In his 61st novel, “The Institute,” children with supernatural abilities are taken from their parents and incarcerated. Sound familiar? Anthony Breznican from The New York Times thinks so… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Stephen King wouldn’t still be in business if all he had to sell was fear.

Within every terrifying story about a shape-shifting killer clown, homicidal father in a haunted hotel or super flu that depopulates the planet, the relentlessly prolific writer has filled his pages with equally powerful supplies of strength, selflessness and even hope. That may be why so many readers, many of whom discovered his books when they were kids themselves, have remained loyal over 45 years of storytelling.

The author is about to turn 72 as he publishes his 61st novel, “The Institute,” about children who display supernatural abilities being forcibly rounded up for study by a shadowy organization that brutally discards them when their usefulness is exhausted. Those who think of King primarily for horror may be surprised by how much warmth there is in a book that sounds so coldblooded.

The concept for the book dates back more than two decades, when King — who has depicted similar psychic characters as loners in books such as “Carrie,” “The Shining,” “Firestarter” and “The Dead Zone” — pictured an entire schoolhouse filled with such kids. When he began writing the book in March 2017, he thought of it not as a horror story but as a resistance tale, with 12-year-old telekinetic genius Luke, teenage mind reader Kalisha and 10-year-old power-channeler Avery forming a rebellion inside their detention center.

“I wanted to write about how weak people can be strong,” King says, speaking by phone from his home in Bangor, Me. “We’re each on our own island, and at the same time sometimes we can yell to each other and get together, and there is that sense of community and empathy. I love that. I love that in stories.”

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The book features gay marriage, hits out at slavery and imperialism and predicts the climate crisis – 200 years after the birth of its author, Herman Melville, it has never been more important. Philip Hoare from The Guardian explores Moby Dick and Melville. Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Thursday marks the 200th birthday of Herman Melville – the author of the greatest unread novel in the English language. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen eyes glaze over when I ask people if they have conquered Moby-Dick. It is the Mount Everest of literature: huge and apparently insurmountable, its snowy peak as elusive as the tail of the great white whale himself.

Having grown up loving whales as a boy – in the era of the Save the Whale campaigns of the 1970s – I was underwhelmed when I watched John Huston’s grandiose 1956 film, Moby Dick. Perhaps it was because I saw it on a tiny black-and-white TV, but the whole story seemed impenetrable to me. And there weren’t enough whales. I would have been even less keen had I known that the whale footage Huston did include had been specially shot off Madeira, where they were still being hunted. For the Hemingwayesque director, there was none of that final-credit nonsense: “No animals were harmed in the making of this film.” Because they very much were.

Forty years later, I saw my first whales in the wild, off Provincetown, a former whaling port on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It was there, in New England, that I finally finished the book. What had seemed to be a heroic tale of the high seas proved to be something much darker and more sublime. I realised its secret. Not only is it very funny and very subversive, but it maps out the modern world as if Melville had lived his life in the future and was only waiting for us to catch up. I fell in love with Melville as much as I had fallen in love with the whales. My own five-year-long voyage searching for these magnificent creatures produced my own book, Leviathan or, The Whale and a subsequent film, The Hunt for Moby-Dick…

Read full post on The Guardian

If you’re craving an engaging read about the life of the rich and their glamorous lifestyles, these books like Crazy Rich Asians will take care of your TBR according to Rabeea Saleem from Bookriot… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The Wangs vs. the World

by Jade Chang

Kindle price: $2.99

For fans of Crazy Rich Asians: Meet the Wangs, the unforgettable immigrant family whose spectacular fall from glorious riches to (still name-brand) rags brings them together in a way money never could.

Charles Wang, a brash, lovable businessman who built a cosmetics empire and made a fortune, has just lost everything in the financial crisis. So he rounds up two of his children from schools that he can no longer afford and packs them into the only car that wasn’t repossessed. Together with their wealth-addicted stepmother, Barbra, they head on a cross-country journey from their foreclosed Bel-Air home to the Upstate New York retreat of the eldest Wang daughter, Saina.

The Nest

by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

Kindle price: $11.99

A warm, funny and acutely perceptive debut novel about four adult siblings and the fate of the shared inheritance that has shaped their choices and their lives.

Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a nineteen-year-old waitress as his passenger. The ensuing accident has endangered the Plumbs’ joint trust fund, “The Nest,” which they are months away from finally receiving. Meant by their deceased father to be a modest mid-life supplement, the Plumb siblings have watched The Nest’s value soar along with the stock market and have been counting on the money to solve a number of self-inflicted problems.

Five Star Billionaire: A Novel

by Tash Aw

Kindle price: $10.99

An expansive, eye-opening novel that captures the vibrancy of China today

Phoebe is a factory girl who has come to Shanghai with the promise of a job—but when she arrives she discovers that the job doesn’t exist. Gary is a country boy turned pop star who is spinning out of control. Justin is in Shanghai to expand his family’s real estate empire, only to find that he might not be up to the task. He has long harbored a crush on Yinghui, a poetry-loving, left-wing activist who has reinvented herself as a successful Shanghai businesswoman. Yinghui is about to make a deal with the shadowy Walter Chao, the five star billionaire of the novel, who with his secrets and his schemes has a hand in the lives of each of the characters. All bring their dreams and hopes to Shanghai, the shining symbol of the New China, which, like the novel’s characters, is constantly in flux and which plays its own fateful role in the lives of its inhabitants.

The Windfall: A Novel

by Diksha Basu

Kindle price: $11.99

“Charming . . . What Kevin Kwan did for rich-people problems, Diksha Basu does for trying-to-be-rich-people problems.”—People

The Jhas are moving up. For the past thirty years, their lives have been defined by cramped spaces and gossipy neighbors. But when Mr. Jha comes into an enormous sum of money—the result of an unexpectedly successful internet venture—he moves his reluctant wife from their housing complex in East Delhi to the super-rich side of town, ultimately forcing them, and their son, to reckon with who they are and what really matters to them. Hilarious and wise, The Windfall illuminates with warmth and heart the precariousness of social status, the fragility of pride, and, above all, the human drive to build and share a home. Even the rich, it turns out, need to belong somewhere.

Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir

by Wednesday Martin

Kindle price: $11.99

Like an urban Dian Fossey, Wednesday Martin decodes the primate social behaviors of Upper East Side mothers in a brilliantly original and witty memoir about her adventures assimilating into that most secretive and elite tribe.

After marrying a man from the Upper East Side and moving to the neighborhood, Wednesday Martin struggled to fit in. Drawing on her background in anthropology and primatology, she tried looking at her new world through that lens, and suddenly things fell into place. She understood the other mothers’ snobbiness at school drop-off when she compared them to olive baboons. Her obsessional quest for a Hermes Birkin handbag made sense when she realized other females wielded them to establish dominance in their troop. And so she analyzed tribal migration patterns; display rituals; physical adornment, mutilation, and mating practices; extra-pair copulation; and more. Her conclusions are smart, thought-provoking, and hilariously unexpected.

See full post on BookRiot

Look, celebs read books all the time — probably a celeb is reading a book at this very moment! Hannah Gold from The Cut looks at how young, influential, and musical ones are particularly keen on flaunting their cool taste in Literature… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Gigi Hadid has reportedly been spotting clutching a copy of Albert Camus’s The Stranger. Her sister, Bella, hid behind Stephen King’s The Outsider at an airport once. In April, Emily Ratajkowski shared her love of Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends on social media. Justin Bieber reads Christian self-help books about how to be married. Goodreads has a dedicated “Books Harry Styles Has Read” page that contains all of ten books.

Read full post on The Cut

Noma Nazish from Forbes wants you to plan a bookish trip that will satisfy both your wanderlust and literary cravings… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

#1 El Ateneo Grand Splendid, Buenos Aires, Argentina

This antique movie theatre-turned-bookstore is one of the most magnificent book shops in the world. The building’s impressive architecture features lavishly embellished theatre boxes, rounded galleries and plush red drapes around the stage — which now houses a cozy café where visitors can sip coffee while reading or, enjoy live piano performances.

#2 Book And Bed, Tokyo, Japan

Tokyo’s “accommodation bookshop” Book And Bed turned a dream into reality for bibliophiles. Here, visitors can not just browse but also stay in the bookstore and read to their heart’s content. And if you get tired, you can doze off in a Japanese-style built-in bed behind the bookshelves.

#3 Jane Austen Centre, Bath, England

Two of Jane Austen’s popular novels, namely Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, are set in Bath, Somerset. So, for avid Austenites, the Jane Austen Centre in Bath is no less than a holy shrine. Set in a beautiful Georgian townhouse, the permanent exhibition offers a sneak-peak into life during the Regency era — and throws light on how the historic city inspired Austen’s works.

#4 Cimitière du Père Lachaise, Paris, France

Dotted with sculptures, Gothic tombs, austere headstones and ornate mausoleums, it’s the resting place of some of the most famous personalities in the world. Here, you can pay your respects to literary giants such as Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire and Gertrude Stein.

#5 The Elephant House, Edinburgh, Scotland

The coffee house touts itself as “the birthplace of Harry Potter” — since JK Rowling supposedly wrote much of the first Harry Potter books in its back room that overlooks Edinburgh Castle. Ever since the series became popular, scores of Potterheads and aspiring writers have started to throng into the coffee house each year.

Read full post on Forbes

According to Michael Kozlowski of Good eReader, all of the modern Kindle e-readers in the United States can borrow ebooks from Overdrive… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Amazon and Overdrive signed a contract almost 7 years ago and it keeps getting renewed. Amazon does not devote any marketing power to let customers know they can borrow ebooks from the library, but the entire experience is not as intuitive as Kobo.

In order to borrow ebooks from the public library on your Kindle you need to visit the website of your local branch on your computer. When you find a novel you want to read, there is a Kindle Book field. You need to click on that and then associate your Amazon account with Overdrive. You can then wirelessly send the ebook right to your Kindle. Some Kindle Books, including many picture books, read-alongs, and graphic novels are not supported.

Read full post on Good eReader.

Anxiety is complex and sometimes hard to put into words. Rachel Rosenberg from BookRiot suggest these works of graphic nonfiction about anxiety to translate some of its challenges… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Kind of Coping: An Illustrated Look at Life with Anxiety

by Maureen Marzi Wilson

Kindle price: $9.99

If you struggle with anxiety, you may feel like it’s you against the world all the time. Sometimes, your anxiety can be too much to handle all at once—wouldn’t it be nice to have someone around that understood exactly what you were going through?

Meet Marzi! She struggles with anxiety just like you. In Kind of Coping, join Marzi as she (kind of) copes with her own anxiety from day to day, finding the humor in her condition with this collection of funny, encouraging, and supportive comics that show you the best you can do sometimes is just kind of cope—and that’s totally OK!

Whether it’s a panic attack or an awkward social snafu, Marzi knows what you are going through. With over 150 full-color doodles that deliver hope and inspiration, unconditional support, and big laughs, let Marzi share her journey with you.

Just Peachy: Comics About Depression, Anxiety, Love, and Finding the Humor in Being Sad

by Holly Chisholm

Kindle price: $9.99

Just Peachy is a comic series that explores what the day-to-day is like with depression and/or anxiety. The all-too-real cartoon protagonist gives readers a character to empathize with, and helps explain some of the not often talked about consequences and symptoms of having depression. The comics also explore the themes of heartbreak, finding love, dealing with stress, and capturing the magical moments in life that keep us going.

Through dark humor and cute illustrations, the subject matter becomes a bit more bearable, allowing for honest discussion about things like treatment and getting through anxiety attacks, and providing some comfort in times of struggle.

For anyone affected by mental illness, Just Peachy shows that you are not alone. Simply put, this is an encouraging collection of comics about being just okay sometimes.

Anxiety is Really Strange (…is Really Strange)

by Steve Haines

Kindle price: $7.81