William Golding elaborates on the exclusion of little girls from his deserted island and author Kim Liggett responds on CrimeReads… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

It was the bone-deep sense of raw humanity that I remembered most from reading Lord of the Flies in high school. It felt like a dark truth. A secret language only the people who’d read it would understand. So, as an adult, working on my own book about girls who are banished to an island for their sixteenth year to rid themselves of their dangerous magic, I decided that I would revisit William Golding’s classic, in hopes of rekindling that spark.

I chose the audiobook because the narrator was William Golding himself. What could be better than that? I just knew I was going to pick up on things that only the author would be able to imbue, and unfortunately…I was right.

The recording starts off lovely. His grandfatherly voice, his delightful British accent as he describes the bucolic scene, in 1953 or 1954, when he decided to write his beloved classic, Lord of the Flies. He was sitting on one side of the fireplace, his wife on the other, when he suddenly said, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to write a story about some boys on an island showing how they would really behave—being boys and not—little saints as they usually are in children’s books.”

His wife replied, “That’s a first-class idea. You write it.”

So, he went ahead and wrote it.

I can almost see them wrapped up in woolen sweaters, the tinkling of bone china as they refill their teacups, ash wood and bergamot filling the air inside their quaint country cottage.

I find myself utterly transfixed and thoroughly charmed as I settle into my covers, readying myself for the ultimate bedtime story.

He continues…

“When girls say to me, and very reasonably, why isn’t it a bunch of girls? Why did you write this about a bunch of boys, my reply is, I was once a little boy. I have been a brother. I have been a father. I’m going to be a grandfather. I have never been a sister or a mother or a grandmother. So, this is why I wrote it really about little boys.”

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Reading Gaol, the English prison where Oscar Wilde infamously served time for “gross indecency,” has been put up for sale according to BBC News… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The jail where playwright Oscar Wilde was a prisoner has been put up for sale, the Ministry of Justice has said.

The MoJ, which owns the Grade II listed jail building in Reading, announced in April it intended to sell the site.

Reading East MP Matt Rodda previously expressed concern over the prison being converted into luxury flats and started a petition to preserve the site.

The MoJ said it would be considering “conditional and unconditional bids from all parties”.

A spokesman said: “We will always seek the best outcome for the taxpayer and the money received from the sale will be invested back into our prisons.”

Wilde, spent two years at the jail for gross indecency between 1895 and 1897 after after his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas was exposed.

After his release, he composed The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which was inspired by his time as a prisoner and reflected the brutality of the Victorian prison system.

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In her own words, Cyntoia Brown shares the riveting and redemptive story of how she changed her life for the better while in prison, finding hope through faith after a traumatic adolescence of drug addiction, rape, and sex trafficking led to a murder conviction. Kristin Hall with the Associated Press looks at Brown’s long journey…. Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Cyntoia Brown-Long, now 31 years old, knows as much about life in prison as she does about being free.

At 16, she was arrested for robbing and killing a man she says picked her up for sex and later was sentenced to life in prison. But two months ago, Brown-Long walked out of a Tennessee prison after successfully petitioning the governor for her clemency.

Brown-Long’s story has mostly been framed by other people — attorneys, the makers of a documentary film and celebrities such as Rihanna, Kim Kardashian West and LeBron James, who called for her release. Her case became a hashtag, sparking discussions about child trafficking and juvenile justice reform, and Netflix announced plans to release a documentary about her.

But now she’s speaking for herself in her memoir, “Free Cyntoia: My Search for Redemption in the American Prison System,” released Tuesday, that goes deep into the patterns of sexual and drug abuse, predatory men and a childhood raised in the juvenile justice system.

“You’re kind of tethered to the worst moment of your life. And we’re so much more complex than that as human beings,” Brown-Long told The Associated Press. (She married her husband, Jamie Long, while in prison and now goes by the name of Brown-Long.)

Her birth mother has admitted drinking heavily while she was pregnant, which Brown-Long’s attorneys argued led to her problems with anger as a young child. Although she was smart and had stability in her adoptive family, she lashed out at other children and teachers.

By age 13, she was in and out of juvenile facilities, often trying to run away from being held in custody. In her book, she describes a mostly segregated judicial system that punished her when she wouldn’t follow the rules but provided little academic or mental health support.

“I can’t recall a time where people at school or people in the court system actually listened to me and (asked) why I felt how I did,” Brown said.

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Joe Hill on Standing in the Shadow (and Light) of His Famous Dad, (published for LitHub)…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

We had a new monster every night.

I had this book I loved, Bring on the Bad Guys. It was a big, chunky paperback collection of comic-book stories, and as you might guess from the title, it wasn’t much concerned with heroes. It was instead an anthology of tales about the worst of the worst, vile psychopaths with names like The Abomination and faces to match.

My dad had to read that book to me every night. He didn’t have a choice. It was one of these Scheherazade-type deals. If he didn’t read to me, I wouldn’t stay in bed. I’d slip out from under my Empire Strikes Back quilt and roam the house in my Spider-Man Underoos, soggy thumb in my mouth and my filthy comfort blanket tossed over one shoulder. I could roam all night if the mood took me. My father had to keep reading until my eyes were barely open, and even then, he could only escape by saying he was going to step out for a smoke and he’d be right back.

I loved the subhumans in Bring on the Bad Guys: demented creatures who shrieked unreasonable demands, raged when they didn’t get their way, ate with their hands, and yearned to bite their enemies. Of course I loved them. I was six. We had a lot in common.

My dad read me these stories, his fingertip moving from panel to panel so my weary gaze could follow the action. If you asked me what Captain America sounded like, I could’ve told you: he sounded like my dad. So did the Dread Dormammu. So did Sue Richards, the Invisible Woman—she sounded like my dad doing a girl’s voice.

They were all my dad, every one of them.

Most sons fall into one of two groups.

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Attica Locke left Hollywood to write novels. Now she’s found success in both worlds according to Madhulika Sikka from The Washington Post… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Attica Locke always wanted to make movies, and for a while, that seemed to be her destiny. At just 25, after writing and directing fellowships at the Sundance Lab, she had a movie deal. But things fell apart, as they often do in Hollywood, and she ended up a screenwriter for hire in Los Angeles, where the frustrations continued. There was no appetite for her voice, she says, and nobody wanted to make the movies she was interested in.

“It was difficult to monetize my blackness,” she says now.

Not anymore. With her fifth crime novel, “Heaven, My Home,” coming out this month, she’s proved that there’s demand for stories about black characters, not just on the page but on the screen. It took her walking away from Hollywood to find success there: After three seasons of writing for the hit show “Empire,” she’s also working on the buzzy upcoming series adaptation of Celeste Ng’s “Little Fires Everywhere.”

This is a far cry from where she was more than a decade ago, when she was taking out a second mortgage on her house and giving herself a year to become a novelist.

Her debut, “Black Water Rising,” was published in 2009 to critical acclaim and was followed by “The Cutting Season” (2012) and “Pleasantville” (2015). Her books, categorized as mystery or crime, are also unabashedly about black experiences, examining the legacy of black history in the context of modern politics and culture. The crime she really concerns herself with is an existential one: the legacy of America’s original sin.

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The historical novels The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek and The Giver of Stars, published a few months apart, share some noticeable similarities, reported by Tomi Obaro from Buzzfeed News… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Historical fiction writer Kim Michele Richardson was surprised when she learned in March that English author Jojo Moyes, most famous for her bestselling Me Before You romance trilogy, would be publishing The Giver of Stars, a historical novel about the real-life Pack Horse Library project in Kentucky, on Oct. 8. Why? Because Richardson’s novel The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, which focuses on imagined characters in the same real-life historical setting, was set to be published in May 2019.

“I could only hope there was more than enough room for more than one” novel on the topic, Richardson said in an interview with BuzzFeed News.

She became concerned, however, when a blogger who had received an advance review copy of Moyes’ book alerted Richardson in April to what she believed were unusually specific similarities between the two novels; at least one bookseller has also referenced the apparent overlap in a tweet.

“History is not proprietorial,” Richardson said. But “the disturbing similarities found in Moyes’ book are too many and too specific and quite puzzling,” she added in an email. “None of the similarities found in Moyes’ novel can be chalked up to the realities of history, nor can be found in any historical records, archives or photographs of the packhorse librarian project initiative that I meticulously studied. These fictional devices/ plot points were ones I invented.”

A spokesperson for Moyes’ publisher Pamela Dorman Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, told BuzzFeed News in an email, “The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes is a wholly original work. It is a deeply researched piece of historical fiction based on the true story of the Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky. We have absolute confidence in the integrity of Jojo Moyes and her work. Neither the author nor anyone at Pamela Dorman Books has ever read The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.” Moyes was not available for comment; the representative cited her “packed schedule.”

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Becoming: A Guided Journal for Discovering Your Voice, a companion journal to former U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama’s bestselling memoir, Becoming, will be published in the U.S. and Canada on Tuesday, November 19, by Clarkson Potter… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The Becoming journal will have a first printing of 500,000 copies. It will also be published globally this fall in more than 20 countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Taiwan, and China, with additional territories to be announced.

Featuring an introduction by Obama, the Becoming journal includes more than 150 questions and quotes that resonate with key themes in Obama’s memoir that are designed to help readers “reflect on their personal and family history, their goals, challenges, and dreams, what moves them and brings them hope, and what future they imagine for themselves and their community.” World publication rights for the Becoming journal were acquired by Penguin Random House from the author’s representatives, Robert B. Barnett and Deneen Howell of Williams & Connolly.

Pre-Order Becoming: A Guided Journal for Discovering Your Voice,