“Young people don’t read anymore,” cries your local cynic. “They’re always on their phones.” Clearly, they’ve never met a YA reader. Marie Pabelonio from GoodReads explains by cynics are wrong. (Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!)

YA readers show up to author signings dressed as their favorite character. YA readers camp out at bookstores, waiting for the midnight release of a beloved series installment. YA readers use their spare time to write fan fiction, make GIF sets, and create blogs with the same fervor people have for pop stars and TV shows.

So it’s no surprise that YA books have some of the most passionate fandoms.

Jonathan Sanchez, cofounder and director of YALLfest, describes the festival as “a chance to be with your ‘tribe’ of fellow Marissa Meyer or Leigh Bardugo or Angie Thomas fans.” Here lines of avid YA readers stretch along the streets of the main historic district of Charleston, South Carolina. “There’s like a whole ‘line culture’—sort of like sneaker fans—where by being in this ridiculous line together you show that you are in a unique but significant group.”

The passion is contagious, but do you have to be 18 and under to enjoy it?

Or are older YA readers doomed to live out this Steve Buscemi meme from 30 Rock whenever they encounter other fans?

The good news is that older YA readers aren’t an anomaly.

There are currently 15.8 million Goodreads members who marked “young adult” as their favorite genre on our site. While only 20 percent of those readers disclosed their age, 65 percent of that sample are 18 and older and 33 percent are above the age of 35. Based on our data, we can infer that older readers represent a healthy portion of the young adult audience, if not the majority.

So while the term “young adult” nods to a specific age group (industry insiders agree the age range for those readers is generally between 12 and 18 or 14 and 19), the category is far more inclusive than you’d think.

“Of course, interest in YA doesn’t immediately stop once someone turns 19,” says Erica Barmash, senior director of marketing and publicity at Bloomsbury Children’s Books. “And there are younger kids reading up as well.”

A quick look at the 1 million–plus Goodreads members who completed The Hunger Games tells us that 64 percent of those readers who disclosed their age are between 18 and 35. Of the 115,000-plus Goodreads members who completed The Hate U Give, 60 percent of those readers who disclosed their age are between 18 and 35.

“Just because a narrative in a YA novel might take place when those characters are teenagers doesn’t mean the experiences represented aren’t relevant to people outside of that age bracket,” says Lindsay Boggs, assistant director of publicity at Penguin Young Readers. “Even as an adult, I often reflect on my teen years. I don’t think I’m alone in that.”

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Netflix and Martin Scorsese are making their biggest bets ever on the confessions of a mafia “hitman.” The guy probably made it all up. Bill Tonelli from Slate reports on the lies of The Irishman… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Assuming you were alive in April 1972 and old enough to cross the street by yourself, you could take credit for the spectacular murder of mobster Crazy Joe Gallo—gunned down during his own birthday party at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy—and nobody could prove you didn’t do it.

Of course, anyone who knows anything about New York City organized crime can tell you who was behind it: The murder was payback for an equally brazen shooting—in broad daylight, in midtown Manhattan—of mob boss Joseph A. Colombo Sr. a year earlier, an attack Gallo supposedly ordered (though even that no one can say with absolute certainty, since the shooter was shot dead on the spot). But no one has ever been arrested or charged in Crazy Joe’s killing, and so technically it’s still unsolved.

The same is true about the disappearance, in July 1975, of Teamsters’ union legend Jimmy Hoffa. He had made some lethal enemies in the mob. After serving a prison term, he persisted in trying to regain control of the union even after he was warned, over and over, to back off. The last time anybody saw him, he was standing outside a restaurant in the suburbs of Detroit, waiting to be driven to what he believed would be a peace meeting. The FBI and investigative reporters have devoted decades of effort to solving the mystery, but all we have is guesswork and theories. So if you want to step up now and say you whacked him, be my guest.

That’s the thing about these gangland slayings: When done properly, you’re not supposed to know who did them. They’re planned and carried out to surprise the victim and confound the authorities. Eyewitnesses, if there are any, prove reluctant to speak up. And nobody ever confesses, unless it’s to win easy treatment from law enforcement in exchange for ratting on other, more important mobsters. Those cases often turn into the ultimate public confessional—the as-told-to, every-gory-detail, my-life-in-crime book deal. Followed by—if you’re a really lucky lowlife—the movie version that fixes your place forever in the gangster hall of fame.

And then there’s the strange case of Frank Sheeran.

Only if you had been paying close attention to the exploits of the South Philadelphia mafia back in its glory days (the second half of the 20th century) might you have noticed Sheeran’s existence. Even there he was a second-stringer—a local Teamsters union official, meaning he was completely crooked, who hung around with mobsters, especially Russell Bufalino, a boss from backwater Scranton, Pennsylvania. Sheeran was Irish, which limited any Cosa Nostra career ambitions he might have had, and so he seemed to be just a 6-foot-4, 250-pound gorilla with a dream. He died in obscurity, in a nursing home, in 2003.

Then, six months later, a small publishing house in Hanover, New Hampshire, unleashed a shocker titled I Heard You Paint Houses. It was written by Charles Brandt, a medical malpractice lawyer who had helped Sheeran win early parole from prison, due to poor health, at age 71. Starting not long after that, Brandt wrote, Sheeran, nearing the end of his life, began confessing incredible secrets he had kept for decades, revealing that—far from being a bit player—he was actually the unseen figure behind some of the biggest mafia murders of all time.

Frank Sheeran said he killed Jimmy Hoffa.

He said he killed Joey Gallo, too.

And he said he did some other really bad things nearly as incredible.

Most amazingly, Sheeran did all that without ever being arrested, charged, or even suspected of those crimes by any law enforcement agency, even though officials were presumably watching him for most of his adult life. To call him the Forrest Gump of organized crime scarcely does him justice. In all the history of the mafia in America or anywhere else, really, nobody even comes close.

Now, though, Frank Sheeran is finally going to get his due.

When it premieres at the New York Film Festival in September before a fall release, The Irishman (as the tale has been retitled) will immediately enter mob movie Valhalla: Martin Scorsese directing, Robert De Niro as Sheeran, Al Pacino as Hoffa, and Joe Pesci as Bufalino, all together for the first (and probably last) time. Sheeran is a part that De Niro has reportedly wanted to play since Brandt’s book came to his attention over a decade ago. The actor has been nursing it along ever since, finally getting Netflix to put up a reported $160 million. This will be Scorsese’s most expensive film ever, in part because of the extensive digital manipulation required to allow De Niro, who turns 76 this month, to play Sheeran from his prime hoodlum years until his death at age 83.

All in all, an astounding saga. Almost too good to be true.

No, let’s say it: too good to be true.

I’m telling you, he’s full of shit!” This is a retired contemporary of Sheeran’s, a fellow Irishman from Philadelphia named John Carlyle Berkery, who allegedly headed the city’s Irish mob for 20 years and had many close mafia connections. Berkery is a local legend, one of the few figures of that era still alive, not incarcerated, and in full possession of his wits. “Frank Sheeran never killed a fly,” he says. “The only things he ever killed were countless jugs of red wine. You could tell how drunk he was by the color of his teeth: pink, just started; dark purple, stiff.”

“It’s baloney, beyond belief,” agrees John Tamm, a former FBI agent on the Philadelphia field office’s labor squad who investigated Sheeran and once arrested him. “Frank Sheeran was a full-time criminal, but I don’t know of anybody he personally ever killed, no.”

Not a single person I spoke with who knew Sheeran from Philly—and I interviewed cops and criminals and prosecutors and reporters—could remember even a suspicion that he had ever killed anyone.

Certainly, his first noteworthy mischief held no promise of underworld greatness. In 1964, at the somewhat advanced age of 43, Sheeran was charged with beating a non-union truck driver with a lug wrench—about what you’d expect from a Teamster goon. Sheeran was later twice indicted in the murders of union rivals. But in neither case did the government or anyone else accuse him of touching a trigger, only of hiring the hit men who did his dirty work for him. When Sheeran was finally convicted of something, it was for cheating his own union members. Not exactly the kind of crime that gets you invited to Don Corleone’s daughter’s wedding.

But none of Sheeran’s nonlethal past mattered or even came up once the book came out. Though Publishers Weekly called it “long on sensational claims and short on credibility,” the credulous world welcomed a solution to the mystery of Jimmy Hoffa’s whereabouts and a chance to read tales of other famous mobster mayhem. Even the New York Times’ reviewer wrote, “It promises to clear up the mystery of Hoffa’s demise, and appears to do so.” The book appeared on the Times’ extended bestseller list and has sold over 185,000 copies, according to its publisher. Charles Brandt, the former chief deputy attorney general of the state of Delaware, was, at 62, the author of a hot property.

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From our friends at LitHub, here’s a breakdown of the meanest felines in the lit game… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The Cheshire Cat from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1856)

It might be a little ungenerous to call the Cheshire Cat mean. Lewis Carroll’s famously grinning creation is really more mischievous than he is malicious. Still, CC does seem to take a little too much pleasure in confusing and frustrating Alice—a lost youth clearly in need of some intelligible guidance from a local—with his inscrutable non sequiters. His habit of disappearing into thin air so that only his smile remains, hovering spookily in the trees, is also pretty poor social etiquette.

The cat that walked by himself from Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (1902)

In case you haven’t cracked open Kipling’s turn-of-the-century collection of animal origin stories for children recently, “The Cat That Walked by Himself” is the tale of an admirably contrarian proto-cat who, upon observing with distain Enemy and Wife of Enemy’s attempts to subdue the local fauna, tricks Wife of Enemy into letting him sit by the cave fire without submitting to a humiliating domestication. Again, it might be harsh to call the cat that walked by himself mean, but he is an outrageously smug little bastard.

Macavity from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) / Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats (1981)

Macavity the Mystery Cat aka the Hidden Paw aka the Napoleon of Cat Crime aka Idris Elba, is the all-singing, all-dancing master criminal villain of Eliot’s collection of whimsical poems and its insanely popular Andrew Lloyd Weber musical adaptation. Based on Sherlock Holmes’ arch nemesis Professor Moriarty, the ginger tabby’s nefarious deeds include cheating at cards, kidnapping, and exhibiting a general disregard for the laws of Jellicle society. For shame, Macavity.

Behemoth from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)

The granddaddy of all mean literary cats. In terms of iconic feline villainy, no moggie comes close the gun-toting, cigar-chomping, joke-telling miscreant member of Woland’s entourage. Large as a hog and capable of taking human form, this demonic black warecat drinks, smokes, philosophizes ad nauseam, and generally wreaks havoc around Bulgakov’s tinderbox Moscow in what many consider to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

Mrs. Norris from the Harry Potter series (1997-2007)

Mrs. Norris is a narc. Enough said.

Church from Pet Sematary by Stephen King (1983)

Poor Church (full name Winston Churchill, which may explain things somewhat), he didn’t mean to be mean. In life, Church was a sweet, affectionate, and slightly chonk pet to his young (but doomed) owner, Ellie, and her (also doomed) family. All that changed when Church was flattened by a big ‘ol tanker truck and then interred in the titularly misspelled animal graveyard (which, TWIST, used to be an ancient Indian burial ground). Before you know it a zombified Church has burst from his burial plot and, well, all hell breaks loose with him.

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Nobel Laureate, activist, author, poet, queen mother Toni Morrison has died at 88. Zoe Haylock with Vulture reports… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The celebrated novelist Toni Morrison died Monday night, according to her publisher, Knopf. She was 88 years old. According to Knopf, the author died peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, following a “short illness.” Born Chloe Ardella Wofford, Morrison was best known for her critically acclaimed and best-selling novel Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among her other memorable and influential novels were Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1997); the three books make up a loose trilogy. Just after the last of them was published, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first black woman of any nationality to do so. The Nobel Committee celebrated her as an author “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” By then, she had already written six novels; she would go on to write five more. Her latest, God Help the Child, was published in 2015. She wrote through the toughest of times, including the death of her son in 2010. “I stopped writing until I began to think, he would be really put out if he thought that he had caused me to stop,” Morrison told Interview magazine around the release of her ninth novel, Home, in 2012.

Before she was a world-renowned author, Morrison broke barriers as an editor for Random House, where she worked for 19 years, publishing a new generation of black writers, including Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and Angela Davis. She was also the chair of humanities at Princeton, where she taught from 1989 to 2006.
“We die,” Morrison closed her Nobel Prize address. “That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

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Did novelist John Steinbeck spy for the CIA in Paris? Christopher Dickey with The Daily Beast explores how it appears that Steinbeck was gathering intel for the Agency… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

PARIS—In the summer of 1954, John Steinbeck was living the good life here in the City of Lights, but teetering on the brink of darkness and despair. The author of The Grapes of Wrath was hugely famous and comfortably rich (although still years away from the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature), but he was wrestling with depression. “I just don’t have any place to run to, it seems sometimes,” he wrote to his agent in New York.

Writers often like to complicate their lives with distractions and adventures when they’re depressed, especially when they think they’re not writing anything very important, which was the case with Steinbeck in the summer of ’54. So, to keep himself amused, Steinbeck had signed up for a series of little columns and short stories to be published in French (which he did not speak) in the Paris daily Le Figaro.

And one of those has just been published in English for the first time by The Strand Magazine, which previously unearthed lost or forgotten fiction by Ernest Hemingway, H.G. Wells, and others.

Also, during that Paris sojourn in ’54, it appears Steinbeck was working as an asset gathering intelligence for the CIA.

So there are some intriguing mysteries about what Steinbeck was thinking, writing, and actually doing that summer as he settled in with his third wife, Elaine, and his two young boys from his second marriage, Thomas and John IV.

The opulent apartment they rented was at 1 Avenue de Marigny in a palace next door to one of the Rothschilds’ mansions and across the street from the Élysée, the French presidential residence. One could walk to the U.S. embassy next to Place de la Concorde or the U.S. ambassador’s residence on the Faubourg St. Honoré in 10 minutes or less.

The Steinbeck apartment was also so close to the venerable restaurant Laurent that on a quiet summer evening one might have heard the pop of Champagne corks on its terrasse, providing partial inspiration for the newly published short story, which came out originally under the title “Les Puces Sympathiques” and, now, “The Amiable Fleas.”

The restaurant that bears that rather unsympathetic name in Steinbeck’s tale is a blend of clichés. Like Laurent today it has one Michelin star, and the chef certainly hopes for another. But it is also home to resident intellectuals of the sort one might easily have found across the river back then at the Flore, the Lipp, or Les Deux Magots (which means two wise men but is sometimes referred to by Anglophones as The Two Maggots).

At Steinbeck’s imagined café, “Three of its outside tables had as daily ornaments: One poet whose work was so gloriously obscure that even he did not understand it; one architect whose fame rested upon his passionate attack on the flying buttress; and a painter who worked in invisible ink. Each of these of course drew his followers, so that The Amiable Fleas was beginning to be mentioned by the conductor of passing tourist busses.”

The chef has a cat, a feline muse named Apollo to whom he gives a taste of all his sauces. But when the Michelin critic comes, the chef is so tense and out of sorts he kicks the cat, which slinks away into the wilds of Paris. The meal for the critic is a disaster and all seems lost. The chef, acknowledging defeat, and hoping at least to reconcile with the cat, makes a special dish with a very special secret ingredient and goes searching for the errant feline. By happenstance, the critic winds up back at the restaurant and samples the dish and voilà—it’s like the ratatouille moment in the movie Ratatouille (made many decades later), a story for children written with light-hearted asides for adults and a happy ending.

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A guide to presidential candidate Marianne Williamson‘s books, from mild to wild by Caroline Tew at EW… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Marianne Williamson has emerged as a meme queen since debuting on the 2020 Democratic presidential primary debate stage last month, offering unusual phrasings, unique points of focus, and more…spiritually influenced policy ideas. (For instance, after the most recent debates she used the words “wonkiness” and “dark psychic force” in the same tweet.) And on Tuesday night, yet again, she made the most of her limited screen-time during night 1 of round 2 of the debates.

But while her fellow candidates’ titles range from mayor to congressman to governor, Williamson has been introduced, merely, as “author.” Indeed, Williamson boasts a large, best-selling bibliography — and yes, many of her books skew on the more, ahem, peculiar side. EW has assembled a guide to all of Williamson’s books, from the expected treatises on the future of America to her manual on how to spiritually lose weight, ranked from most mild to most wild.

A Politics of Love and Healing the Soul of America

Although A Politics of Love is an April 2019 release while Healing the Soul of America was just reprinted in a twentieth-anniversary edition, the two similarly deal closely with America in the here and now. Politics is worried about the divisive nature of the American political landscape and calls for the American people to act out of “love.” Healing preaches that Americans move past the dark history of our country and try to treat others with compassion. In other words: Here are the books that one might expect from a presidential candidate, just a bit more driven by feelings than policy.

The Gift of Change, Everyday Grace, and A Return to Love

A Return to Love is Williamson’s biggest hit. Written in 1992, it’s essentially a spiritual guide on how to get more in touch with oneself and their higher being. When it hit best-seller status, Williamson landed an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The Gift of Change and Everyday Grace are in the same vein, pushing readers to become more spiritual which will, in turn (according to Williamson), lead to miracles. Call these the most on-brand of the bunch.

A Year of Miracles and Illuminata

Both A Year of Miracles and Illuminata are collections of prayers and meditations to help the reader through times of trouble. Year commits the reader to a full 365 prayers and musings such as “There can be no darkness where I provide the light,” while Illuminata promises help for whatever situations life may throw at you.

Tears to Triumph

Here’s where things start to get a bit dicey. This 2017 release revolves around the idea of repression, though not in those words. Williamson claims that by refusing to confront pain, people are hurting themselves and exacerbating their anxiety and depression. Learning to stop avoiding pain, according to the book, is key to a better spiritual life and to heal. She makes some valid points about repression, but ignores how medication can treat mental illnesses, anxiety, and depression altogether. (It’s not a part of Williamson’s “spiritual” plan.) This doesn’t bode well, especially along with claims that she told HIV-positive men that they could cure themselves with prayer rather than medication (Williamson herself has denied saying this).

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Macmillan announced that it will publish a memoir, Permanent Record, by former CIA agent and whistleblower Edward Snowden globally on September 17 according to Emma Wenner at Publishers Weekly… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

According to the publisher, Permanent Record will tell Snowden’s story for the first time, including the “crisis of conscience” that led him to leak highly classified information on U.S. government’s secret efforts to collect every phone call, text message, and email ever sent as part of a mass surveillance system.

John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, said in a statement that the publisher is “enormously proud” to publish the book by Snowden. “Like him or not, his is an incredible American story,” Sargent said. “There is no doubt that the world is a better and more private place for his actions.”

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