. Oh, I'm so excited.

And in the second half of that show, I will be talking with the creators of the new documentary Banned Together, B-A-N-N-E-D, where they were following book banning efforts in mostly South Carolina and Florida over the last few years and a few student activists from schools that have been especially hard hit. I got to watch that over the weekend. It's really terrific. And it's coming out on streaming on April 9th, April 10th on Amazon and Apple TV. So we'll be talking with them right as it becomes available on streaming for folks to access too. Wow.

We're also looking for, we've gotten our first wave of recommendation requests for moms, dads, and grad season. You can shoot us an email, podcast at bookriot.com. For Patreon members, you can jump to the head of the line over there. I'll put a link in the show notes as well. Let's see, what else was I going to say? Yeah, check out the Book Riot podcast, Instagram, the Patreon, the Substack, Instagram.

I've got a, I think, I don't remember where we left this, Rebecca. Who's writing up the fantasy draft rules? Is that you, me, Laura? Who's doing that? Oh, yes. I have a document of the rules for the Fantasy League, and then I started working on a spreadsheet that we can each use as our scoring sheet. We have a couple...

little nitty gritty things that we'll need to sort out with each other and with Sharifa, who will be joining us for that fantasy league draft. But we'll be doing that here in early May. A lot of nice feedback from our episodes with Laura. That was a really good time over there. Now I just...

What we can't have here, Rebecca, is Dr. Laura McGrath coming into our podcast and beating us. So I think you and Sharif and I, we need to team up somehow. I don't know what kind of strategy we can do here, but it's BR versus Laura McGrath. I don't know. I like Laura. I might be team Laura. Come on. Does a thousand episodes give me nothing?

She comes on for 90 minutes, is in Charming and Knowledgeable, and I'm out. I mean, it's not that you're out. It's just that I like it when I win, and the next best thing to me winning is someone other than you winning. That's really tough to hear, though. Very familiar-sounding refrain, I have to say. Say hello to Michelle. Yeah, I will. If she was right here, she'd be nodding vigorously. Anyway, so that's going to be really fun to take a look at.

over there. Point of order on something else I was thinking about, speaking of the 21 books I'm looking at in April, I was thinking about kind of a Patreon, maybe only bolt-on to the It Books of the Month where I give seven or eight like wildcard picks because I'm going through the catalogs anyway. And we could do 15 or 20 minutes of like, here, look at these books. You know, kind of like a Deals, Deals, Deals books for books that are coming out that we don't know anything about. And they can follow sort of the Deals, Deals, Deals

which is just, I thought they were worth talking about for four minutes and that's it. I mean, I have a couple to add on to those as well. I think let's do that. We'll try that out for next month's Zip Books. And see what people think of that over there. And maybe a couple like honorable mentions that were just outside the 10 or something like that. I think people, and I like, and we know that just navigating the weekly deluge of releases is a,

It's a lot. Work and also can be entertaining, right? Like I think a lot of people are like me where knowing a book exists is like not as good as having read it, but it's also not as bad. You know, it's like, it kind of like knowing that the thing was there. It's fun to like walk into the bookstore and see the new releases and be like, oh yeah, I knew of most of

these. As you were saying, I'm not going to have enough time to read nearly anywhere close to all of them. But it is fun to be like, oh yeah, I heard that that was coming out. It'll be interesting to see how it does or maybe it gets picked up by something. But equally delightful is the, whoa, I've never heard of this. And it's brand new.

And it's especially when something is right in my wheelhouse. I love that discovery moment in a bookstore like that can still happen. It can still happen. That's how many books there are. People who look at this stuff all the time can still be surprised. I realized and I think I would have put it on the list. I'm not really sure, but I talked about it before. I didn't mention Exit Zero by Marie Helene Bertino. And that was because...

My filters and edelweiss for it books is I filter by hardback. And that's a paperback original. And that's a paperback original. And I just miss paperback original. And it's sort of rare that a paperback original would rise to the level of it book inclusion. And for us, I think for us, Bertino certainly is one of the most interesting books we're looking for in April. Is it really contender for it book of the month? Yeah.

Probably not, to be honest. Probably not. But we will be. I mean, it's very much in our wheelhouse and it will be in the Patreon, the wheelhouse over there. We're going to read that short story collection and then run back the play that we did for the last George Saunders collection where we rank the stories in exit zero by how Marie Halimbertino they are. Yes.

We're giving her the full court press because I'm also interviewing her and walking through her whole catalog, book by book, which is a format I've never done before. Luckily, this is one where I have. The only thing I haven't read is her first collection of short stories, which I just got, but I'm going to reread everything else. So we're giving the full court press. We're having every reason to talk about Bertino we can come up with.

Not for nothing. And you can hear the whole episode of the live show that we did at Powell's. I thought about this. The most recommendable books of the century so far. But Marie-Helene Bertino is the only author who got two spots. Two. Each picked one of her books.

And that's a little bit of rule result because we just pick different books. If we had a, we can only have one book by each author, which maybe we should have, but that's it. It's kind of fun to see that there as well. So yeah, those are things coming up here. Before we get into the rest of the show, we got to do a first sponsor break. This episode is brought to you by Alcove Press and Spotify. Stick around after the show to hear an excerpt from the audio book of The God's Time Forgot by Kelsey Sheridan Gonzalez. Manhattan, 1870.

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Today's episode is brought to you by Sourcebooks, publishers of I'll Never Call Him Dad Again by Caroline Darion. Now, this book comes with a bit of a trigger warning. In November 2020, Caroline Darion received an unthinkable call. Her father was in custody. Investigators had uncovered the unimaginable.

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We're not quite to the end of 2024 books and awards because the lag really ends with the Pulitzer Prizes, which is soon, right? Next couple of weeks, I think. In the next few weeks, late April, early May, we'll get the Pulitzers. But in the amuse-bouche to the dessert that is the Pulitzer Prizes, we get the National Book Critics Circle Awards.

That came out, I think, the week before last. I'm not really sure when these came out. I think before I was on vacation. Yeah, we missed it on the news show. It was right. It came out after we recorded the last episode before you went on vacation. Oh, you and Vanessa probably would have covered it. Yeah, right, right. The award winners there, there's fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, poetry, criticism, poetry.

And first novel prize, we talked about the finalists a little bit here. The headline for me here is that James did not win in fiction, which, okay. I have not read My Friends by Hisham Mattar. I've heard nothing but good things about it. So this is the rule. This is a rule you and I try to follow. Whereas if something is on a list or wins a prize and you haven't read it, you can't say it should have been X.

X. I agree. I'm surprised. Maybe I would like to have seen, but we played this game with the, what were, Oh, the classics on the Patreon. Like, okay, give us your feedback, but you cannot replace a book you have not read with something you have, because that is available. Like that's maybe under the definition of availability bias, I think right there. So now having said that a surprise, I guess, you know, I expect James to win all of these awards for which that book is available and eligible. Um,

I will read this book eventually, I think, my friend. Yeah. And, you know, it was nominated for the National Book Award for fiction as well. So not a total. This one didn't totally come out of nowhere. And as I've thought about it, I think if any of the awards were going to veer away from James, it would be the National Book Critics Circle just by virtue of like so it's so arty. Yeah.

This is such an arty crowd. I will read this one as well at some point. I'm seeing a little of this happening currently on the Morning News' tournament of books. It has come down to James and Martyr.

which was also one of the National Book Award nominees that went up against it. So really, as you were saying, the only question remaining for James is the Pulitzers. And those can zag sometimes. Because it's like three people that nominate to the greater board. Like some of the structures of these things, we don't know how they work. And the smaller the pool, the more randomness. Yeah. And I mean, sometimes in years, there are good books every year. And, you know, 10 years ago, they just didn't award one. Right.

I would be – I didn't think – we've talked about that before. One part that never really occurred to me until, I don't know, I was thinking about it in some context. I don't know what.

Like if you did all the work as one of the Pulitzer judges, right? Like you did the work of reading the books and you make a recommendation to the board and then they're like, nah, I would be so mad. Me too, especially under the rules we're talking about here. If the board says nah, but it's not because they've read all of those books as well and they disagree. Yeah, like I don't want a book about fly fishing. Well, you know what you can do with your poll?

Anyway, so the other winners here, I'm very pleased to see Challenger by Adam Higginbotham win. That book is awesome. I don't know what to say. For those of you who don't know, it is about the culminating in the explosion of the Challenger shuttle, but really a history of NASA to that point and shortly thereafter that shows how it got there. There are stories of...

supreme neglect and avarice, there's also surprising stories, to me at least, of people who averted other disasters. There's this one woman, and I don't remember her name, I think it's Jenna something, I wrote it down, but I don't have my notepad with me, who basically knew that the instrumentation was faulty and avoided aborting another shuttle launch that probably would have killed everyone because she's like, you know...

This is more of, this is a problem with the check engine light, not the engine. Like she knew. Oh boy. Okay. So like it was a little bit more held together with two hands metaphorically and figuratively like, so anyway, that book is terrific. Highly recommend it. It's very long. If you're going to read one Higginbotham though, and you haven't read Midnight in Sheridan Orville, that one's still the best one. Okay. There you go. And then, you know, for the completely understandable and I totally get why there's always this year by Henaif Abderkiba's in Criticism.

You know, I'm always happy to see Hanif Abdurraqib win awards. I think this is just evidence that...

awards-giving bodies don't know what to do with books that don't fit neatly into one genre. And rightly so, because what do you do with a... You have a wildcard award? Well, actually, that's a good idea. They should have a wildcard award. Yeah, they should have a wildcard category, because they have a biography category. Separate from an autobiography category, you could make a case that there's always this year is a... It's a form of autobiography and memoir. I think it makes more sense than criticism, absolutely. Right, and then...

And then criticism, I think his previous book, A Little Devil in America, fits more neatly into criticism. I would have put There's Always This Year into the autobiography category. But then maybe you're up against like Alexei Navalny's autobiography comes up. So there's some juggling there.

But one of the remarkable things about Hanif Abdurraqib is that even though no one knows quite like which shelf to put him on in the bookstore, because he does multiple things at once, he continues to win awards. Like they find ways to recognize him because he's so deserving of it. So we're thrilled to see that, of course. Congratulations to him. I'll be really eager to see how the Pulitzers shake out in a couple of weeks. Another thing we like about the NBCC is that they have a

first book prize. Is it first novel? Okay. So a praise, a praise and feedback for the NBCC here on their, on their homepage, on this, on this page that has the awards. Yeah. Do you know what I'm going to say?

Yeah, for having the first book prize. That's very good. That's the praise. But it doesn't say, it says John Leonard Prize and then say what it is. Oh, yeah. And then you can't click on anything. Yeah, you just have to know that that's what the John Leonard Prize is for. Yeah, and the Tony Morrison Achievement Award goes to Third World Press. And it's just words. Like, I can't click on it. There's no explanation. Like, what are we doing here? You can't even open up a synopsis of the book by clicking.

clicking on it. If you scroll to the top of the page and you click on the long lists, you get like really no further information. Yeah. So great. A more robust website would be great. I mean, is, is link is to something linked to the publisher page? Like maybe they're like, we don't know where to link, but can you pull the synopsis from the publisher? Like we have the technology here, so you've got, you've got good stuff. Don't, don't put your light under a bushel. Yeah.

I support this. Lights go outside the bushel. Books are hard enough to sell. Let's try to make it a little bit easier. Or just know something about. I wanted to click on this. Lights go outside the bushel is like a great nugget for a self-help book. I'm not even metaphorical gun to your head. Could you identify a bushel in a lineup of things? Absolutely not. Is it like a hat?

I picture those, you know, like a bushel basket. Like if you go apple picking and you have the old timey baskets for that. That's what I always picture for hide it under a bushel. No. It must be, it must have been a basket for like you just pick stuff and put it in there. It's like I couldn't pick, I couldn't pick out what a cord of wood is either. That could be like an airship, like an aircraft carrier amount of wood or like three pieces. Right. Somewhere between those I think is interesting.

Yeah. Somewhere between 15 minutes and all night is your problem, Jeff. Don't put your light under a basket. And who did this? I mean, where did that metaphor come from? They like saw some kid like, you know, Johnny or Jebediah, your light doesn't because those things are flammable. That's the other thing.

Right. And we would be talking about like old timey candles, probably that you snuff out by putting them under. Or you catch the basket on fire. Like there's no good reason here. The wheels have come off. That's okay. If you know the origins of hiding your light. Is this a Bible verse? Well, no, it's like a song. Well, I know, but did the song come from a Bible verse?

It's been a while since I've, you know, I've been sufficiently trained in the good book to be able to tell you that right there. Email us. Podcastedbook.com. This is what happens when you don't hyperlink your texts. This is what happens. You have podcasters going way sideways. We don't know what to do. We're just flailing. Okay. So enough about that. You know...

The courts are trying to do some of their things when it comes to book bans. And the most recent one is Kelly wrote about this while I was gone last week on the 26th, that a federal judge has again blocked our favorite bill. You know it's a bad bill when I know it, 496. It's like, oh, I sent it 496. It's that one. This is the third decision as Kelly notes over that bill. So I guess I don't really know where we are in the appeals process. I assume this is going to end up in the Supreme Court.

I assume one of these is going to go there at some point. And this Iowa scene, the Iowa one seems to be like a good contender. It's one of the ones that is usefully vaguely worded where, you know, things have to be age appropriate, but there's no definition of age appropriate and they can't contain descriptions or depictions of sex acts, but like is mentioning that someone kissed appropriate.

a sex act? How graphic does it have to be to count? And then of course, there's the whole thing where they are describing these materials as pornographic that don't meet the existing legal standard of pornography, but words don't mean things anymore here in George Orwell's America.

Kelly also rounded up the biggest book censorship and banning news of the year so far. And the degree to which the Overton window has been ripped out of the wall and put into a separate building, any one of these stories would have been the story of the year four years ago. And I guess just to pick one that's related because I was mentioning the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court's going to hear one of these cases, Mahmoud versus Taylor, which

which is about the situation in Montgomery County, Maryland, and access to LBTQ plus titles. And the issue is, do the schools have the right to provide the materials without giving parents an opportunity to... I'll link it. You can see Kelly's strikethrough commentary here, opt their kids out about learning that, you know, LBTQ people exist. Kelly is not optimistic about the outcome, but...

That's going to be very interesting. She also notes that we have not had a books-related case in front of the Supreme Court since 1982. Wow. Okay. Which is really, really interesting to see. Because you know what? We thought we sort of figured this out. Right. That most of the time it's cool. Yeah. I mean, that's the year that I was born. And until the last five, six years of this stuff, it seemed like we had pretty much settled on...

Books contain ideas and you decide which...

ones you want to read, but the fact that you don't want to read some of them doesn't mean you have the right to tell anyone else that they can't read them. And that is apparently once again in question. I'll just again encourage folks, mark it on your calendars next week for when Band Together comes out and you can watch it on streaming. A really terrific resource, especially for folks in your life who are maybe just kind of aware that this is happening, but they're not as plugged in. They're not listening to book podcasts.

on their own, but they're curious about it. I mean, we read all of this stuff as Kelly reports it and we're following it. And I still found it really astonishing to see some of the footage from inside those school board meetings. And they did a great job of getting one-on-one interviews with teachers and librarians who have been personally targeted by Moms for Liberty, personally targeted with harassment campaigns by parents and groups that are angry at them. And just

how devastating that is to their lives, but also to the students who rely on them for support and for resources. It will light a fire under you to make some phone calls and go to some meetings. You know, it's interesting. I know a little bit about

earlier in the well we're not in the 20th century so early to mid-20th century court cases around obscenity and I really got into it when we did the annotated about Ulysses right because there's a big court case about whether or not Ulysses was very interesting to read a court case about whether or not it's obscenity and there was subsequent court cases like 30 years later around Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Allen Ginsberg's Howl so this does come up I guess

I think it's helpful to have some sort of historical prism because just because there hasn't been a case since you were, you know, in utero doesn't mean these things are solved. And it doesn't mean that we're going back to them means we're like, Hey,

handmaid's tailing it, it's not great. But there are these pendulums. The arc of history bends towards justice, as Dr. King said. But that arc is bumpy and there's some loops back and forth. It's non-linear. It's non-linear. And I think it's helpful, again, maybe to give people a sense of that just because we're having these cases and challenges that are very much retrograde to me, feeling...

It's sort of, I don't want to say it's normal, but it isn't a sign that things are broken. It's a sign you got to do something. It's a sign you got to argue, but like this does happen and then they get overturned in another court case, doesn't it? It takes time, but these things do happen. What makes this moment special?

Maybe not totally singular, but unique in contemporary history, at least, is that it is part of a larger movement and systematic. Like, it's not about is this one book obscene? It's not just Tropic of Cancer, but about these whole collection of books, but really about suppressing a whole collection of ideas and identities and things.

You can on on the left here, we can start to feel like we sound like conspiracy theorists when you talk about how these groups are connected and what these campaigns are about. And that's another thing that they did really nicely and band together is interviewing like Democratic politicians, liberal folks who were like, here's what happened in Florida. Like this got passed in this specific way because campaign money was funneled to this person and that person. And Moms for Liberty are deeply connected to the apparatus of the Republican Party movement.

both nationally and at the state level, varying degrees in different states, but extremely connected in the state of Florida. And that is a huge reason that they've been so successful with the book banning attempts in that state is that they are so at every level of state government, they're backed up by folks who share this ideology and who do see this as a way to, they state as one of the student protesters says, they state that they're protecting the children, but no one is asking us what we actually want.

But they certainly have ideas that they believe children should not be exposed to. Yeah. I mean, again, the historical moment, I think it's just so helpful to compare and contrast because like Ginsburg was expelled from Columbia for being found in bed with Jack Kerouac. Yeah. You know, the district attorney of San Francisco brought the case against Ginsburg. So like,

This, whatever's happening now is not that. Like that was more, this was more radical because it wasn't just keeping Howell out of high schools. This was, should Henry Miller be thrown in jail? Should City Lights be unable to distribute these books? So like things have moved. Again, I'm not trying to Pollyanna anything here.

But these things have their moment because there is a broader thing in the argument. And these things against Howell and Henry Miller were certainly related to McCarthyism in the 50s and people being nervous about the world changing again. There's so many interesting parallels. It's a lot different, but it also fundamentally feels kind of the same, honestly, in a fundamental way. Yeah, I think what you're talking about is kind of that cyclical expansion and then reflex nature, that when there is an expansion in public conversation,

consciousness and an expansion in our understanding of rights and freedom of expression. Like what does freedom of expression mean? People who are scared of those things contract or they, they attempt to contract it all by pulling back and restricting everything. And there's a, I think a much like too shiny way of explaining it. Like, this is how you know you're winning that people are coming for you. Right.

We have made meaningful progress, and you can see that in the way that human rights have expanded in the last 20 years in this country. The right does not like that, and they are attempting to come for it.

I think we can expect those cycles again. Like, I completely share the beliefs that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. And I have a sick simper Tyrannus tattoo. Like, I don't think this shit ever... But someone's got to bend it, right? Like, it doesn't bend by itself, I guess, is the point. Like, you got to keep working the metal. Like, this stuff never...

never ends in the way that the people who are trying to restrict freedom want it to end. But we do have to keep fighting and move to the next one and then come to, I think, really an expectation that this is what will happen the next time there are big steps taken forward in how we understand freedom of expression and human liberty, that every time more people get free,

the people who want the control of power are going to attempt to restrict it. And right now books are at the center of it, but they might not always be. Yeah. And I don't know, I don't know this history at all is like, you know, as, as Kelly has written about it's, we've moved on from the point where a single book has become the flashpoint for these, like it's whole categories or depictions or identities. Like that's,

That I don't have ready at my own mind and a historical antecedent for. Maybe there were things like this, but like that I can name Ulysses, Tropic and Cancer and Hal is specific is meaningfully different than any book that mentions LBTQ people. Or there's these vague age appropriateness, at least in these cases, in a lot of ways, they're like weird close reading cases. Like in each single one, the judge kind of made the same arguments. Like, yes, there are sexual depictions here, but the literary merit of the thing is,

says that it's not pornography. And so it shouldn't be regulated like pornography.

And they become sort of de facto close readings of these texts, which are, I mean, I find that as you kind of, yeah, that's fascinating. That's like catnip for me. I mean, part of the problem is not doing anything like that. The folks who are challenging these books are not close reading them. And in many cases, not reading them at all. It's very, it's very much a, I don't know, blankets indictments and, you know, judge, jury and executioner based on just the presence of specific people or identities. You hate to see that. Yeah.

Today's episode is brought to you by Flatiron Books, publisher of Girl Falling by Hayley Scribner. And if you like women with messy friendships, explorations of grief, and a nice little twisty twist at the end, this is for you. Torn between her girlfriend Magdu and her best friend Daphne, Finn is looking forward to a day of rock climbing and bonding for the three women on the soaring cliffs near their Australian town.

but nothing goes as she planned. And in a horrific accident, Magdo falls to her death. Rocked by grief, Finn tries to pinpoint where it all went wrong. Did Magdo die because of Finn's friendship with overbearing Daphne who has never wanted Finn to change or leave her? Hmm, questions. So then the police suspect the foul play and Finn begins to search for the shocking truth about her relationships and what has been in front of her all along.

So did Magdo accidentally fall to her death or was there some encouragement, let's say? Who knows? You have to pick up Girl Falling by Haley Scrivener to find out. Thanks again to Flatiron Books, publisher of Girl Falling, for sponsoring this episode.

I was never really a runner. The way I see running is a gift, especially when you have stage four cancer. I'm Anne. I'm running the Boston Marathon presented by Bank of America. I run for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to give people like me a chance to thrive in life.

even with cancer. Join Bank of America in helping Anne's cause. Give if you can at bfa.com slash support Anne. What would you like the power to do? References to charitable organizations is not an endorsement by Bank of America Corporation. Copyright 2025. Okay. In stories I'm glad to see, the bishop who urged Trump to have mercy during the... It was at the National Cathedral. It was the National Prayer Breakfast. Yeah, that's part of the inauguration pomp and circumstance took the occasion to...

Sub-preach, I guess. Or overtly preach, I guess. She did not throw away her shot is what happened right there. Reverend Marianne Edgar Buddies? Budd. B-U-D-D-E's? Budds. How We Learned to Be Brave is coming out on October 25th. There's also a picture book scheduled for the summer of 2026. Great. Penguin Young Readers, P-Y-R, is taking on. So one is young adult and one is a picture book.

I'll be interested to see how they try to ban these. Oh, yeah, I'm sure they will. So just as a quick point of order, her book, How We Learned to Be Brave, came out in 2023. That's adult. I'm sorry. Pardon me. Pardon me. Yes. Written for adults. And then in the wake of the National Prayer Service and hers having this real moment of public attention, they're doing a young adult edition, which is We Can Be Brave that, as you said, will be out October 25th. And then there will be a picture book in the summer of 2026.

We certainly need more people who are willing to stand up to shoot their shot like this when they have a moment to say the thing and to be unafraid. I mean, Trump was out there the next day calling her like a terrible left wing radical and all sorts of things. And I think she knew what she was signing up for when she, you know, took the pulpit and said the things that she chose to say. So, Reverend Budd, may your efforts succeed.

We'll be very interested to see what the book tour process looks like and how they go about publicity for these titles. But more like this, if you're in a position where you can help people who are willing to take their message out into the world and fight the good fight like this, get book deals. Let's get them some book deals, people.

It's also, I don't know where we are in the political book buying deal making cycle. This is a much different moment than 2016 into 2020 for sure in a lot of different ways because the pace is pretty quick. Like even Cory Booker's like marathon strong eating filibuster is kind of washed away today by the tariff. Like,

I'm curious, even by the fall, will people have to be reminded? Oh, that's a good, yeah. Maybe. Those cycles for publishing are longer than the news cycle, certainly. I'm waiting to see which publisher is going to announce that they are binding up all of the stuff from Cory Booker's

I mean, those are public records, right? Melville House is what my money is on. Melville House is probably there, yeah. They're probably writing it up right now. I'm waiting for the press release about that. But if they can get that one out pretty quickly, I think there will be appetite for that. That's going to be a historical document at some point. Yeah, I think it will be at some point. Speaking of Penguin, Random House sales for PRH were up

8.5% in 2024, topping $5 billion, I believe, for the first time. Yeah, it would have had to have been.

The story here is more that they acquired a bunch of places that also sold books. I don't think there is a lot of data here about the actual unit sales from existing. It's like, what is that? In publicly traded companies that are retail, there's like two different ways of looking at earnings. One is like same store sales versus new store sales. Yes. Like, okay, you're going to sell more if you open a new Chipotle in a town that doesn't have one. That makes sense. But what does your Chipotle that's been in the same place for five years doing?

And this has been a longer term story. This is why the acquisition thing has been happening really since we've been doing this, Rebecca, right? It's because it's so much easier to buy an existing Chipotle, well, or buy an existing burrito joint and turn it into a- Turn it into a Chipotle, exactly. And say, hey, look, our sales are up. Yeah. Because the profits that they're making, they don't have a good way of reinvesting into the company to grow sales. So they take that free cash flow and they buy other things.

you know other people have written about whether this is bad or good or conglomeration but i think it speaks to the fundamental problem in publishing is that reinvesting the profits they do make into their extent business it sort of doesn't work yeah it sort of doesn't work there's like a big open secret in publishing

The thing Warren Buffett always looks for when he's a corner, this is now stock corner with Jeff, apparently is what I'm doing right now. I was like, Warren Buffett, come on, let's go. I'm thinking of Bob today. Bob today. Oh man. My baby boy. The day after tariffs. It's an interesting day to be Bob today. I wondered when you asked about the coffee grinder that I had, it's like, can't you just use Bob's teeth?

Anyway, like, you know, Buffett, when he acquires a company he's looking for, can this company take its earning and reinvest it in the company and grow? Because that's part of the magic flywheel of this kind of compound growth. And publishing cannot grow.

do it. They have not figured out how. They have not figured out how to do it. And so what are you going to do with the money that you make? Well, some of it you return to shareholders, but some of it you try to grow the business. And the only way they've been consistently able to do it is to buy other publishers. And the problem with that is at some point you run out of other publishers. Forget all the stuff about monopsonies and monopolies. That could be very well. But at some point there is a logical end to that where there are no more publishers to buy. Right. Yeah. It's similar to like Amazon grows at such a rate that

There is a timeline at which Amazon cannot continue to grow at that rate because they will run out of people on the planet that they can hire. There won't be enough dollars to make if you're growing 11% a year. Right. And there are only so many publishers that will remain available for acquisition that would make sense to acquire Amazon.

I don't think we're near the end of this kind of consolidation, but I feel like we're in a different zone of it than we were in five years ago, 10 years ago. Like it was a huge deal when Penguin and Random House merged and,

And it doesn't really feel that different to be in publishing now than it did then. Like if you are a person who lives in New York and works in publishing houses and you've watched like job opportunities shrink, I'm sure that that feels very different. But especially, you know, since the Simon and Schuster situation got kiboshed. I think that was the big one that feels like maybe the

At least the political will. If that court case came today, I think PRH would have been allowed to buy some. Oh, probably. I don't know if one of these big four or five will have the opportunity to pick off another one. I don't think they're all interested in it, right? Yeah, I don't think they are all open to it.

either. And some of them, some of them are doing better than others in terms of like, in terms of doing that thing you're talking about with reinvesting their profits and growing the company without acquisition. But this is, this is tough and interesting to see that, that it is pretty clearly these increase in profits are pretty clearly driven by having acquired other publishers, not by having figured out how to grow their own businesses. Yeah.

Yeah, so I'm not sure there's much story here except to say the beat goes on in terms of how do you actually sell? How do you grow the market? Right? Because those are your two options if you're trying to increase your sales, especially your PRH, which you're already what 60, 70% of trade sales.

You've got two options. You can take from other publishers, like win, you know, this book versus that book against a competitive title or competitive imprint. You can buy other publishers and bring them an umbrella, or you can try to grow the pie so that the slice, you know, you're 14%, you're 60%, depending on what publisher you are, gets you more calories, right? Because this slice is a little bigger and that just has not been figured out. And one of the things I remember...

I think Lisa Lucas saying as part of either her entry into the editorial process or exit from was she was surprised. Again, I don't remember. Don't quote me on this. I could have gotten this wrong. Maybe it was somebody else, but I'm attributing it to her. One of the things she was surprised by was the disinterest, unwillingness to try to grow the whole market, right? Investing in

know younger readers like you have to this is a multi-decade thing it's it's probably easier right well cigarette companies know how to do this you hook them while you're young right so they grow up to be smokers it would make sense for you know a better product but like you're making lifelong readers I'd imagine it'd be much more cost effective to try to get a nine-year-old who's already sort of reading books in school to become a lifelong reader then to confer a 47 year old guy like me who maybe isn't reading right which one is it difficult and in the lifetime

I don't know what they think about those terms, the way that these publicly traded companies report on earnings. They do not lend themselves to a multi-decade system.

Right. To a long, yeah, we're investing and we'll give you returns on this in 20 years is not generally well received. Yeah. So anyway, that was a lot of, that was a lot of something for saying, I'm not sure there's much to see here. What do you think about growing the market by getting in bed with giant YouTubers who sell chocolates and do giant stunts to YouTube videos? Oh, I just had a real like, of course, this is what we're doing response to this headline, which is that Mr. Beast is

Who I would not have been able to pick Mr. Beast out of a lineup, but that's probably by virtue of there are no children living in my house. You've never consumed a Feastable? I don't even know what that is. Is it like a Lunchable? It's a candy bar. Mr. Beast, popular YouTuber, is teaming up with none other than James Patterson.

to write a not-yet-titled book that's being described as Squid Game-esque. I mean... Players fight to survive deadly tests held in dangerous locations around the world as they battle to become the one. It was a bidding war with offers that were in the eight-figure range.

It broke out over publishing rights. And apparently there's already, of course, high interest in film or TV adaptation rights. As this piece in Vulture by Jennifer Jeanne states, basically, it seems almost guaranteed that these two rich dudes are about to get even richer. Okay. Okay. This is what we're doing now, I guess. Talk about like maybe...

Either they really do understand how to reinvest or they really don't. Like in this week's Publishers Weekly, the number one hardcover fiction book is a new James Patterson title. And that is just the reality. But like eight figures? Do we really think we're going to sell enough books to have made that worth it? I mean, here's the thing. If you don't know who Mr. Beast is, I get that. And you're probably better. It's not for you, I would say. But...

That media thing that this company does is a behemoth. Like when you talk about platforms, as big of an individual, I mean, it's bigger than any celebrity name you know of. It just is. And I saw a breakdown of this company's revenues the other day because this is what I do with my free time apparently.

And it's shocking the amount of money, but also how much of it isn't just from the YouTube stuff. Like that's kind of a loss leader for the chocolate company and the hamburgers. And like, it is this, it's this different kind of in the corporate influencer. And this is a new thing under the sun. Yeah. And it makes sense to try. I don't know.

that your Mr. Beast watching fanboy is going to pick up a book to read? That's an interesting question. If they do, there could be something here, but I don't know. My best guess was, is this a way to grow Patterson's market into the parents of these Mr. Beast fans?

Yeah, who's like, who's who's extracting value from this? Right, because I agree. Like, I'm not sure that most of the I assume it's relatively young people that are Mr. Beast fans. Like, I'm aware of the halo of Mr. Beast, but I have not consumed any Mr. Beast content. Is this an attempt to get the Mr. Beast fans to buy books? Are we attempting attempting to like grow Patterson's audience by tapping into like their parents?

What do we think is going on here? Is the James Patterson flavor of book like the lowest hanging fruit for if you want a Mr. Beast fan to read a book, maybe that's what you're going to...

Give them, but also if you're Mr. Beast, why not just do it yourself? Like that was the most interesting thing to me. I think that's a really good question. I think that is the question to me. Mr. Beast is kind of a one of one in terms of audience and attention in the way that we talked about Taylor Swift being a one of one. Why is there not just a Mr. Beast thing?

franchise that even if he didn't want to write it, it could be ghostwritten. Like what is Mr. Beast getting out of partnering with James Patterson? I understand what James Patterson might be getting out of partnering with Mr. Beast. I think the other thing that's hard to remember about the James Patterson industrial complex is that they have a mechanism for making these books. Sure. Because, uh,

We have not seen a lot of sales data after the fact, maybe this is a Brenna question about these team ups and they must have worked because we keep getting the Patterson plus X, the Uber for X, but the Patterson for X team ups, they must be working because they keep happening and they get it. They get a big deal. Now, uh,

Do you Peter principle yourself into the one that fails? I see there's a world in which this works really well or it's for neither. It turns out to be neither for the Patterson fan or the Mr. Beast fan. My question is like James Patterson books just sell. So do the partner ones sell meaningfully better, meaningfully more copies than the ones that just have James Patterson and some other co-writers in

name on the cover. Like, if you're going to give James Patterson $10 million to write a new book, and we just know this is in the eight-figure range, so now I'm just guessing. But if you were going to give James Patterson $10 million to write a new book, or you have to give him and Mr. Beast $20 million combined for this, do you get... Is the juice worth the squeeze? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot...

It's so easy when it's not your money and not your industry to say, boy, it seems like they're being dumb about this. And sometimes they are. I don't really know. I guess the generous reading would be that they've seen enough success to branch out. Because this is categorically different than a...

Bill Clinton or one of these other kinds of like celebrity older traditional star kind of. And that's what was making me wonder if this is more about growing Patterson's appeal because his he's an older white guy. He partners with people like Bill Clinton and like other old white guys typically to sell books to old white guys in airports.

And if you're trying to get him to a younger audience, I can see somebody on the Patterson team thinking like, oh, maybe Mr. Beast would be interesting or somebody who has that kind of...

audience. I just have a lot of questions. It's fat. I'd love to know the, who approached whom, what were the negotiations like? Also, it's so funny that Mr. Beast, like the actual guy's name is Jimmy. Like he's a James too. Are we looking for the next James Patterson? Right. Cause like in a lot of ways, Mr. Beast is a, is a new media James Patterson where he puts his name on a bunch of stuff. I don't know how many of these things he actually makes or, or

to or Danes or just sort of like taps the fairy wand and says, yes, you can go make that under my, my shill. But yeah, I think the, the book writing apparatus that the Patterson imprints over at Hachette knows how to make is undervalued. I think one people who, people who look down on the Patterson industrial complex and there's so many, I

I think the thing they don't realize is people would not be buying these books if they didn't fundamentally enjoy the experience they're getting when they open up a James Patterson branded thing. And I think that is harder than people realize to do. And I think...

If Mr. Beast is being smart about this and he's willing to give up some of the top end to raise the floor of the quality of the reading experience, I think that's a smart tradeoff. Because I think it's a lot harder. We've seen this like Millie Bobby Brown and some other people that want to do their own. They hide their own ghostwriters. They work with some people. Mostly those books don't really do very well.

But the Patterson books, people read them and they come back for more. If you're on Mr. Beast's team and he wants to do a book thing and you're looking for somebody to partner with, James Patterson is going to be the only... It's plug and play. Right. It's the only available plug and play. There's no one else at the James Patterson-ish level. We don't have a Nora Roberts and Book Factory. Well, Louise Penny, didn't she do with Hillary Rodham Clinton? Yeah, but nobody else has this factory going on. Well, we haven't seen other Louise Penny teen-ups, which maybe tell you something about how that one went.

I think that one came about because they're buds. Right, right, right. Network effect. Speaking of things that we haven't seen more of or will not see more of, NaNoWriMo has officially folded up shop. After a series of screw-ups that...

I think we kind of thought, I guess here's what I'm trying to say. I kind of thought it was already done. And when I saw this headline, I was like, oh, okay. It's not a fish. It's not Facebook official as we used to say 15 years ago. I've seen like a little of the discourse around this wants to claim that NaNoWriMo is shutting down because of the missteps that they made last year where they were endorsing use of AI for various elements of participating. Yeah.

In the competition or in, you know, it's National Novel Writing Month and they were basically saying you can use AI and if you don't, or if you're anti-AI, that's ableist in some way. And also the whole thing was sponsored by an AI company. Like it was a perfect storm. It's a, it's a nonprofit. It's been run as a nonprofit on the internet for like 15 or 20 years. It is hard to run a nonprofit and it is from an older time on the internet.

And, you know, the spokesperson said to the TechCrunch reporter that too many members of a very large, very engaged community let themselves believe the service to be provided was free. And like they wanted to participate without supporting the existence of NaNoWriMo financially. This is maybe also a sign that NaNoWriMo grew itself into a bigger people operation.

operation and the internet could really willingly was ready to support. Like there's a supply demand question I think happening there, but NaNoWriMo will be no more. And they are insistent that this is a result of law, like years long running problems. They had, you know, a very bad PR PR moment with the AI stuff last year, but I don't think it's a

reasonable assumption to think that the whole thing is shut down over that or even that that got enough attention in the broader internet community to have put a sour taste in enough folks mouths to like stop participating it wasn't everybody stopped doing NaNoWriMo and they're shut down it's NaNoWriMo needs money and doesn't have it

Yeah, I think it might be a little of column A and column B where you're running close enough to the red line and then you have a huge PR problem. And even if you lose 8% of your paying members, if you're having trouble already, that could be the thing. Sure, sure. That tips you over. My top level diagnosis here is that the mode of the internet...

that NaNoWriMo grew out of is gone. Very different. Yeah, they launched in 1999. Yeah. Like that's just a completely different version of online connectivity and community. And other, you know, I don't know what their sort of short form video strategy were, if they were anything different.

But even stuff like Jamie Attenberg's A Thousand Words of Summer or whatever probably took – probably some people moved over there. Yeah, probably. Right. Started on Twitter, moved over to Substack. And when you're already hurting, it can be death by nine smaller cuts rather than one big thing. I can't – if we A-B tested the universe and they didn't have the AI-generated problem, are they existing today? Maybe, maybe not. But it can have helped. It can have helped when you're already –

Hurting. All right. We're on the front list for you, brought to you by Thrift Books. Oh man, new and used titles at Thrift Books. An endless selection. Okay, it's not de facto endless, but you know, it's kind of like for our limited lives on this mortal coil, it's de facto endless. You can get all kinds of stuff. Childhood classics, undiscovered worlds of adventures, anything that you can find and for every budget. And with the Thrift Books Reading Awards program, you can get all kinds of stuff.

You get points towards a free book. Read more, spend less at thriftbooks.com. All right, Rebecca, here's your final guess. How many books do you think I read during my trip to- How many actual beach days were there?

We were there for six full days. Okay, six full days. And you don't read on the plane because you watch. I do need to know what the, I assume, deranged movie lineup was for you. I didn't watch movies on the way back. I was just listening to podcasts, actually. We had some travel snafus. Anyway, it wasn't amazing. I'm going to guess that you read five books.

I read zero books on this vacation weekend. I was reading magazines. I was staring at the beach. I love this for you. That's wonderful. We were playing dominoes. We were watching movies. Just didn't really have... The kids would stay up later and they'd get up... There was less time with this vacation. It was just me and the sun. We didn't spend... So our travel day when we go to the beach, Kai places looks like this. We go out really pretty early in the morning. As soon as the sun is in the sky...

and snorkel for a few hours. We'll drive someplace at a new spot. And we come back for the heat of the day. I was taking naps, we're making lunches, you know, we're talking, reading magazines. And then we go out for the best part of the day to me, which is like five to 6.30 when the sun sets and, you know, we're boogie boarding and just splashing around. Then it's, you know, let's come back, take showers, make dinner. We're ready to watch a movie as a family. Then it's bedtime. Yeah.

That sounds amazing. This is a great plan. My kids read a ton of books. I think while I was reading magazines, just staring into space or, you know, making lunches and stuff. And Michelle and I were basking, do the other things. So I'll do their frontless foyer for them here. Ames read Sunrise at the Reaping, the new Hunger Games. What's the report? Okay. Love to hear that for him. The nut of the story is that it's Haymitch's backstory, his Hunger Games story.

Ames said it's more brutal and heartbreaking even than the originals, which is saying something. Wow. I trust Ames' take at this point. Yeah, and he read another book called Zeroes Sars Do Not Recommend that was actually recommended to us at the Powell's Live event. He said it was very good. It looks like a comedy commercial fiction. He says it's like satire, but the sun sort of winks out of existence and it says the earth slowly goes cold, but it's funny. I don't know that he or I have the language to talk about what that book is actually doing, but he really enjoyed that.

Rowan did Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, as I think I mentioned before. That she also got from the Powell's and she did Beautyland. And then she read, this is a series of middle grade into young adult sort of horror thrillers. The first one's called Small Spaces. There's a series of them. And she did like three more of those all in a row. And then some audio books too. So that's what we did. I got nothing. I read nothing. I'm behind everything.

Well, I'm always behind, but I've got some things I really do want to do get this year that I wanted to get to, but I didn't. But such is life. And I don't feel bad about it. No, that's wonderful. Like often when I'm traveling, the only times I read are like on the plane. And then once I get where I'm going, you're just in the thing. You're having experiences. I think this is real life in three dimensions. That's right. Yeah.

I did watch Dunkirk on the plane, which Michelle thought was insane behavior. You do make some choices with your movie selections on planes. He's like, what are you? That's wild stuff. I thought about you a couple of times. I just, it's late and Jeff's probably on a plane. When am I going to throw on Dunkirk at home? No one's going to watch that with me. No one's ever casually like, you know, this feels like a Dunkirk kind of night. Like,

Yeah, our default at home is Margin Call. Like, you want to just watch Margin Call tonight? But like, it's a different vibe than Dunkirk. And I watched something else on the play on the way there. I cannot remember what it is for the life of me. I wrote it down on my list, but I'm not going over there. What have you been reading? Bad news for whatever that movie was. So I read Harriet Tubman Live in Concert. Oh, right. You told me about this. By Bob the Drag Queen. I'm going to do a thing we don't normally do with debut novels here.

Because Bob the Drag Queen is doing just fine. She is having a great career and my negative review is not going to impact her.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

So Harriet Tubman asks him to help produce her record and he gets to go like a hangout in a warehouse with Harriet Tubman and a bunch of folks as she tells her story and he's going to write the raps that she's going to perform that will do all of these things. The rap lyrics that Bob the Drag Queen imagines for Harriet Tubman's life story are incredible. Like those are a treat. They were really fun. For me, they were the best part of the book. But the rest of the book to me kind of veered into like

after school special kind of zone. Like Darnell for a person who's been queer for decades and was out in the gay community knows like shockingly little about queer history or culture or community seems like very surprised about a lot of things. And it sort of turns out I'm going to spoil things now. So like stop listening if you are still going to read this book.

It sort of turns out that Harriet Tubman's whole mission working with Darnell is to save Darnell and to help him get free from his past, not necessarily this bigger thing that she's been talking about. The story just felt...

too small to me. And the most interesting bit is this like, these historical figures have returned and it's known and people talk about it as the return, but we don't know anything else about it. Like the only other thing you know about the return is that like Cleopatra also came back and she's working as an influencer. And I wanted like more of what this world is like that they're all living in. It just felt kind of pat and messagey.

And I was bummed. I was bummed about that one. Okay. Well, sometimes things don't work. Yeah. Sometimes they don't work, but a really fun idea. And then I also... Oh, good. I was going to say, also writing books is hard. Maybe this is going back to the Mr. Beast Patterson thing. The reason that you've teamed up with James Patterson is that writing books is actually harder than people like... Right. Writing books is hard. And it made me think about also what Tracy from the Stacks was saying when she was here and was talking about often a lot of black debut authors...

or debut authors of color don't get edited as tightly as they might need to be. I don't know who Bob the Drag Queen's editor was, but in a conversation with some Book Riot folks, you know, offline, this was also floated by one of them as a like, maybe, like, it certainly felt to me like there needed to be more, a tighter editing and more critique going into how that book was produced. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, that was a real bummer.

I was really excited about that one. And then I read Stop Me If You've Heard This One by Kristen Arnett, which was also among my most anticipated of the season. And it was great. Kristen Arnett is consistently really funny. Her books are always set in Florida. She lives in Florida. She's very devoted to Florida. I don't think she's going to move to Portland like everyone else who is apparently defected. I don't know. Vandermeer and Russell. It's true. It's true.

from Florida, but this one felt like a step up to me. It's about a woman named Cherry who works as a clown or like her dream is to be a clown. This is her form of art and performance that she wants to make her life around. She works at an aquarium store to make ends meet and like the cast of characters at the aquarium store. Yes.

hilarious and cherry is basically having a quarter life crisis like the opening scene of the book is that she has gone to perform at a kid's birthday party and it turns out that kid's mom is really into clowns and maybe she's like doing it with the kid's mom in the bathroom at the birthday party okay and that's and she's like i know my life is a mess this is the kind of thing i do like you know you're wondering how i got here kind of scorpion sting mess is gonna mess right but

But she's trying to figure out, like, how is she going to be able, is she going to be able to, like, make her life in clowning and build her life around art in the way that she wants to? Also, she's a queer woman in Florida, and that's not easy. So there's, you know, it's inflected with that experience, with the disappearance of a lot of queer spaces in Orlando where she lives, and sort of with a general, like,

Cheri is not doing well. She's not happy. But then she meets this woman named Margo, who is a well-known magician in Orlando. She's a little older. And Cheri thinks that both her romantic and professional prospects might be turning around with Margo. But can she keep that straight or is she going to make a mess?

of it as well. It's, oh, and she's still grieving the death of her brother from several years ago. So like things are just, Cherry's just in a hard spot. You don't, I don't think you want to be friends with Cherry, but you're happy to hear her story from the distance. Really funny. Seems like she would be a good hang. The book is really funny, but also like really poignant and thoughtful. The sentences are, I felt like sharper sentences

Then Arnett's first few books, and I really liked her first couple. So I felt like this was just the thing I was waiting, like a new trick I was waiting to see her pull out. And she did it. And it's overtly about making art, you know, like Cherry thinks about her clowning as making art. And so you can kind of infer in there the way that Arnett is thinking about or wrestling with some of the challenges of being a writer.

Interesting. Okay. It was a good one. Well, with that, that's our show this week. You can find the show notes at bookriot.com slash listen. Send us an email, podcast at bookriot.com. Check out First Edition over there. Consider joining the Patreon. And also send us your mom's, dad's, and grad's recommendation requests. Remember, you don't need to be a mom, dad, or a grad.

Or you don't even need to have a recommendation for, this is just a general, this is just a, this is a bushel. You put it, you put your recommendation in the bushel. Could be for anyone. It could be for you. Yeah.

Could be for John the Baptist. That would be an interesting ask. This time of year is Moms, Dads, and Grads. But yeah, if you want a book recommended for yourself, we'll be happy to hook you up as well. Just like how mattress stores have like President's Day sales. I don't know why we do that. It's just like we need a reason to have a sale. We need a reason to have a recommendation request show. We do this at the winter holidays. We do it at Moms, Dads, and Grads. Is there another time of year we should consider?

Oh. What else is there? Summertime, I guess. Is this a sort of de facto like- Yeah, we'll give you a summer reading rec now if you want one. Yeah, something like that. I guess back to school maybe. I don't even know. People are going to be reading anyway. This is fine. We don't need to add stuff. We figured this out. We got enough to do, Jeff. Optimally deployed. All right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Rebecca.

Thanks so much for listening today. We hope you'll enjoy this excerpt from the audiobook edition of The God's Time Forgot by Kelsey Sheridan Gonzalez. Thanks again to our sponsors at Alcove Press and Spotify. She wondered what this hole looked like to people not in it. Would they even notice it in the ground? Or would they walk right past her body as she lay rotting with her feet dangling above the cave she'd tried to crawl out of?

No, she wouldn't let that happen, she told herself. Buried and forgotten was not to be her fate. Her hands clawed at the dirt while she shimmied herself upward with her knees, her elbows chafing against the soil that enclosed her. She pulled and pushed until finally the pressure on her chest started to lift. The dirt and gravel loosened beneath her. She was almost out.

One last desperate pull and she was free, gasping for the air she'd recently taken for granted. She rolled onto the grass and faced the darkening sky. How did she end up here? She turned her head to glance at the triangular hole she'd just crawled out from and the mound of grass above it. From the outside, one would never suspect a massive cave rested beneath.

She hadn't a clue what would have prompted her to enter such a thing. Her body still trembling from the exertion. She sat up, her shaking hands as dirty and bloodied as her tattered dress. While her breathing steadied, she took in more of her surroundings. The forest around her was lush and thriving. A creek cut through the trees. Upon seeing the water, her throat burned with need.

She rose to her feet, shuffling to where the creek had pooled, backed up against the rocks. The water was still, a perfect mirror image of the woods around her. It called to her, offering to quench her thirst and cleanse her soul. She knelt before it, cupping the cool water with her hands and lifting it to her lips. At the same moment, an image flooded her mind.

My darling sister, ever the fool, she looked up to find who had spoken. Have you no sense of self? No respect for our sisterhood? Languid. The sable-haired woman lay against the rocks, letting her fingers dance in the water. The fairer woman frowned upon hearing the harsh words, but did not offer a rebuttal, nor speak up in her defense.

She took another sip, the image of the women still clear in her mind. They were draped in long flowing gowns, belted at the waist, sitting by the water, and she was one of them. The water trickled down her chin and the length of her arms as the forest came back into focus. She sat back on her knees, looking around her, noting the similarities of the world she saw now and the one she saw in her mind.

The pool of water was the same, but the fauna was different. The trees here were taller, the brush thicker, but still so eerily similar. Thinking about the sisterhood the woman had mentioned, she dipped her hands in the water once more. She didn't know of any sisterhood. At least, she couldn't remember one.

No, you cannot touch the water. It's cursed, a woman shouted at her. The same voice she heard calling for Emma. She turned to find a petite woman with a pallid complexion, wearing a terrified look in a drab gown much different than the garments of the women she had seen in her mind's eye. Emma, relief washed over the woman's face as she ran toward her. You're all right,

She let out a deep breath. What happened? What are you wearing? I'm not Emma. She shook her head, though she wasn't sure. She wasn't sure about anything. Concern filled the woman's eyes. It's all right now. Just come with me. She took a small step forward with her hands out, speaking the way one would to a frightened child.

The sound of men's voices carried through the trees as they crashed through the underbrush. Emma Harrington, they yelled. Where are you, Emma? She went rigid at the sound of their menacing shouts. She's over here, the woman called. There was chaos in the trees, snapping branches, grunting and panting. They were coming for her.