Young women of color are leaving publishing in droves while mediocre white men continue to find enormous success while making subzero effort according to Ian Parker in a scathing New Yorker expose… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Dan Mallory, a book editor turned novelist, is tall, good-looking, and clever. His novel, “The Woman in the Window,” which was published under a lightly worn pseudonym, A. J. Finn, was the hit psychological thriller of the past year. Like “Gone Girl,” by Gillian Flynn (2012), and “The Girl on the Train,” by Paula Hawkins (2015), each of which has sold millions of copies, Mallory’s novel, published in January, 2018, features an unreliable first-person female narrator, an apparent murder, and a possible psychopath.

Mallory sold the novel in a two-book, two-million-dollar deal. He dedicated it to a man he has described as an ex-boyfriend, and secured a blurb from Stephen King: “One of those rare books that really is unputdownable.” Mallory was profiled in the Times, and the novel was reviewed in this magazine. A Washington Post critic contended that Mallory’s prose “caresses us.” The novel entered the Times best-seller list at No. 1—the first time in twelve years that a début novel had done so. A film adaptation, starring Amy Adams and Gary Oldman, was shot in New York last year. Mallory has said that his second novel is likely to appear in early 2020—coinciding, he hopes, with the Oscar ceremony at which the film of “The Woman in the Window” will be honored. Translation rights have been acquired in more than forty foreign markets.

Mallory can be delightful company. Jonathan Karp, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, recently recalled that Mallory, as a junior colleague in the New York book world, had been “charming, brilliant,” and a “terrific writer of e-mail.” Tess Gerritsen, the crime writer, met Mallory more than a decade ago, when he was an editorial assistant; she remembers him as “a charming young man” who wrote deft jacket copy. Craig Raine, the British poet and academic, told me that Mallory had been a “charming and talented” graduate student at Oxford; there, Mallory had focussed his studies on Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels, which are about a charming, brilliant impostor.

Now thirty-nine, Mallory lives in New York, in Chelsea. He spent much of the past year travelling—Spain, Bulgaria, Estonia—for interviews and panel discussions. He repeated entertaining, upbeat remarks about his love of Alfred Hitchcock and French bulldogs. When he made an unscheduled appearance at a gathering of bloggers in São Paulo, he was greeted with pop-star screams.

Read full post on The New Yorker

Melissa Harris Perry at Glamour, gathered extraordinary women of color working in many different fields and asked them about the books that helped them fall in love with reading… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

“Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston

I loved that Hurston used Southern U.S. patois to tell the story. It was the first time I read everyday people’s language in an acclaimed text. Not since Ms. Lou of Jamaica had I read dialect in text. But the best part of the book was the evolution of Janie. She was a beautiful mixture of confidence and insecurity—like so many of us. —Janice Johnson Dias, Ph.D., Marley’s mom, associate professor of sociology at John Jay College, and author of the forthcoming Parent Like It Matters: How to Raise Joyful Changemaking Girls

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“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf” by Ntozake Shange

For Colored Girls…, especially the poem “toussaint,” was transformational for me. So many books I read in school were assignments, and I read them to fulfill a lesson for school. For Colored Girls wasn’t about school—it was for my soul. —Tamron Hall, Emmy Award–winning journalist and host of The Tamron Hall Show

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“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou

The moment I began reading, I knew Maya Angelou had written this book for girls like me. This book let me know that it was okay to be a little brown girl with a big Arabic name in a place called Lynchburg, Virginia, with the audacity to imagine possibilities unbound by identity. I’ve been singing ever since. —Khalilah Brown-Dean, Ph.D., associate professor of political science at Quinnipiac University and author of Identity Politics in the United States

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“Double Trouble, #1 Sweet Valley High” by Francine Pascal

It might seem odd for me to choose a book about blond twins, but the Sweet Valley High books revealed many of the complicated confusing aspects of being a young girl. Pascal’s characters have a resilience and strength that my sisters and I devoured. We’d sit for hours discussing the shenanigans of Elizabeth and Jessica. This was what it meant to truly love reading, and it laid the foundation for my work as an academic. —Christina Greer, associate professor of political science at Fordham University and the cohost of FAQ podcast

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“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” by Judy Blume

I was born late in the year and skipped kindergarten, which made me nearly two years younger than my classmates. It was fine academically, but physically I was insecure as everyone else developed. I wore pads every day for years in anticipation! I thought I would never mature. Margaret’s vulnerability helped me make meaning of my own experiences. When I later read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, I connected vulnerability to race and gender. I’ve spent the rest of my life reading to dismantle racial and gender hierarchies. —Alexis McGill Johnson, acting president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund

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Read full list on Glamour.com

As online shopping has spiked in popularity, so has concern around packaging, according to Nicoletta Richardson from the Kitchn.com… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

More people have become aware that the ease of online shopping translates to overconsumption and harmful packaging. And Amazon has noticed, because they’re taking steps to spread awareness on how to be a better consumer.

Amazon created Second Chance to educate shoppers with an array of related sustainable topics, from how to recycle your packaging to looking for an easy and reliable way to purchase secondhand items. “Pass it on, trade it on, give it a second life” is the tagline, and from the looks of it, they’re practicing what they’re preaching.

First, there’s a forum on how to recycle your packaging. After you click on the category, a drop-down menu of specific materials comes up, grouped into “Amazon.com Packaging” and “Amazon Grocery Delivery Packaging.” Clicking on each photo of a packaging material brings you a brief yet efficient description of how to treat it once it’s arrived. For example, for “bubble-lined plastic bag,” they suggest looking into whether your city offers curbside recycling, and if not to use a designated drop-off location where plastic firm is accepted. Don’t know where that might be? They have a drop-off location finder.

Next, they tackle items that you no longer want. Whether it’s an item you just purchased from Amazon or a video game that you haven’t played for years, methods on how to go about recycling items (and getting money in return!) are listed here. If it’s the opposite problem, and you’re looking to buy or rent an item that isn’t necessarily new, Amazon provides you with four places to look that you might not have known existed: Amazon Rentals, Amazon Warehouse, Amazon Renewed, and Certified Refurbished Amazon Devices.

Click here to check on Amazon Second Chance

Read full post on Kitchn.com

Anna Gooding-Calfrom BookRiot asks, should you stay up until 3:00 AM to finish that novel?  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

PRO: You’ll get to finish your book.

At last, you’ll close your eyes with that sweet sense of accomplishment that can only come from closing a cover. There’s nothing quite like owning your Goodreads list in the wee hours of the morning!

CON: There’s another book in the series and it’s available on Amazon.

Oh shit. Oh shit. You HAD to update Goodreads, didn’t you? Now it’s become obvious that you have more reading to do. You’re still human! You still need to rest! Cut it off.

PRO: You’ll actually finish the book club book.

You can’t cut it off. You have book club tomorrow. Don’t be lame and half-read the book again. They’re catching on, my good friend! Power through, for Dog and country.

CON: You’re reading the wrong book.

Let’s be real here. You’re not actually reading Portnoy’s Complaint. You’re reading Gideon the Ninth! Meanwhile, Philip Roth languishes under a pile of tax paperwork on the other side of the room. You’re three pages in and you hate it and you’re not going to read it, deadline be damned.

PRO: Everyone else at work is reading this too, so they’ll understand.

It’s literally Harry Potter. It’s Fifty Shades Of Grey. Every time you face a colleague with sagging eyelids and a blank stare, you give each other a wavering smile. You’re all on this adventure together. Together, you will all stay up late to finish your book. Everyone understands.

CON: You still need to do your job, and you work with backhoes, so there’s that.

BAM! That was the sound of you plunging the toothy bucket of your eathmover right into a city water main. Was staying up late worth the $5.3 million your municipality is going to have to pay to fix this? If your answer is no, then it’s time to go to bed.

The publicity-shy Mr. Portis earned a modest but devoted readership and accolades as America’s “least-known great writer”, according to Roy Reed at The New York Times… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Charles Portis, the publicity-shy author of “True Grit” and a short list of other novels that drew a cult following and accolades as the work of possibly the nation’s best unknown writer, died on Monday at a hospice in Little Rock, Ark. He was 86.

His death was confirmed by his brother Jonathan, who said Mr. Portis had been in hospice care for two years and in an Alzheimer’s care facility for six years prior.

Mr. Portis was in his early 30s and well established as a reporter at The New York Herald Tribune in 1964, when he decided to turn to fiction full time. The decision astonished his friends and colleagues at the paper, among them Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe and Nora Ephron.

He had covered the civil rights movement in the South: riots in Birmingham, Ala.; the jailing of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Albany, Ga.; Gov. George C. Wallace’s attempt to stop the desegregation of the University of Alabama. And he had been assigned to a coveted post, London bureau chief. His future in journalism was bright.

But he said he was heading home; he was going to move into an Arkansas fishing shack and write novels.

“A fishing shack!” Mr. Wolfe recalled in his book “The New Journalism.” “In Arkansas! It was too goddamned perfect to be true, and yet there it was.”

Within two years Mr. Portis had published his first novel, “Norwood.” It told the story of Norwood Pratt, a naïve ex-Marine from East Texas on a road trip to collect a $70 debt. Along the way he encounters, among other things, a con artist and a chicken that can play tick-tack-toe.

“Norwood” set the pattern for Mr. Portis’s use of misfits, cranks and sly humor in his fiction.

Read full post on the New York Times

Ken Jennings, the “Jeopardy!” superstar and Seattle author of 12 books, talks with Chris Talbott about book recommendations… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Ken Jennings

What book are you reading now?

I’m always reading a bunch of books at once. I just started “Girl, Woman, Other” [by Bernardine Evaristo]. It’s kind of a multigenerational novel about Black families in London and it’s kind of this weird, all-lower-case stream of consciousness thing. So it looks very daunting, but it’s actually really readable. It’s really great. And I just got this two-volume, giant Taschen “The History of Graphic Design” book. I’m a huge design nerd and it’s just gorgeous. If you want to spend hundreds of dollars on a 20-pound book, I recommend that. That’s like a “Jeopardy!”-winners-only choice, because those Taschen books are expensive. But they’re beautiful. And, what else? I’m reading these Patricia Highsmith short stories. I’ve never read her short stories. And one of her very first collections is a series of these kind of dark murder mysteries all about animals, domestic animals, killing their humans. So every single story just ends with a donkey or a Chihuahua or whatever killing its owner. I think it’s called “The Animal-Lovers [Book] of Beastly Murder,” and I didn’t even know it existed. It’s crazy.

What book have you reread the most?

That’s a good question. I’m not a huge rereader. The books I’ve read most of my life are probably the novels I would just read every year when I was a teenager — “Lord of the Rings,” “Cat’s Cradle,” by Vonnegut, “Dandelion Wine” by Ray Bradbury. I feel like I’ve read those all either to my kids or myself in the last few years. Those all hold up.

What book do you recommend other people read and why?

I am not going to name one of my own books. That’s exactly what my first impulse was. Any author is going to have a very hard time not doing that, but I think it’s a bad look. I can tell you the best book to read for “Jeopardy!”: “The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy.” It’s a hardcover desk encyclopedia thing and it’s got a one-sentence definition of everything. Here’s what the Battle of Actium was, here’s what polonium is, to here’s who Valentina Tereshkova was. It’s just for somebody at home who’s like, “Oh, I’ve never heard of that.” But, accidentally, it’s a perfect “Jeopardy!” study guide because you need extremely broad but very shallow knowledge to ID names from those clues. And it’s, I think, kind of the go-to, standard study guide in the “Jeopardy!” world. It won’t get you everything. But, you know, if you miss an Evelyn Waugh question, you probably should have taken a look.

Read full post on the Seattle Times

Free agent NFL quarterback and controversial political activist Colin Kaepernick announced plans to publish a memoir to be released via his own publishing venture, Kaepernick Publishing, in 2020, according to Calvin Reid from Publishers Weekly … Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The yet to be titled memoir will also be released as an audiobook in 2020 as part of an exclusive multi-project agreement between Kaepernick Publishing and Audible, Amazon’s audio content platform.

Best known as a star NFL quarterback for the San Francisco 49’ers and for taking that team to Super bowl in 2012, Kaepernick is also renowned for his social activism after kneeling during the national anthem to protest systemic American racial discrimination. According to a release, Kaepernick’s memoir will examine his life experiences prior to his pro football career and their impact on his commitment to social justice, as well as the polarizing consequences of his act of nonviolent protest and his subsequent efforts to return to the NFL.

According to Kaepernick’s Twitter account, Kaepernick Publishing is being launched “to create opportunities for Black and Brown writers, authors, and creators to control their narratives and retain ownership.” Although the release indicated that the new publishing venture will release works by a variety of creators, no other projects beyond the Kaepernick memoir have been identified,

Audible senior v-p content acquisition and development Rachel Ghiazza said of the audiobook release: “In this recording, Colin Kaepernick takes listeners through the pivotal moments and experiences that inspired a national debate and cultural movement.”

She added that, “We are thrilled to embark on this groundbreaking creative venture with Kaepernick Publishing in which together we can elevate stories and perspectives that need to be heard.”

Although the memoir will be published in print and e-book formats by Kaepernick Publishing (in partnership with Melcher Media), the title and exact date of the memoir’s release was not announced. The book will be distributed to the trade via Two Rivers Distribution, an Ingram company.

Read full post on Publishers Weekly