Megan Rapinoe signs with Penguin for adult and middle grade books on social justice according to Rachel Deahl at Publishers Weekly.

Rapinoe, who stole the spotlight on and off the field at the recent Women’s World Cup, co-captains the women’s national team, where she largely plays as a winger. Winning both the Golden Boot and the Golden Ball at the World Cup—for being, respectively, the competition’s top scorer and best player—Rapinoe put in a dominant performance. Arguably, though, her public spat with President Trump thrust her onto a bigger stage.

After saying during the tournament that she would decline any invitation to the White House if the U.S. team won, Rapinoe became a target for Trump on Twitter. The moment allowed Rapinoe to espouse some of the social justice issues she has championed throughout her career, from women’s rights to gay rights to equal pay for women.

To that end, the adult book, Penguin said, will be “a perfect vehicle for a honest, thoughtful, unapologetic, idealistic discussion of women, social justice, role models, gay issues, nationalism, and even a little soccer.”

The middle grade title, to be released by Razorbill after the adult title, will, Penguin said, explore “social justice and change and the power young people have within their own communities and the world at large.”

Neither book has a title. The adult book is slated for fall 2020.

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Why Don’t I Read All My Books? Author Karen Olsson tries to answer this question. Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

I own a book called Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures, itself a small object with a haunting image on the cover: a tiny 19th-century portrait of a dead teenage girl. The book came out in 2000, to accompany an exhibition of miniatures at Yale University Art Gallery, and I bought it not long afterward, though I can’t remember precisely when or why. Although I’m sure I meant to read the book, now it seems to me entirely foreseeable that I would not, in the 19 years since then, have so much as skimmed a chapter of Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures, because it is just the sort of book that I would order and then eagerly leaf through when it arrives and then stick on the shelf and never read.

Doesn’t every bibliophile do this, buy books and fail to read them? Actually no—or so I learned halfway through those 19 years of owning Love and Loss, when I started dating the person I would eventually marry. This man reads every book he acquires. If a friend writes a book, he gets to it as soon as he can; if his father randomly sends him a biography of some musician, he’ll read that; I myself am hesitant to ever give him a book, knowing that it represents an obligation that I would never feel in his place, namely to read the thing from start to finish.

For such a compulsive—er, scrupulous—person, the bookshelves trace a straightforward history of his reading life, one kind of intellectual biography. Meanwhile, living with him, I’ve become conscious of the alternative biography my books represent, a history of stray intentions, youthful aspirations, old interests that have run their course but not quite expired, since there’s always that chance I might decide to learn at last about portrait miniatures, or neuroscience, or the Battle of the Alamo. (Part of the problem is that I’m someone who would genuinely like to know more about those subjects but who reads mostly in bed, at night, and by then I’m less interested in new information than in a bedtime story.) While I’ve amassed plenty of unread novels, it’s the neglected nonfiction volumes, with their weighty titles and untouched pages, that stand out and reflect back at me the younger selves who purchased them.

The most conspicuous of those younger selves is the recent college graduate who moved from the east coast to Texas, where I still live. I was fascinated by this state, fell in love with its outsize characters and narratives. I read a lot about Texas but inevitably bit off more than I could chew. The obsession had its limits. My shelves are still crowded with unread Texas history: I wolfed down Robert Caro’s biographies of Lyndon Johnson but never cracked Robert Dallek’s; I read the first half of Great River, Paul Horgan’s massive book about the Rio Grande, but not the second; and I have spent more than 20 years now meaning to read David Montejano’s Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas 1836-1986. (These books, by the way, all used to cohabit a Texas-themed shelf—until my spouse imposed strict alphabetical order.)

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A group of House Republicans is urging its members to pressure Amazon to resume selling a set of controversial gay conversion therapy books, after the platform announced this month it would no longer carry works by the “father of conversion therapy.” Daniel Newhauserwith Vice News looks into why.  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus that includes more than 70% of all GOP House members, issued a handout during a private meeting in the Capitol Wednesday asking members to “contact Amazon with concerns” about what they referred to as “Amazon censorship.”

Amazon removed books by Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, a clinical psychologist who is credited with originating gay conversion therapy, a debunked — and in some cases illegal — pseudoscientific method of trying to turn gay people straight.

Nonetheless, the Republicans want to lobby to get his books — such as “A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality” and “Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality” — back in circulation.

“In recent days, Amazon has banned the sale of several books addressing unwanted same-sex attraction,” according to the handout, obtained by VICE News. “Catholic psychologist, author and therapist Dr. Joseph Nicolosi (deceased) penned multiple books to assist men struggling with unwanted homosexual attractions, feelings and lifestyles.

“These books were available on Amazon until an LGBT activist repeatedly petitioned Amazon to remove the ‘homophobic books’ from the company’s website. Amazon removed Dr. Nicolosi’s books and those of several other authors on similar topics,” the document continues. “It is not clear that any of the banned books have violated an Amazon policy, but rather that the company is choosing to censor speech.”

The handout was issued a day after representatives from Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple were grilled about antitrust issues in a House committee hearing. Separately, the effort to pressure Amazon would open a new front in Republicans’ years-long fight with tech companies, which they claim censor conservative viewpoints.

When the Amazon decision was first reported, the company confirmed to news outlets the books were removed because they violate Amazon’s content guidelines. Conservative media outlets heavily covered the decision as another instance of censorship.

The Republican Study Committee memo recommended that members read a story from the Federalist, which charged that Amazon is being hypocritical because it still sells books by Adolph Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Benito Mussolini, Timothy McVeigh and David Duke.

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The CW’s Nancy Drew won’t directly adapt any books, but it will be horny according to Jordan Crucchiol from Vulture. Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The opening minutes of the CW’s new Nancy Drew series feature kissing and implied sex between two of its young, attractive leads, and it closes the same way. In other words: It’s a pure hit of exactly what you’re tuning into the CW for these days, complete with a not-natural but still-believable redhead (Kennedy McMann) in the starring role. At San Diego Comic-Con on Thursday, the producers and core cast of Nancy Drew shared a sneak preview at their upcoming series premiere, which debuts on October 9, and hung out for some question-and-answer time afterward to talk about their adaptation of the iconic literary mystery series.

It was clear from the first trailer released this spring that new Nancy Drew was going to take a lot of cues from the Riverdale playbook, but just how similar will the tone of the two shows be? Well, when we say, “Drama series set in a fecund small town that looks nestled in the evergreen rainforests of the Pacific Northwest and seems like it could always be a crisp 64 degrees outside, and it revolves around a bunch of late-teenaged characters who end up solving mysteries and hanging out a lot at a local diner,” which show would you guess we’re describing? And what if we told you that same small town lives under the pall of a teen’s tragic death-by-water, and the lead character’s dad is played by a signature 1990s hottie? There are even wry voiceovers! We won’t spoil any of the actual plot details in Nancy Drew episode one, but suffice it to say, if you love dark and sexy Riverdale but find yourself longing for the presence of a keen girl detective, Nancy Drew is your new strange addiction. (And Freddie Prinze Jr. is the new ’90s hottie in residence.)

So now that you know the vibe, what about the mysteries on offer? When asked if the CW series would be directly tackling any of the storylines from famous Nancy Drew books, the producers gave a swift and certain “no.” So don’t expect a “Secret of the Old Clock” episode to show up down the line. These new Nancy tales will be “inverted” and “reinvented” for modern times, say the writers, with the primary nods to Drew canon coming in the form of Easter eggs — like a red pajama set that CW Nancy wears harkening back to a book cover in the series.

This isn’t your grandmother’s or even your mother’s Nancy Drew series, but it is a slightly soapy-looking mystery show set in a town that’s “a vortex for supernatural events.” So get ready, gumshoes. Your new binge bait awaits.

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Dean Koontz inks multibook deal with Amazon Publishing. Rachel Deahl with Publishers Weekly has the big announcement. Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Bestselling author Dean Koontz signed a five-book deal with Amazon Publishing’s Thomas & Mercer imprint. The agreement also includes a collection of six short thrillers for the company’s Amazon Original Stories unit (which releases only digital and audio content). The deal follows a string of agreement Amazon Publishing has struck with bestselling authors recently; in 2018 alone, Thomas & Mercer inked multibook, seven-figure deals with Barry Eisler, T.R. Ragan and Robert Dugoni. Other top authors to come on board include Slyvia Day and Patricia Cornwell.

Grace Doyle, Thomas & Mercer’s editorial director, acquired North American rights to the five standalone titles, while Amazon Original Stories’ editorial director Julia Sommerfeld took world English rights to the collection. Richard Pine and Kimberly Witherspoon at Inkwell Management, along with Richard Heller at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, represented Koontz.

The first standalone under the deal, Devoted, is scheduled for spring 2020, Amazon said in a release, while the thriller short story collection, Nameless, will be available on November 12.

Koontz has published with Amazon before, having done audio titles with the Amazon-owned Brilliance Audio and short piece for Amazon Original stories. His most recent book from a Big 5 publisher, The Night Window, was released by Bantam in May. Speaking to that decision, Koontz said that Amazon “presented a marketing and publicity plan smarter and more ambitious than anything I’d ever seen before.” He added: “The times are changing, and it’s invigorating to be where change is understood and embraced.”

His agents at Inkwell, Pine and Witherspoon, added that, while Koontz has been incredibly successful–they noted that he has sold over 500 million copies–more is possible. They said in the release: “Dean is at the peak of his storytelling powers and Amazon has committed to a highly ambitious and creative publishing plan that’s certain to delight his existing fans and create millions of new ones.”

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Murder, manipulation, and nightmarish “romance”: Kaira Rouda from CrimeReads on seven of the most disturbed couples in literature. (Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!)

Here are 5 literary couples whose relationships are deeply disturbing in the most fascinating ways possible:

Revolutionary Road

by Richard Yates

Kindle price: $9.99

My Lovely Wife

by Samantha Downing

Kindle price: $12.99

Dexter meets Mr. and Mrs. Smith in this wildly compulsive debut thriller about a couple whose fifteen-year marriage has finally gotten too interesting…

Our love story is simple. I met a gorgeous woman. We fell in love. We had kids. We moved to the suburbs. We told each other our biggest dreams, and our darkest secrets. And then we got bored.

We look like a normal couple. We’re your neighbors, the parents of your kid’s friend, the acquaintances you keep meaning to get dinner with.

We all have our secrets to keeping a marriage alive.

Ours just happens to be getting away with murder.

Wuthering Heights

by Emily Brontë

Kindle price: 45 cents

Emily Brontë’s only novel was published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, tells the tale of the all-encompassing and passionate, yet thwarted, love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys them and many around them.

Now considered a classic of English literature, “Wuthering Heights” met with mixed reviews by critics when it first appeared, with many horrified by the stark depictions of mental and physical cruelty. Though Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” was originally considered the best of the Brontë sisters’ works, many subsequent critics of “Wuthering Heights” argued that its originality and achievement made it superior.

The Windup Girl

by Paolo Bacigalupi

Kindle price: $9.11

Gone Girl: A Novel

by Gillian Flynn

Kindle price: $9.99

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

The #1 New York Times Bestseller

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick’s clever and beautiful wife disappears. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but passages from Amy’s diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media—as well as Amy’s fiercely doting parents—the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter—but is he really a killer?

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She was Edna Rydzik in Jersey. In Miami, she was the hardboiled crime writer who defined an era and left a complex legacy. Sarah Weinman from CrimeReads take’s a look at Edna Buchanan‘s Miami. Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Edna Rydzik, as she was known from birth until the short-lived marriage that bestowed her professional name, dreamed of the writer’s life at a young age. Dreaming was a good way to pass the time in Little Falls, New Jersey, a small town in Passaic County just outside of Paterson. It beat going to school, something she despised, as she told the Bergen County Record in 1987: “I dreaded Sunday night because Monday morning meant school. I have never dreaded anything as much since. Covering murders, rapes, and riots is a breeze by comparison.” And it certainly beat thinking about the most obvious future for her: working in a factory, like her mother, or a tavern, like her father, or staying at the Western Electric Plant as a switchboard operator.

The notion of writing about crime came later. The inciting incident happened early in the morning of Sunday, July 29, 1957. Rydzik, then nineteen, was driving her Nash Rambler along Lower Market Street in Paterson when she hit a 58-year-old homeless man named Archie Beal as he crossed the street. As the Herald-News described it the next day: “He landed on the car’s hood, which he dented and bounced into the windshield, which he cracked. Then he slid off the front of the hood and the car, still moving, rolled over him.”

When police and the ambulance arrived, Rydzik’s Rambler still lay on top of Beal. By some miracle he escaped real harm, treated for superficial head wounds before his hospital release. The Herald-News story noted Beal’s recurrent arrests for public intoxication; whether that contributed to his cheating death that night cannot be known. But for Rydzik, the ordeal’s aftermath made a permanent impression: how did the newspaper get so many details about what happened, and why did the cops talk to that reporter?

A decade and a half later, she was that reporter. Edna Rydzik, with a limited future in Paterson, had been wholly subsumed into Edna Buchanan, hard-driving, insatiably curious police beat reporter in Miami. Another short-lived marriage, this time to a cop, added insight, but far less than the daily calls to police stations wondering if there was a crime for her to write about. She liked to note, especially during the book tour phase for her 1987 nonfiction collection The Corpse Had A Familiar Face, that she had borne witness to more than 5,000 murders during her career and thousands more assaults, rapes, robberies, and other violent crimes in addition. (A side note: Buchanan was a guest on Late Night With David Letterman, at a time when authors were more customarily on late-night. It’s awkward to watch, though Buchanan is steely throughout.)

Some of Buchanan’s coverage sticks out more than most. The beating death of Arthur McDuffie, a black man, at the hands of a group of white cops, whose acquittal in May 1980 led to race riots that killed 18 people, wounded many more, and caused all manner of fires in the Miami. Contents Under Pressure fictionalizes this story and inserts Britt Montero into the narrative; because it was published in 1992, many people assumed Buchanan was writing about Rodney King or Reginald Denny. As she explained, and as we now know with bitter truth, police kill unarmed black men in every town, in every state.

There was also Jack Murphy, nicknamed “Murph the Surf” whose theft of the Star of India jewel from the American Museum of Natural History in 1964 made him into a minor celebrity, one that persisted even after he was convicted of the murders of two young women five years later. Murphy was released from prison and speaks on the lecture circuit. Buchanan told an interviewer in 2016 that she’ll still get called up by other journalists for background information, but refuses to take part: “You’re just playing into his hands. All he wants is attention…It’s mean cold brutal murder and he doesn’t need to be aggrandized anymore for it.”

Or the story of Jack Maclean, the self-designated “Superthief” whose brazen heisting masked even more brazen sexual assaults, committed in costume, sometimes in broad daylight. Buchanan reported in the Miami Herald, with barely disguised outrage, that Maclean wouldn’t be prosecuted for the rapes. It took decades, but she was eventually proven wrong on that count.

But the crime story that took over Buchanan’s life for a number of years is one even I have trouble stomaching. It’s the basis for her first book, Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder, published in 1979, crafted out of more than 120 hours of interviews she conducted with Robert Frederick Carr III, a serial killer and rapist who murdered boys, girls, and women from Florida to Connecticut and back throughout the 1970s. He was caught in 1976 attempting to rape a woman. After his arrest he recreated his cross-country travels with police so that they could unearth the mutilated and brutalized bodies of his victims.

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Discover Edna Buchanan’s BookGorilla Author Page