The It Books of June 2025
56:34 Share

This episode is brought to you by eBay. We all have that piece. The one that's so you, you've basically become known for it. And if you don't yet, Fashionistas, you'll find it on eBay. That Miu Miu red leather bomber, the Cousteau Barcelona cowboy top, or that Patagonia fleece in the 2017 colorway. All these finds are all on eBay, along with millions of more main character pieces backed by authenticity guarantee. eBay is the place for pre-loved and vintage fashion. eBay. Things people love.

After zoomies at the dog park, it's time for drive up at target in goes a big bag of kibble and one squeaky chicken toy for the good boy. Drive up. That's ready. When you are only in the target app, just tap target. This is the book podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill. And I'm Rebecca Shinsky. And it's time for the books of June, 2025. One of the.

After September, I think the biggest month of the year, generally speaking. Yeah, a lot of books coming out this month. And unlike in the movie business, we do get, well, really throughout the year, award season fodder. And I think for June, you do get commercial upmarket literary is coming out of the woodwork. Like you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a commercial literary book that has maybe some year worth.

potential. I don't know. So when you swing a dead cat, Rebecca, do you have two hands? Like do you swing it around your head or do you kind of do like the Pamchenko from the cutting edge? Oh, are we, we're talking lassos or baseball bats? I think that's the question. When you swing a dead cat. I would be inclined to go lassos. Right. Over your head. It just feels like a lock and go wrong. It feels like momentum though. I like the momentum. Yeah.

Yeah, I'd have to take some Dramamine to do the full baseball bat. To be the cat, you'd have to take the Dramamine. I really should just have an IV drip at all times of Dramamine. So we've got 10 books. If this is your first time, welcome.

I have culled from the literal thousands of books that we published in June. When you say it that way, it does sound bananas. I was thinking about it because I was working on this over the weekend and going through Edelweiss and a bunch of places. Like how many books, again, I'm using consider very loosely here, but that my eyes passed over, I guess is the most accurate. I bet it's a couple thousand. It has to be. It has to be a couple thousand. From no, I've selected 10 contenders. Okay.

And then we will go one by one, knockout round style, to determine what we think the It Book of the Month will be. It Book being a nebulous definition of our own design, serving only our needs for entertainment and ethical purposes. Combination of...

Sort of threshold of the mother people are gonna need to read this library whatever we have to find doing something relatively interesting It has to be good. It has to be good or we think it could be very good It will have some buzz and then the pixie dust award stuff at the end. I did not do this month There's not as many this month as there were in May of we all have an rst and le place We call it the Stephen King throne for books by authors who are perennial bestsellers and

but a new one of their books sells a lot of copies. That book could outsell all of the books on this My List combined, and yet we're not that interested in it. Those books are events for their fans, but they aren't like capital L literary events. The Dick Wolf Book Prize, the healy creator of Law & Order. And I put them in order. I did do a little massaging here because we've got a couple of titans that if we had them one, two, and three, I'm not sure the rest of the conversation would be that interesting, but I will lead off with a sponsor.

Today's episode is brought to you by Hanover Square Press, publisher of Life is a Lazy Susan of S-Word Sandwiches by Jennifer Welch and Angie Pumps Sullivan. From the host of the hit podcast, I've Had It, comes a bold, hilarious guide to navigating life's challenges with humor, resilience, and hope.

Through raw honesty and sharp wit, Jennifer Welch and Angie Pump Sullivan share the lessons they've learned tackling addiction, heartbreak, and self-doubt together. Part memoir, part survival guide, their book is packed with wisdom and laughs to help you find joy and connection no matter what life throws at you. Or I should say, no matter what kind of sandwich life throws at you. You know what I mean? This is for fans of bold self-help, perfect for readers who loved big friendship,

or the subtle art of not giving an F. This book is a guide to embracing life's messiness with grace and laughter. And we need a lot of grace and laughter these days. You know what I mean? Make sure to pick up Life is a Lazy Susan of S-word sandwiches. And thanks again to Hanover Square Press for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Avon Books, publishers of Along Came a More by Alexis Daria.

Romance readers, listen up. The wait is over. Alexis Daria, the international bestselling author of You Had Me at Hola, is back with the epic conclusion to her Primas of Power series. A long came and wore is here, and trust me, it's got everything you need, sis. Gastini chemistry, family drama.

I love the story you'll be rooting for from start to finish. So let's get into it. We've got Eva Rodriguez. Her husband crushed her by saying he needed to chase his quote unquote dreams, whatever that means. She just wants to have fun now. But then you get Roman Vasquez. He's magnetic. They meet at a wedding party. Secrets collide. Emotions erupt.

Next thing you know, we've got sizzling, sexy, impossible to put down romance, which is what we wanted. Make sure to pick up Along Came a More by Alexis Daria. And thanks again to Avon Books for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Eighth Note Press, publishers of Learning to Fall by Peach Morris.

18 year old Casey feels stuck. Her friends are off to school, she's stuck at home caring for her mother and her trifling raggedy boyfriend cheats on her. But then the unknowing other girl Imogen offers an apology, friendship and introduction to the world of roller derby and Casey's world finally starts to look a little brighter. Casey soon joins a group of fearless teammates who aren't afraid to speak their minds and body slam each other, which I guess is a good quality to have in friends.

Plus she's nursing a serious crush on her magnetic new friend. The question is, will Roller Derby be a brand new start or a place to break her heart and her bones in one go? We're going to find out. We're going to read it. Debut author Peach Morris is a queer non-binary disabled author who, like their main character Casey, found solace in the Roller Derby community. I'm excited for this one, y'all. Make sure to pick up Learning to Fall by Peach Morris. And thanks again to 8th Note Press for sponsoring this episode.

But I will really lead off with a book you and I were just talking about on the Patreon episode, check out the Patreon link in the show notes, bookright.com/listen, of S.A. Cosby's new one, King of Ashes. And we come to one Sean, aka S.A. Cosby, at a moment of great import for his career because this book is getting a big push, his other books have done well, he's had enough out there where people in this space and the wider world know his name a little bit.

And a big bestseller that is going to be adapted by Obama's production company is in the offing.

You have read this, so you know more about it than I do right now. It will automatically make it through the second round because it's first, but let's spend a moment on what you thought of King of Ashes and then its it book, Bonafides. Yeah, I don't read a whole lot of suspense. I always struggle with Cosby to figure out what even to call the genre. It's not a mystery. There's some thriller elements. There's some suspense. They're crime books, really? Yeah, they really are crime books. And I think under that- No more Leonard kind of?

Yeah, really gritty. This one certainly is crime book. Like there, there are some mystery ish elements to some of his previous ones. But this one is about a guy who is like a kind of financial fat cat. He's left the small town he grew up in in Virginia. He's rolling a high roller in Atlanta has really fancy clients, but gets a call from his sister that their dad something has happened to their dad.

And he's in the hospital and main guy needs to go back home and help care for dad and sort some things out. One of the things that he's got to sort out is that their brother is in trouble with a local gang. And maybe that's connected to the thing that happened to their dad. And so our main guy, who is our money man, is maybe going to use his skills to try to make some money for somebody to get his brother out of this situation with the local gangsters.

But also the family's business is a crematorium that the title King of Ashes refers to one of the ways that their father thought of himself as, you know, kind of the local leader of funeral businesses. But a crematorium can be convenient if you are in the business of sometimes having bodies, right?

to get rid of for less than savory reasons. This was definitely, I felt like the most violent and the most like the grittiest and most straightforward crime novel of Cosby's so far, which was just a surprise to me. Like once I got my head around, this is what we're doing here. I was like, okay,

Like, this is bloody and I'm into it. Here we go. Very adaptable. And it feels to me also like could be the beginning of a series. There are some like characters that you might want to pick up on and follow them into the future. But it felt to me like Cosby having a moment with himself of like, all right, we're leveling up. We're going to do a new thing now. And it does feel more in the like Elmore Leonard grit, really gritty crime fiction mode.

All right, it's going to automatically advance up next. The sophomore novel from Layla Motley, her first book was called Nightcrawling, came out a couple years ago, three years ago now, which I read and admired a great deal. It's hard to say a book you like about a runaway...

Sex worker. I mean, it's tough. It's a tough. Admired is a good word. Admired. It was excellent. It was Oprah book pick. It was New York Times bestseller. This is her new book. The setup here is... What's it called? I'm sorry. It's called The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Motley. And the main character is 16-year-olds and pregnant, and her parents send her off to her grandparents' house in Florida to, I guess, be. I haven't read the book, I should say.

And she meets someone else there who has just had a newborn and is also in high school and is trying to graduate. And then she meets someone else who has young kids and is very young. So it's about this group of very young mothers in a working class neighborhood, I guess, Padua Beach, Florida. I don't know anything about it. And them trying to make it and becoming friends and dealing with being moms and children and women and girls and...

I don't know, it sounds pretty cool. I think there's this cool, again, you have to use these words differently when you're talking about subject matter like this, but it sounds ambitious. I haven't heard of a book quite like this before about like teen moms, but not

Not like salacious. Spectacular and salacious. This is like, there are a lot of young women who have kids and are trying to make their way in the world. And what does that experience actually look like? And how do they find community and comfort in conflict as they try to do that all together? Interesting. I think this could be, again, sophomore novel. The subject battle is more difficult than a real commercial novel in terms of like, oh, you got to read this book because it's uplifting or even...

it's it's going to be difficult i'd imagine having read night crawling not going to pull any no punches shall be pulled in the lately motley book but award season times barack obama list time oprah again you can see you know if someone wanted to get really interested in in an adaptation of a short series you could see all kinds of things or a movie

You could see it happening. So I put it here, a writer to watch for me, but that's The Girls Who Grew Big by Laila Motley. This is kind of unexpectedly tricky, I think, because Cosby has had some notable success. Motley had different kinds of notable success. But in both of those cases, the thing you should expect for their next book would be for it to not do as well as their past books. So putting them up against each other...

The Cosby is, I think, way too violent for like it's read with Jenna is not going to pick this book. And it feel the subject matter feels more like it's angled at a stereotypically male reader to me than his past books have, which is also a knock on something for the big book club picks. Maybe like some of the crime awards books.

nominations. I wouldn't be surprised if he gets into New York Times 100 Best of the Year. I think some of his past titles have, but it sounds to me like the Girls Who Grow Big could get book clubbiness and maybe award mentions, even if it's not as big of a seller because it's harder to recommend based on the subject matter. I don't know. I think I'm going to give a little edge to Girls Who Grew Big. Yeah.

I think that's an interesting pick. I think... Knowing that at this point, like, neither of them is probably going to make it all the way. Since the adaptation, A, doesn't already exist and will not come out this year for King of Ashes, there's a world in which, let's say people like this book, it does well, the adaptation is well regarded in a couple years, and there's a follow-on book with the characters from that, then we have a different conversation. I think so, yeah. This one has all the marks of an it book of the month.

It's Susan Choi's new novel, Flashlight, coming out from FSG June 3rd, so very quickly here. Her previous novel, Trust Exercise, won a little award called the National Book Award. She also has other novels that I frankly have not read. I think I read My Education. She's won major awards. And this book is a literary mystery in which

a father disappears on the beach while walking his daughter along the shoreline in Japan in the 70s. She's 10, and then we follow the characters in that family and around that family for the next few decades.

I set against the backdrop of people moving in and around Japan, South Korea, and the United States and emigrating and making lives and then going back and being conflicted about where you are and who you are, which I know more about because between Hong Kang and Pachinko, I feel like my South Korea and Korea-Japan relationship is on point right now. Whereas six years ago, I couldn't have told you anything about the relationship of Korea and Japan. 250,000 print run, NBA,

Upmark, this is literary fiction, but with a mystery behind it, a name a lot of people who shop at independent bookstores know, and that's not pejorative. That's an ad that works well for her. As we talk about this, I have read this. I interviewed her for first edition. Let me say the pros and cons for a book discussion here. One, 464 pages. It's quite long. It is not as comforting slash satisfying as a reading experience of like,

That like an Ann Napolitano or some of these other kinds of books that do that. Not that all these book clubs are going to pick that, not that it's necessary. It's also not a straight ahead mystery. Like we want to know what happened to the dad and that is an issue. But the point of the book is not figuring out what happened to the dad. The point of the book is what happens to these other characters who are, you have experiences great in Strange Loss, but then also a part of this larger post-discovery

you know, war, during the war, emigration, cross back and forth and in betwixt and between, and the relationship. So I think it's a little bit hard of a sell. I will say from my own reading experience, I think it could have been 70 or 80 pages shorter. And I don't think it would have been worse for the wear. I'm not an editor, but my own reading experience was some of it was slower to get through than I think, I don't know if it needed to be, but for an it book contender,

a little more on rails would have been probably a strength. I ultimately ended up liking the book.

but it's not as much of a home run as I thought it might be when I was reading the brief on it coming into June, literary mystery, family stuff, Sujin Choi, Trust Exercise. So that's where I am, Rebecca. Well, so this is also an interesting head-to-head because now I believe Trust Exercise was picked for one of the big book clubs when it came out. It did win the National Book Award. It's going up against Girls Who Grew Big, which was her previous book was picked. Choi can be controversial, but that seems to work in her favor,

Like people either, at least with trust exercise, there are people who really loved it and there were people who really didn't.

But even the people who really didn't seem to admire or appreciate something about it, it wasn't just like, oh, I straight up hated this. And I feel like all of that conversation helps to publicize a book, which is the hardest thing in the game. I'm going to give the edge to Susan Choi here. I think we're going to run with Flashlight. Even though it's long, that can be difficult. But also, both of these books have difficult subject matter that makes them difficult.

hard to talk about. And I think name recognition will serve Choi here in our non-existent competition. Up next...

500,000 print run. And they are all signed. All first editions are signed by one V.E. Schwab. Probably that's why she used her initials, just fewer characters to get in there. That saved her right there. That saved her 3 billion characters. I was so surprised when I requested one from the publisher and they sent it to me and I got a signed copy. You know what? If you can find one that isn't signed, it's worth more at this point. Someone has an unsigned one of these knocking around at tour somewhere. Maybe Eileen can help us out.

So V.E. Schwab, I guess, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, The Darker Shades of Magic has become a star in the firmament of science fiction and fantasy and especially kind of a one-of-one in this space right now. She's not writing romanticism.

This is among the BR audience, which tends to be eclectic readers, will kind of give anything a try. This and the new Kuang, I think, are probably at the center of the Venn diagram of people working in genre, people working in speculative, but also trying some other stuff out, not afraid of a political issue.

It's been a while since I read Gallant, which was her last book, which I think was a YA situation, which I liked quite a bit. You have read this. This one, our friend and coworker Danica described it as toxic lesbian vampires, and that was enough for both of us. Yeah.

Without giving up too much away, what can you say about your reading experience? And it's Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab's It book candidacy. I mean, this is a big book, too. It's like 540, 550, something like that. It's about three women who become vampires at different points in history. One is in the 1500s. One is in the 1700s. One is in the 1900s or 2000s.

And how are they connected? We don't find out for several hundred pages. Like, you know that the threads are all going to come together, but Schwab is teasing out what those connections are. All of them are women who are attracted to other women, and this is variable levels of acceptable in the different timelines that these women live in. So for some of them,

you know, becoming a vampire and living outside society in the ways that they, that vampires live outside society gives them freedom to do the kinds of things that they can't do if they, I don't know, have to like be presented to the ton in the Regency ball situation. Uh-huh.

For being as long as it is, I thought it really moved. I was trying to read it before this upcoming PTO, and I sat down one afternoon and was like, oh, that was 200 pages down that I didn't expect to take down in one go. This is my first time reading V.E. Schwab, so I also don't have any sense of how it compares to anything else. I'd say that tracks with my Schwab reading experience of the larger books, yeah. Yeah, goes down easy.

The big question that I had was like that it is not romantic. There is there are some like allusions to sex, but the sex is basically closed door. And I wondered if that how that's going to work for her in a moment where a lot of readers are drawn to the romantic thing of fantasy elements and then really explicit sex scenes.

And maybe it's also going to work for her in the way of like there are people who want this kind of story and don't want the X rated stuff. I don't know. It didn't bother me. I wasn't like, why is it not more explicit here? But I just noticed that. That's going to be my note. I'm pretty sure. Why isn't this X year? Jeff O'Neill. Why is there not more explicit? Doing it. Where is it?

Where is the doing it? Where is the doing it? I enjoyed it. I don't want to say like anything else about it, but yeah, this is... We're in a pretty big discussion about that, right? Yeah, we're going to do a... I think you and Danik and Vanessa and I are going to have a whole hour here in the main feed in a couple of weeks. But 500,000 copy print run. She's an established brand name. If critics like it, it will be on the year end list. Maybe there's some genre award nominations for her.

I mean, I also do think there's like interesting potential for this to do some stuff on social. So, but I mean, I think kind of obviously VE Schwab is going to knock out Susan Choi here. It's one of the few, there's a couple of, there's a couple of big hitters and that's one. I can't get over the autograph thing. Why all 500,000? Just now we're talking about a bunch of dopes. And it doesn't have spreadges. Like it's not a, at least the one I got. If you don't have spreadges, you got to put your name in it. That's the only way to sell books anymore. Yeah.

I think pretty, that the four of us are going to do, give an hour to it is probably the leading indicator for us deciding. Like we've sort of preordained that this is a leading contender here. We're going to do another sponsor break and come back. Today's episode is brought to you by Caitlin Rozakis, the New York Times bestselling author of Dreadful and the newer, the Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association. Now, when Vivian's kindergartner, Aria, gets bitten by a werewolf, yes, a werewolf,

She is rapidly inducted into the hidden community of magical schools. Reeling from their sudden move, Vivian finds herself having to pick the right sacrificial dagger for Eiria, keep stocked up on chew toys, and play PTA politics with sirens and chthonic nymphs and people who literally can set her hair on fire.

As Vivian careens from hellhounds in the school corridors to demons at the talent show, as one does, she races to keep up with all the arcane secrets of her new society and the eternal inferno that is the parents WhatsApp group. Now this sounds like a super fun time. Last year, Caitlin's debut high fantasy farce dreadful was a New York times bestseller and it was selected as bestseller.

Barnes & Noble's Speculative Fiction Pick of the Month. So get in on this fun. Pick up the Grammar School Parent Teacher Association. And thanks again to Caitlin Rozakis for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Sourcebooks Landmark, publishers of The Girls of Good Fortune by Christina McMorris. Oregon, 1888.

Amid the subterranean labyrinth of Portland's Shanghai tunnels, a woman awakens disoriented in an underground cell. Though no stranger to upholding a facade, being half Chinese yet passing as white, she's perplexed by the male disguise she's wearing. Of more pressing concern, however, are the dangers she faces as a crimped woman.

or shanghaied, sea-bound to work as forced labor. While struggling to recall what happened, she desperately tries to escape so she can return to her daughter, left in danger in a place where unearthed secrets can prove even more deadly than the dark recesses of Chinatown. From New York Times bestselling author of Sold on a Monday and The Ways We Hide comes a story of one woman's journey through Portland, Oregon's Chinatown and its infamous Shanghai Tunnels,

giving voice to those in the shadows in a spellbinding story of a young half-Chinese mother and her determination to forge a future for her daughter in a world that shuns outsiders. Make sure to pick up The Girls of Good Fortune by Christina McMorris. And thanks again to Sourcebooks Landmark for sponsoring this episode. I think maybe Laura took this in the draft. I don't remember. I didn't look at the spreadsheet. But up next on my list, June 10th from S&S.

Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin, which is a debut novel with all kinds of wild blurbs. Akbar, Rumaan Alam, Hildebrand. It is kind of one of those novels where the synopsis I don't think is going to do us any favors because it's kind of a tour through modern America where someone has to figure out what happened. And...

As you can imagine, it's about... So I'll give you the slogan, I guess, for people listening. An arrest for cocaine possession on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith...

A positive, I mean, a positive, the quote, the parenthesis, parenthesis, commas, Smith being a queer black Stanford graduate in a state of turmoil, pulled into the court system and mandated treatment. He finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation. His class protects him, but his race does not. So this is an exploration of race and class and privilege in America told by someone who gets caught up in it.

I think that's simple. Yeah. Akbar's blurb has sentences I want to cut out and put on my forehead. Now again, friends, we got to be careful when friends blurb. Did they both go to the Iowa Writers Workshop? I'm just guessing here. But if this does have magic electric sentences and the social stuff and some plot absurdity, then you're talking. We're talking here about we've got the ingredients of the primordial ooze of an it book.

Yeah, you're talking National Book Award nominations. You're talking best books of the year lists. It probably will not sell as many copies as VE Schwab. At least initially, but like with Martyr, again, this would be your hope for a book like this. That's true. This could be like this year's Martyr, which although I think Martyr really benefited from coming out in January of the year that it came out. Like it had a whole year to sell. Before James. Right. Yeah.

Yeah, it got four months of runway before Percival Everett. No, there's no James this year. That's right. Yeah.

I think I'm going to give the edge to V.E. Schwab. Just like that's such an established track record. I don't see how you can't, but I'm tempted. Yeah, I'm tempted also to just like turn it over. I'm really looking forward to this book. Me too. This one's been on my personal list as well. But yeah, we're going to roll on with Bare Airbones in the Midnight Soil for at least one more round. I'm going to turn over the setup to the next one to you because you also have read this.

The Dry Season by Melissa Phebos, which is a memoir of a year. I think all the doing it, she sucked out of Barrier Bones in the Midnight School. Sort of the opposite of a contact high. Yeah. So Melissa Phebos, one of her previous memoirs is called Abandon Me, and it's about a two-year-long, very abusive relationship that she was in.

after that relationship, she has a string of like romantic dalliances, flirtations, sexual encounters, like a whole bunch of stuff.

and realizes that she wants to re-examine the role that relationships and sex play in her life. So she decides to be celibate for three months. A lot of her friends make fun of her like, oh, just three months? But to her, this is a really big deal. Sex has been very important to her. It becomes six months, and in the process, she undertakes an inventory of all of the romantic and sexual relationships that she's had in her life to try to identify patterns and see like,

to see the things that she hasn't previously been able to see about herself and how she uses sex and love to meet other needs in her life. Along the way, like she has a whole lot of free time because she's not spending a lot of time dating and sleeping with people and starts thinking about the role of celibacy, also the role of connection of other kinds in her life. She's working on multiple levels. Like it's not a stunt memoir about like...

I didn't bone anybody for six months and here's what happened. And she's just a hell of a writer. Like there are literary references. There's a lot of really personal, intricate stuff that she's unearthing and talking about. I really loved it. There's already a New York Times profile about her coming out. I don't think she's going to outsell Barry Arbones in The Midnight Soil. I'm kind of feeling like maybe I should have picked her in the...

Fantasy League at this point. Yeah, I don't think anybody took her in the Fantasy League, but I have her in our Patreon summer draft. It's a good pick from you. Okay, moving right along, as the Muppets say. I've got another debut here, I think also one I picked in the summer draft, How to Dodge a Cannonball by Denard Dale, debut novel, like I said before, a satire of race set in the Civil War.

Some amazing blurbs here. I haven't seen this comp on the cover of a book, but it says, perfect for fans of Colson Whitehead and James McBride. That's all I need to hear. Bold. That is bold. We also need to be careful out there. Let's not get hurt. But he's a comic writer. His bio clearly was written by him. Advertising copywriter who dangerously flirted with stand-up comedy is in the bio there. Princeton MFA at Columbia graduate. He's written for New Yorker, McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

He has new brothers in this. We get someone who I can't remember who one side goes to there. I'm imagining it goes from a union side to a Southern side of a black soldier who passes for white in the Southern army and then has to take up with the Confederates and like meets people and,

and traffics in what's going on down there. But it sounds like a really zany comic kind of way. Steingart blurbed it. So I'm expecting to have a biting, funny, satirical bite to it at the same time. This is not going to be

I don't know what a good example is going to be. It's going to be a little bit more James and a little bit less, I don't know, beloved. I guess I'll put it that way in terms of its comic sensibilities is what I'm kind of guessing here. I'm looking forward to it. That sounds great. I'm so nervous for any writer being compared to both Colson Whitehead and Percival Everest, but I'm looking forward to it. It's a high mountain to climb to be a debut writer. Yeah. So we'll VE Schwab is going to roll on for one more. Yeah.

memoir. One of my favorite categories is memoir by New Yorker writer. And Jeff Dyer does not put on his bio that he's a New Yorker writer. He may have had a byline there or not, but he's a literary writer. He's an English person who has written wonderfully just for his whole life in sort of the top tier magazines and newspapers.

He's written a collection of criticism, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. And this is his memoir of growing up in a working class part of England and took the definitive test that you can get to the fancy school, and he passed. And then entered into a whole life of art and literature. And the cover shot is him in the 50s standing next to a car,

with like tail fins on it and his sort of awkward parents. And then from there all the way into his modern life of being, you know, the kind of writer a lot of people dream of being, can kind of write about anything well and people read him about anything. And I'm one of those people. What's the title? Homework by Jeff Dye. Good title. That has real Dead Poets Society vibes. Yeah.

To me, that sounds like catnip. It's not going to outsell V.E. Schwab or get picked by any big book clubs, but I'm glad it's on this list. I will listen to this with extreme prejudice. I will be looking forward to this one. The only demerit, he spells his name with a G, and so that's always an issue that it's hard to look at. All right, well, that brings us to another debut novelist. I don't know if you've heard of Taylor Jenkins-Reed. I'm familiar. Her new book, Atmosphere, is...

comes out in June, of course, June 3rd. And Esh has been her want of the late, the last few, to take sort of an interesting profession in a historical setting and put an interesting woman at the center of it and kind of see what happens. Yeah. And she's done, what, surfing and there was tennis and now she's moving out of athletics and into space. Is that exactly what the last few... Because I read Malibu Rising. I didn't catch the tennis one.

Yeah, the tennis one was back, right? Yes, and that's the one that I think Serena Williams is involved in. Right. The production. Yeah, I'm not sure if... Yeah, TJR is on a run. Yeah.

despite the fact that two podcasters did not know that the seven and a half husbands of Evelyn Hugo or whatever it is called. I get that confused with the seven and a half deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, but it's the seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Having seven and Evelyn in two titles is like this should not be allowed. You can't really take a beating on that. You can't have two actors registered for SAG with the same name. So like, why do we have this?

So just to give some sense of the heater that Jenkins has been on, and then maybe a little bit of a tail off over the last couple. So Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo was 2017, really found life as a TikTok social video sensation. Mm-hmm.

Daisy Jones and the Six, published in 2019. Of course, that got a wonderful adaptation and just a real crowd pleaser writ large. And the Evelyn Hugo social media moment comes like a few years after the Daisy Jones publication. It's like 2021, 2022. Is that right? Is that the order of operations? I guess that's right. I think so. I think it was popular when it first came out.

but like it got the tick tock bump late as things tend to do like they got it as a backlist title and then malibu rising in 2021 which i think we heard less about but

Looking on Goodreads right now, it has 1.2 million ratings, which is only a half million behind Daisy Jones in this. Yeah, I read that one and really enjoyed it. I think it made some end of year lists. And I just missed Keri Soto last year. I did too. And so then Keri Soto in 2022. But what I'm saying here is that the again, I'm using Goodreads as a proxy and take that with all the caveats.

But Evelyn Hugo, 3.7 million ratings. I mean, just a smash. Daisy Jones. Just 3.7. Yeah, I mean, it's probably the top 20 most rated. Daisy Jones in the 6, 1.7. Malibu Rising, 1.2. And then Keri Soto's back is 644,000. So half of Malibu Rising.

So this happens, right? You cannot live at the air up there with Daisy Jones, the six and seven husbands forever. You just can't. It might be regression to the mean in some form, but she's still so far above the mean 600,000 ratings for your least popular title. And that her, her,

I won't even say decline, but that this pull back to something more typical happens, like coincides with the rise of romanticism, that the thing that Taylor Jenkins read does, which like if she were writing these books in the late nineties and early two thousands, we would have been talking about them as like upmarket chiclet, well written women's fiction. Yeah. It's not as fluffy, like as some of the chiclet was, but it's in that women's. A little bit less lipstick and stilettos and,

Yeah, but in that women's fiction zone and romantasy, I think, carved off, like peeled off a lot of those types of readers and pulled them into, you know, the romantasy and fantasy zone. I think it also does show that there is a meaningful, and I could be way underselling that meaningfulness there, of people are reading what they're reading because other people are reading it. Yes. It is, you need to have something at the core, but...

Seven Husbands of Ellen Hugo and Fourth Wing are considerably different kinds of books in reading experience. One is much more to my liking than the other. That's immaterial here, but it's different enough that they're not just transportable interest. And the maelstrom of attention, interest, sales, and activity around romanticy is going to siphon off some of the casual readers that are like, what are people talking about? What are people reading? The like...

people I see in the hair salon who are just like, what is that that you're picking up? Or the folks around the pool, people who are looking for what's on the shelf in the airport bookstores. A lot of that is, I think, being redirected into romanticy because that's what the headlines are about. That's what you're getting served if you just log on to TikTok and you search for books. The first couple things they try to give you are almost definitely going to be romanticy. And so that's what people are hearing about in the same way that

In 2012, the thing they were hearing about was Fifty Shades of Grey. And in 2005, the thing they were hearing about was Twilight. And the folks who are going to fill some of their, let's call it six to 12 reading slots for the year with what's popular, this is what's popular. And Taylor Jenkins Reid had a big moment and is continuing to do just fine. But Romantici is having the big moment right now. And I don't know. She also is an interesting zone between...

an every year writer, like the Emily Henry's of the world and a different kind of writer. I'm not going to say more literary because it can be sometimes just an event writer who's, it's every few years. So like they've got a new book out. So this is every two-ish years, there's back to back. And then it's been three since the last one here. So is she, do people think of her as sort of a end of the grocery store aisle? James Patterson, Emily Henry, Allie Hieselwood kind of pick? I don't think so. Or more of a...

I'm not even sure. Kristen Hanna, I guess, is the closest comp in terms of popularity. I think that's probably a good comp. Yeah, probably a Kristen Hanna, but for more contemporary kinds of readers. It's interesting to put her up against V.E. Schwab and Barry Airbones. Well, that's what I was going to lead you next, because they're not dissimilar, but also not at all alike. Yeah, and they both...

I would believe you if you told me both of these books were published 10 years ago and were big deals 10 years ago. Bury Our Bones feels like a popular vampire book from a while ago, from before the times of Romanticy. It was kind of surprising to read a vampire book that, like vampire fiction tends to have sexy times in it and that this was pretty mild and closed door. And then Taylor Jenkins Reid is writing a more straightforward type of

upmarket fiction or what we might have called women's fiction. That also, I think there are some romantic elements in Atmosphere, but it's not a rom-com. It's not the same. Like the cover is not the same type of illustrated cover. I think that's maybe the central insight is it's not marketed like those other things. Right, that all the rom-coms have. So it looks different. And to me, that's refreshing right now. I'm tired of everything looking and sounding the same, but I'm really curious about how...

the new Jenkins Reid is going to land in this moment where romantic and rom-coms are dominating everything. And also how, how bury our bones will land in a moment when something spicier than just a vampire story seems to be the thing that you need. If you're really going to break out.

I think I'm going to give the edge to Taylor Jenkins Reid because it seems to me more likely for her to get a big book club pick and that kind of real escape velocity than for V.E. Schwab, too. And we've seen Reid make end of the year lists before. I don't think either of them is really going to be an awards contender yet.

I don't think... I mean, maybe for the genre awards for Schwab, that's always a possibility. I think the floor on the Schwab is a little higher because of the fandom for science fiction and fantasy of a commercial stripe. And again, I'm not talking Romantici. I think Romantici is its own snow globe universe right now. I don't think a lot of those people are flying over to pick up... I don't know. I'm trying to think of something off the top of my head. I mean, Bardugo, right? I guess to use one of the other great brands, like Bardugo...

is swimming in the same waters as Schwab, but I don't think you peel off a lot of those readers. But also I think the people that are looking at Schwab and looking at Bardugo,

aren't going to be sort of replacement reading some generic romantic with that title. That's interesting. Yeah, I think you could you might experience Schwab or Bardugo as a gateway drug into romantic because marketing is going to try to funnel you that direction. But I don't think many folks are going the other way that if you're a big romantic reader right now and you get marketed the V.E. Schwab.

I mean, maybe people pick it up, but like, it's not going to give you the thing that you're looking for. If what you're looking for is that romantic, spicy, you know, sexy element. This, yeah. Interesting comparison to end up with these two, but I think I am going to give the edge to Taylor Jenkins. Okay. We have one more after we have one more, but just a note on Hannah, just in terms of publishing cadence, I looked at it real quick. So Nightingale 2015. Then after that, it's the great alone 2018. Then the four wins in 2021, uh,

And the women in 2024. And she had some books before The Nightingale, but The Nightingale was really the breakout. Yeah, that was the big moment. And then she did Firefly Lane, which people forget about, which is like kind of a Netflix-y. Yep. I'm not even sure what you called it. That's a women's fiction situation. Yeah, that's right. And I should try to talk to Kristen Hanna sometime because I'd be so interested. I haven't read. I read The Nightingale and The Women. Okay.

But I haven't read anything before The Nightingale. Okay. And I've only seen like the Netflix trailer for Firefly Lane. And that's 2008. And she did some other stuff between that, like Homefront, Night Road. But the pivot from what looks like a Jodi Picoult cover to writing...

Dad books for women? I mean, I'm not even sure how to put this. Yeah. Women in these sort of grand historical moments and telling the deep historical epic. Historical fiction that isn't romantic historical fiction or about World War II lady librarian spies. Well, they're just spies in The Nightingale. I mean, I wonder, kind of kicked off that too. I wonder if the marketability of lady spies really initiated with The Nightingale. So last question.

And I put this last for a couple of reasons. One is I didn't want to have one of the three that are kind of true contenders. But in terms of long term, in terms of the kinds of stories we're going to see about it, it's getting a pretty significant print run, it looks like, from Amistad, which is imprinted at Harper's. This has been long gestating, but it's Tony at random, which is Dana A. Williams's...

Book about Morrison's time as an editor at Random House. 368 pages, 40,000 print run for a book like this is pretty significant. That is pretty significant. It would make sense. Williams is a professor and dean of the graduate school at Howard. Morrison was amenable to this project when she was alive. So that tells you a couple of things about it. One, it's been cooking for a while because Morrison's been gone for a while.

And the kind of access that Williams has had. In fact, Morrison even helped name the book. Like, she suggested the book, Tony at Random. Oh, that's interesting. Maybe it was her email address. Was she there long enough to have email? No, she could not. No. Because I think she was at Random House through the publication of The Bluest Eye and maybe Sula. And that's like 79, I think, Sula, something like that. Anyway. Pre-email. So, look. Sure.

This isn't going to be a book. Well, Oprah, listen, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be, I'd be surprised, but not shocked. Yeah. And I would be delighted if we could sit here and say, this is going to knock out Taylor Jenkins, read it. No, we don't live in that world and that's okay, but I'm glad you're mentioning it. Important. Like these are important documents. Tony Morrison, one of our most important writers, one of our shared favorites, uh,

We will be watching this. I think a lot of publishing is going to be watching this. A lot of folks have... I'm going to read this. We're absolutely going to read this. A lot of folks have attachment to at least The Bluest Eye and Sula and Beloved. Some of the really... They're all signal works, but some of the really signal works that if you haven't read the whole Morrison corpus, you've probably encountered those if you were an English major or somebody who's working in the world of books and reading. Or you feel like you should have read them if you haven't.

She's so significant and our last American Nobel Prize winner. Just a huge deal to follow that career. And that she was cranking out books that became some of the most important novels in American history while also editing and shepherding other writers' careers is just a fascinating story. I mean, the people that she worked with are a who-sue of late 70s, you know, 60s into 70s Black arts. Muhammad Ali, Angela Davis,

Tony Cade Bambara, Huey Newton. And as I talked about before, this cadre of people and women, black women in particular, writing at this time, really thought they were part of it. And they were really part of something. So it's interesting to see there. I guess I'm not going to make a case for it for the It Book of the Month. I guess I'm more looking at

If you look at the totality of the year, is there a chance it wins some major awards for fiction? I think absolutely there is. I think there totally is. I wouldn't be surprised to see this land on a National Book Award or Pulitzer. Right. The Pulitzers have that category for biography. It's a little tougher for...

the National Book Award because all nonfiction gets lumped together and biographies tend to have a harder time hacking it there with like serious political stuff that comes up. But this feels like a Pulitzer biography finalist to me. Yeah. And at the end of the year, I think there could be a world in which this is one of the books of the year. Like it could be on the New York Times 10 notable books of the year list. There's no doubt about it. This could be on an Obama list. Yeah.

I was struggling to remember the name of Courtney Thorson's book that I read, The Sisterhood, just to name check that, how a network of Black women writers changed American culture, talked specifically about this moment in time, and made me think, I don't know who would have the temerity to do this. This would be the literary TV we maybe talked about on this episode or a different Patreon, but like...

What about a seven-episode prestige drama of Toni Morrison's Last Days at Random House with a who's who of Black actors playing the who's who of Black artists and writers? Please. Please.

I mean, maybe that's a Patreon episode. We can cast Fran Lebowitz. We can just go through and cast everybody. Imagine having the temerity to play young Fran Lebowitz. Like, that's really bold. That's really interesting. What if you just cast Fran Lebowitz and we just all sort of pretended? Yes, that's what you do. Or can we, like, Benjamin Button Fran Lebowitz somehow? Yeah, right. Just uncanny de-aging. But, like...

I've long wanted... I mean, this is me. I want a Mad Men for books, like something like this, because what you get, you get these characters people have heard of but don't know, but what you get is the dialogue. You get the language. You have an excuse to be...

Sorkin-esque plus hyper-realistic language because it sort of makes sense within that world. And Mad Men is the right comp too because it's the same time period that like publishing is having... I mean, we can put it wherever you want, but... Yeah, publishing is having three martini lunches in the mid-60s into mid-70s. And...

you know, the paperback is rising and all sorts of new voices are coming out. And like, I think when people, when some people like older executives have had a make publishing great again, kind of yearning it's for those, like those heydays of like really having huge expense accounts and publishing being very glamorous, which it has been quite a while since like not in my 20 years has publishing been glamorous. I don't think it was glamorous for a while even before publishing.

We got into it, but I mean, a Toni Morrison. I don't know how big the audience for that is, but something inspired by it set in that time frame would be really fun to watch. Anyway, I would find it. Or maybe like a play. I just find myself dying for a dramatization of putting these people in conversation around the issues of the day about art, but also race and class and politics and gender too. I mean, I actually think this period of the 70s would be because...

The new is struggling to be born, to quote better writers and thinkers than me, but the old is kicking and screaming and sort of there. So that tension could be pretty fascinating. Because Mad Men, for all of its many virtues, was about...

All of the issues I just said, but not really explicitly, right? You could have an explicit conversation between, I don't know, Truman Capote and John Updike in the offices at Knopf. I actually don't know if they were published by the same people. And you get somebody who's publishing bell hooks at this time. Right. And those voices that are pushing against the Betty Friedan versions of Fandango.

feminist thought and like kind of the way before we had the term, but the first intersection of any or the first introduction of any kind of intersectionality in political thought and discourse. And at this moment too, and Professor Thorson does a good job of talking about this, like Morrison has become the monument of

for reasons that I think are understandable and useful. But also, any monument tends to smooth out the wrinkles and bumps in the story. And Morrison was challenged. She's spiky. Morrison's a more complicated figure now than I think people...

know or want or even are interested in knowing about same with Zora Neale Hurston same with any of these titanic figures of arts letters or history But it would be cool to see someone who's more radical than Morrison like storm into her office at random say what the hell are you doing here? Something like that. You want me to cut this? What are you thinking? What are you doing? So I think it's but also know why are you a part of the machine? We should be out doing our own thing and you know you could get the Amira Barakas of the world and some of the other more radical people and

And that push-me-pull-you of art and commas and being a part of the system, that's interesting in any context. But Morrison, is there any more interesting locus of that kind of investigation than Morrison? I can't think of one. Yeah, it would be so wonderful to have that. So that was a lot of excuse for me to fan cast a Toni Morrison-centered publishing... We're in charge here. We don't need excuses. ...docudrama. Yeah.

Anyway, so that, let's go back. So we're going to advanced atmosphere, but let me go through. We had King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby, then The Girl Who Grew Big by Leila Motley. I think from there, you actually advanced The Girl Who Grew Big. I did. And then we had Flashlight by Susan Choi. And then I believe you advanced that book.

Then we had Barrier Bones in the Midnight Soil. Then it goes on a bit of a run because it then knocks out Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin, The Dry Season by Melissa Phebos, How to Dodge a Cannonball by Denard Dale, Homework by Jeff Dyer, finally is knocked out by Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid, and then we cleared out a little space to nerd out about Tony at Random by Dana, Professor Dana Williams there. I didn't see a...

A Murderer's Row of Stephen King Honorary, you get mentioned here. Atmosphere is the number one most popular book of June, according to Goodreads, in terms of anticipation. Barrier Bones is number three. There's a lot of... What's number two? Thrillers. I'm going to get that. There's a run of Thrillers, two, four...

Five, six are all, so it's Death Row by Freda McFadden, With a Vengeance by Riley Sager, Don't Let Him In by Lisa Jewell. So I'm surprised to see that. Kind of the first straight up rom-com is Sounds Like Love by Ashley Poston at number seven. And yeah, Freda McFadden is in the now Stephen King. There's just another new one. Yeah.

So, I almost put this on here, and maybe I should have, and listeners can tell me. The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater, which is number eight on this list of anticipated. It's a lady spy in 1942. Okay. Is it YA or is Stiefvater writing for adults now? Let's see. It doesn't say. It's got to be adult. It's got to be adult. So, there's a romance element to it, too. So, I'm going to go with that.

There you go. So that's why I didn't put it on because I could, lady spies don't make it. You got to do something a lot different, a lot different. King of Ashes, number 12, in terms of things we talked about. We start seeing a couple of big romantic, Heir of Storms by Lauren Murray, Stormweaver series number one at number 15. Gloves Off, we got a hockey romance, number four from Stephanie Archer. I know the Vancouver Storm series has been very popular in my household, especially. And let's see, there was one other one I was going to mention that I hadn't heard of.

Yeah. So this one is caught up by Nevesa Allen into darkness number two in this series. It sounds like this is extremely spicy. In fact, there is a genre on Goodreads now, I did not realize this, that is just tag smut. And everyone have a good time. There is a morally gray male lead.

Some themes and scenes may be disturbing to readers. Please check the content warning at the beginning of the book. It's in the official... This might be in the dark romance vein that's happening lately, which, okay. The slug line is, get on your knees and pray with an E in pray. So be careful out there. Enjoy yourselves if that's your kind of thing. So that was new to me. Thought I would mention that here. That was new to me. Yes.

You putting yourself in completely optional situations where you have to read descriptions like that. You know what? You walk up to the water's edge. You don't have to get in. But sometimes you tell them, that's interesting. Look at what they're doing out there. Look what they're doing out there. Seem like they're having a great time. Be careful. Wear your life jacket. And make sure you wear sunscreen. Okay. Those are the books of June. You can email us, podcast at bookriot.com. Shoot us an email, bookriot.com slash listen. And it's going to be a helter skelter of...

episodes and things. The next up on this feed will be

Sharif and I talking about Flashlight by Susan Choi. And we also have an interview with some folks from Spotify Audiobooks to share with you as well. And do, if you're interested in any of the, a lot of the books we talked about here, and especially touched on the Patreon, first edition is a real smorgasbord starting next week for June. I think I have six or seven episodes. It might be fewer. I might twin up some of those things because I've made promises to

get things published during publication week, and when everything comes out June 3rd, it presents a real problem, but it makes for an embarrassment of riches.

over there as well. Rebecca, safe travels to you and we'll talk to you on the website.

And watch those and come hang out with us on Patreon while we have an appreciation moment. If you've seen them, you know how great they are. So you should just go rewatch them. All right, Rebecca, I'll talk to you later. All right. Have a good one, y'all. Welcome to Those Who Can't Teach Anymore, a narrative podcast series that explores why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus. This season, we're getting a look at the year and the life of teachers from across the country through their audio journals.

I am Darcy Ostermiller. This is Megan Overgoth. This is Sophie V. This is Charlie Blackwood. This is Taylor Barron. This is Iva Moss Redmond. This is David Whisker. This is Dan Morris. This is Amanda Smith. Look for Those Who Can't Teach Anymore, Season 2. A different kind of the same thing.