Stephen King has revealed that he once wanted to write a book from the perspective of Jason Voorhees, the hockey-masked murderer from the Friday the 13th franchise, according to Adele Ankers from IGN.com… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Taking to Twitter on Sunday, the legendary storyteller confessed that he had considered writing “Jason’s side of the story” as a first-person narrative from the fictional character’s point of view, though he noted that the story is unlikely to ever now hit the shelves.

King suggested that the table-turning tale, called “I, JASON,” would see the titular character subjected to a “hellish fate” of perpetual death at Camp Crystal Lake, the summer camp that Jason stalked in the Friday the 13th film series.

“The best novel idea I never wrote (and probably never will) is I JASON, the first-person narrative of Jason Voohees, and his hellish fate: killed over and over again at Camp Crystal Lake,” King tweeted. “What a hellish, existential fate!”

“Just thinking about the legal thicket one would have to go through to get permissions makes my head ache,” King explained in a follow-up tweet. “And my heart, that too. But gosh, shouldn’t someone tell Jason’s side of the story?”

“Blumhouse could do it as a movie,” he wrote as a final suggestion.

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The Trump Administration is no stranger to lawsuits meant to silence former lieutenants by preventing them from publishing tell-all books, and as of yesterday, John Bolton’s forthcoming memoir is the latest to come under fire, according to Andrew Albanese from Publishers Weekly… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The Department of Justice on Tuesday filed a civil suit in Washington D.C. over former national security adviser John Bolton’s forthcoming memoir, The Room Where It Happened, just days ahead of the book’s June 23 publication date. In its 27-page complaint, the government claims that its prepublication review is not yet complete, and that Bolton’s manuscript remains “rife with classified information” and in violation of non-disclosure agreements.

The government is seeking an order directing Bolton to take “all actions within his power to stop the publication and dissemination of his book as currently drafted,” as well as “a constructive trust on any profits” obtained from a book published before the government completes its review and authorizes its release.

“The United States is not seeking to censor any legitimate aspect of Defendant’s manuscript,” the complaint reads, “it merely seeks an order requiring Defendant to complete the prepublication review process and to take all steps necessary to ensure that only a manuscript that has been officially authorized through that process—and is thus free of classified information—is disseminated publicly.”

Bolton and his attorneys, however, have expressed concern that the Trump Administration is using the review process to “suppress” the book. And, while not committing to the June 23 publication date, Bolton’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, backed its author in a statement issued Tuesday evening.

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From Words Without Borders: As queer communities around the world take to the streets in the fight for racial justice, many are also working to raise awareness of the full spectrum of queer experience, including its intersections with race, class, culture, and more. Here’s 5 queer books in translation to read this pride month… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Who Killed My Father

by Edouard Louis
Kindle price: $9.99

This bracing new nonfiction book by the young superstar E´douard Louis is both a searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father

This bracing new nonfiction book by the young superstar Édouard Louis is both a searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father.

Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French—at the minimum—of negligent homicide.

The author goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father, barely fifty years old, who can hardly walk or breathe:“You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.” It’s as simple as that.

But hand in hand with searing, specific denunciations are tender passages of a love between father and son, once damaged by shame, poverty and homophobia. Yet tenderness reconciles them, even as the state is killing off his father. Louis goes after the French system with bare knuckles but turns to his long-alienated father with open arms: this passionate combination makes Who Killed My Father a heartbreaking book.

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Nine Moons

by Gabriela Wiener
Kindle price: $8.54

From the daring Peruvian essayist and provocateur behind Sexographies comes a fierce and funny exploration of sex, pregnancy, and motherhood that delves headlong into our fraught fascination with human reproduction.

Women play all the time with the great power that’s been conferred upon us: it’s fun to think about reproducing. Or not reproducing. Or walking around in a sweet little dress with a round belly underneath that will turn into a baby to cuddle and spoil. When you’re fifteen, the idea is fascinating, it attracts you like a piece of chocolate cake. When you’re thirty, the possibility attracts you like an abyss.

Gabriela Wiener is not one to shy away from unpleasant truths or to balk at a challenge. She began her writing career by infiltrating Peru’s most dangerous prison, going all in at swingers clubs, ingesting ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle. So at 30, when she gets unexpectedly pregnant, she looks forward to the experience the way a mountain climber approaches a precipitous peak.

With a scientist’s curiosity and a libertine’s unbridled imagination, Wiener hungrily devours every scrap of information and misinformation she encounters during the nine months of her pregnancy. She ponders how pleasure and pain always have something to do with things entering or exiting your body. She laments that manuals for pregnant women don’t prepare you for ambushes of lust or that morning sickness is like waking up with a hangover and a guilty conscience all at once. And she tries to navigate the infinity of choices and contradictory demands a pregnant woman confronts, each one amplified to a life-and-death decision.

While pregnant women are still placed on pedestals, or used as political battlegrounds, or made into passive objects of study, Gabriela Wiener defies definition. With unguarded humor and breathtaking directness, Nine Moons questions the dogmas, upends the stereotypes, and embraces all the terror, beauty, and paradoxes of the propagation of the species.

* * *

La Bastarda

by Trifonia Melibea Obono
Kindle price: $9.99

Orphaned Okomo lives under the watchful eye of her grandmother and dreams of finding her father. Forbidden from seeking him out, she enlists the help of other village outcasts: her gay uncle, and a gang of “mysterious” girls reveling in their so-called indecency. Drawn into their illicit trysts, Okomo finds herself falling for their leader and rebelling against the rigid norms of Fang culture.

* * *

The Tree and the Vine

by Dola de Jong
Kindle price: $11.49

“A jewel hidden in plain sight.”—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“De Jong depicts the darker, dangerous side of the world of same-sex desire, and the way it’s a source of torment—physical and psychological—for those who exist within it.”—The Paris Review

When Bea meets Erica at the home of a mutual friend, this chance encounter sets the stage for the story of two women torn between desire and taboo in the years leading up to the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. Erica, a reckless young journalist, pursues passionate but abusive affairs with different women. Bea, a reserved secretary, grows increasingly obsessed with Erica, yet denial and shame keep her from recognizing her attraction. Only Bea’s discovery that Erica is half-Jewish and a member of the Dutch resistance—and thus in danger—brings her closer to accepting her own feelings.

First published in 1954 in the Netherlands, Dola de Jong’s The Tree and the Vine was a groundbreaking work in its time for its frank and sensitive depiction of the love between two women, now available in a new translation.

* * *

Not One Day

by Anne Garréta
Kindle price: $11.49

Not One Day, winner of the prestigious Prix Médicis, begins with the maxim: “Not one day without a woman.” What follows is renowned Oulipo member Anne Garréta’s intimate, erotic, and sometimes bitter collection of memories, written under strict constraints, with each chapter written each day describing a past lover or love, exploring the interaction between memory, fantasy, and desire.

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Publishers Weekly: In response to Monday’s Day of Solidarity, which saw more than 1,100 publishing workers demanding that the industry take action to diversity its workforce and to publish more black authors, three of the Big Five publishers issued statements saying that they will do just that…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Penguin Random House had the most comprehensive response. In a letter sent to its American employees, the board of Penguin Random House US acknowledged that while the company has made progress in diversifying its workforce and the types of books it publishes, it must do more on both counts. Last fall, the publisher established the Diversity & Inclusion Council and, in its letter, the board announced some of the actions it will be implementing.

PRH said that while it has published “groundbreaking Black authors,” it said “our company and our industry haven’t published enough works by authors of color. We can, and must, do much more, and in particular, we must live up to our goal of publishing books for all readers.” PRH also said that to publish more diverse books, the company needs to create a more diverse and inclusive employee population and culture.

Among the actions announced by PRH are a donation to the Equal Justice Initiative, an increase in its donation to We Need Diverse Books, and an expansion of its partnership with WNDB that includes becoming the inaugural sponsor of the Black Creatives Fund, a fund that will focus on encouraging and amplifying the work of black creatives who have written adult or children’s books.

The company is also upping its anti-racism training and making it mandatory for all employees. The board will participate in training right away and then rollout programs. Until PRH selects a company to work on the anti-racist program with, it will start a company-wide read: How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, which will be assigned to all employees, along with support materials to facilitate discussions in every team across the company. PRH expects Kendi to take part in a company-wide town hall event, which will serve to launch the anti-racism training program.

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A former director of the Harlem Writers Guild, Grace F. Edwards published her first novel when she was 55, and her first mystery, featuring a stylish female ex-cop turned sleuth, when she was 64. She died on Feb. 25 at Downstate Hospital in Brooklyn receiving little fanfare according to Penelope Green from the NY Times… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Though she began writing at age 7, Grace F. Edwards waited until she was 55 to publish her first novel. That book, “In the Shadow of the Peacock,” was a lush portrayal of Harlem during World War II, a girl’s coming-of-age story set against the race riots of the time.

It was a placeholder for the six detective stories she would later write, mysteries set in Harlem starring a female cop turned sociologist and accidental sleuth named Mali Anderson, always with a backbeat of jazz. The first of these, “If I Should Die,” was published in 1997, when Ms. Edwards was 64.

She was 87 when she died on Feb. 25 at Downstate Hospital in Brooklyn, her death receiving little notice at the time. Her daughter, Perri Edwards, who confirmed the death, said she had had dementia for three years.

In the late 1960s, Ms. Edwards and a friend ran an Afrocentric dress shop selling dashikis and stylish caftans of their own designs and those of others near West 140th Street and Seventh Avenue (now called Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard). They called the store Neferti, for the African queen (intentionally misspelling the name because another business had taken the correctly rendered one, Nefertiti).

By 1974, Ms. Edwards was a disability analyst in New York State’s social services department, having earned a bachelor’s degree from City College the year before and a master’s of fine arts a few years later.

In her first novel, she wrote of the neighborhood she loved, and its vanished characters:

“The women and the old men gathered for comfort where folks were known to do the most talking: The women drifted into Tootsie’s ‘Twist ‘n’ Snap Beauty Saloon,’ where the air was thick with gossip and fried dixie peach. The men congregated in Bubba’s Barber Shop to listen to orators, smooth as water-washed pebbles, alter history with mile-long lies.”

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“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling is again under fire for comments about the transgender community, according to Hannah Yasharoff from USA Today… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Less than six months after the writer was slammed for showing support for Maya Forstater, a researcher who lost her job at a think tank for stating that people cannot change their biological sex, J.K. Rowling made a similar stir in criticizing a headline on the website devex.com. The op-ed piece included the phrase “people who menstruate” in an effort to be more inclusive.

“I’m sure there used to be a word for those people,” Rowling tweeted Saturday. “Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

After facing backlash, Rowling, 54, stood her ground, claiming her life “has been shaped by being female” and defended the exclusionary comments while arguing she still supports transgender people.

“I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives,” she wrote in a series of tweets. “It isn’t hate to speak the truth … I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it’s hateful to say so.”

Mark Hutchinson, Rowling’s representative, told USA TODAY she would not be commenting further.

Read full post on USA Today