This weekend is Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon! It started in 2007, and I’ve participating every April and October for more than ten years. It’s a great excuse to clear my calendar for a day and read as much as I can. These days, I celebrate with a couple of my friends: the three of us snack and read together all day long (and most of the night!).

Over the years, I’ve learned some things about readathoning. For one thing, I don’t stay up the full 24 hours anymore. I’m too old for that. I also am still perfecting the exact perfect balance of snacks. Equally important to snacks, though, are the books. I usually read mostly graphic novels and novellas on readathon days, but there are a few more things I’ve learned about book selection. (Like every day of the year, of course, I mostly read queer books.)

Here are some of the best and worst choices of queer books to read in one sitting—at least, when it comes to my reading tastes.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

Hamtopia?

The visual stunner that was Nomadland (adapted from Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder) turned me into a big Chloé Zhao fan, so it is with great enthusiasm that I announce news for Zhao’s upcoming film–another adaptation–Hamnet, based on the book of the same name by Maggie O’Farrell. Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley are now attached to star in the film as William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes, respectively, in the story fictionalizing the untimely death of their son and the creation of Hamlet. Irish actors are fire right now. O’Farrell and Zhao worked together on the screenplay for the internationally bestselling book. Hamnet‘s limited release begins November 27 around the release of Zootopia 2 ahead of a nationwide release on December 12.

More Casting News But Make It Games of Hunger

Let’s keep it easy-breezy this Friday with the fun stuff: we have Sunrise on the Reaping casting news! The Hunger Games prequel can’t stop won’t stop making headlines and it is kinda wild that we’re already getting casting news for the adaptation of a book that hit shelves a mere month ago. Anyway, the rumors were wrong about Haymitch Abernathy and Lenore Dove Baird. Joseph Zada will play Abernathy and Whitney Peak will play Haymitch’s girlfriend. It sounds like Zada and Peak both are in the early stages of their careers; starring roles in a franchise as big as the Hunger Games can really put an actor on the map, so congratulations to them! The Hollywood Reporter story doesn’t include any other casting notes, so we’ll see if the rumors play out with Coriolanus Snow, Drusilla, and other familiar names.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Author Will Donate SO MANY Books

Here’s a nice one to end your week on. With the 20th book in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series nigh, the books’ author Jeff Kinney has announced that he’ll donate 20,000 books a month, every month until he hits 160,000 books donated nationwide, in partnership with the nonprofit First Book. The books will go to underserved communities across the country. Read all about it here.

The Most Read Books on Goodreads This Week

The top five most read books on Goodreads this week look pretty familiar, and that’s because they’re the same as last week, just with #2 and #3 swapped. To make it more interesting, I’ve added in the top five most popular books on the StoryGraph this week, too. This isn’t a one-to-one comparison, because the most popular books on the StoryGraph includes titles that have been added as want to read, not just the most read. There is overlap between the two, but there are also some differences.

Fish Tales, first published in 1983, is a novel told in short, vivid vignettes. A woman named Lewis comes of age hardscrabble in early sixties Detroit. It was a difficult time to be born a girl. Teachers slept with students without consequence; an unexpected pregnancy meant you could be expelled. Secrets and illegal abortions, it seemed, were the best ways for a girl to hold onto her pride.

The novel opens with an illicit scene between twelve-year-old Lewis and the “shit-yellow” older boy who impregnates her. Just pages later, she announces that she has aborted the child, “with a hanger.” It is clearly traumatic for young Lewis, but in the world of the novel, trauma is neither acknowledged nor named. Lewis simply goes on. She barrels headfirst into the arms of Peter Brown, her social studies teacher, beginning an affair that lasts for almost a decade. When he marries a woman closer to his age, Lewis is devastated and enraged. She visits their home and causes a grand, dramatic scene:

“Desecrator, rapist, slimy child molester” spilled out of me into that quiet room.

“Pete told me you were nuts,” [his wife] said from her bed. “He was right. He told me that he’s tried to help you since you were twelve.”

The censorship stories have been coming hard and fast this week. The most prominent one is the Supreme Court deliberating on a Maryland case that would allow parents to opt their kids out of classes that mention the existence of LGBTQ+ people. Justice Neil Gorsuch claimed the picture book Pride Puppy! prompted readers to look for bondage imagery in the illustrations—because apparently a leather jacket is bondage now. Right now, the Supreme Court seems poised to side with these parents.

But that’s not the only story. We’ve also got the results of a study on the impacts of book bans on library circulation, a documentary about students who fought book bans and won, censorship at the Naval Academy, banned books returned to shelves, and more.

While Kelly Jensen is off this week, the rest of the editorial team is filling in to cover censorship news! The first story is from S. Zainab Williams, the next two are from Rebecca Joines Schinsky, and the final two are from Erica Ezeifedi.

An association of parents and teachers under the moniker Kids First (the naming conventions of these groups is something else, but I digress) is suing Maryland’s largest school system to allow them to opt students out of classes on days where books with queer characters and themes are being discussed. They’re arguing that the books violate their right to free exercise of religion under the First Amendment. One member of Kids First decided she needed to help found a private school that wouldn’t “brainwash kids with these ideas.” This person apparently doesn’t know what brainwashing is because incorporating books about LGBTQ+ people into a broader curriculum ain’t it.

The top five most read books on Goodreads this week look pretty familiar, and that’s because they’re the same as last week, just with #2 and #3 swapped. To make it more interesting, I’ve added in the top five most popular books on the StoryGraph this week, too. This isn’t a one-to-one comparison, because the most popular books on the StoryGraph includes titles that have been added as want to read, not just the most read. There is overlap between the two, but there are also some differences.

What both lists have in common, though, is a lack of authors of color. So, before we get into the most read and most popular books of the week, let’s spotlight a couple of new releases that you should know about.

Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools by Mary Annette Pember This chronicles the very deliberate effort to destroy First Nations communities and cultures by way of cultural genocide. From the mid-1800s to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Indigenous American children were stolen from their families and forced to go to boarding schools that were sponsored by the US government—and which had virtually no regulation. At the schools, they were abused and discouraged from engaging in their traditions and culture through violence. Ojibwe journalist Mary Pember explores the long-term ramifications of attending these loveless institutions, detailing how her mother, having attended one, set the stage for a fraught mother-daughter dynamic.

I’m not a programming librarian by trade, but at my last job, I got to help run our library’s monthly Trivia Night for over five years. As a certified Trivia Nerd, this was one of the most entertaining things I’ve been able to do in my career, and our patrons enjoyed it even more than we did! Our program was so popular that online registration would sometimes fill up in less than 60 seconds.

We hosted trivia once a month for 6-9 months out of the year, but rather than hosting it at the library, we partnered with a local brewery, which gave us a bigger space and a great community partnership. Meanwhile, the brewery enjoyed an evening of very solid profits. They even created a signature beer for the library each fall (complete with a punny name) and donated a portion of the proceeds to us!

On its face, running a trivia event seems pretty straightforward, but our version had a couple elements that really set us apart from the other local trivia night offerings: we were able to use these events to foster strong relationships with our attendees, and we leaned into our personalities and senses of humor to make the program unique.

Are you thinking about organizing a trivia program at your library? Here are some tips and tricks that helped make our program successful:

Find the Right Program Length

You really have to find that sweet spot when it comes to structuring your trivia program. Too few rounds feel unsatisfying, whereas too many rounds become a burden. Our trivia nights ran for two hours, and we had six “traditional” rounds of 10 questions each, plus a picture round that teams could work on throughout the evening. We experimented with other options, but this setup worked well for staff and patrons alike.

It’s once again time to get all caught up on some of the biggest comics-related stories from the past few weeks!

News From DC and Marvel

Courtesy of Disney

CinemaCon happened early this month! The comics-related news include Mark Hamill receiving the Cinema Icon Award, new footage from James Gunn’s Superman, multiple Spider-related updates, and a new trailer for Fantastic Four: First Steps.C2E2 happened, too! Popverse has the news round-up, including multiple Superman-related announcements and the absolute best Wonder Woman cosplay I have ever seen.Marvel finally acknowledged the identity of the villain in Thunderbolts*, although fans had already spilled the beans. Speaking of the latest entry in the MCU, current estimates suggest that its opening weekend (May 2) will bring in a comparatively modest $70 million.Director Ryan Coogler shared what it was like working with the late Chadwick Boseman on Black Panther.Ready to watch Captain America: Brave New World at home? Rent or buy it from Prime or Apple TV today, or wait until the DVD/Bluray release on May 13.

News From the Wider Comics World

Terry Pratchett fans should be excited about these upcoming graphic novels based on the expansive Discworld series. The first ones are due for release next year!As if the bankruptcy of Diamond, formerly the biggest comics distributor in the U.S., wasn’t dramatic enough, there is now a dispute over who gets to buy their assets.Popverse discussed what Trump’s tariffs could mean for the comic industry (in brief: not much for now, but given the volatility of the current president/situation, this could change fast). Unfortunately, some small presses are already feeling the pinch.As Danika Ellis reported, two of the ten most challenged books in America were graphic novels: Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer and Mike Curato’s Flamer. Unsurprisingly, both are by and about queer people.Polygon discussed its best anime of the year so far……and NPR recommended a new biography of legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb.

The following comes to you from the Editorial Desk.

This week, we’re highlighting a post that had our Managing Editor Vanessa Diaz feeling a type of way. Now, even five years after it was published, Vanessa is still salty about American Dirt. Read on for an excerpt and become an All Access member to unlock the full post.

Picture it: The United States, January 2020. A book with a pretty blue and white cover is making the rounds on the bookish internet. The blue ink forms a beautiful hummingbird motif against a creamy background, a bird associated with the sun god Huitzilopochtli in Aztec mythology. Black barbed wire, at once delicate and menacing, cuts the pattern into a grid resembling an arrangement of Talavera tiles. The package is eye-catching, ostensibly Mexican in feel, and evocative of borders and the migrant experience. 

The book tells the story of a bookstore owner in Acapulco, Mexico, who is forced to flee her home when a drug cartel murders everyone in her family except for her young son at a quinceañera. She and the boy are forced to become migrants and embark on a treacherous journey north to the U.S. border, evading the cartel and befriending fellow migrants along the way. The book is being lauded not just as the “it” book of the season but as the immigration story. It gets the Oprah treatment and is praised by everyone from Salma Hayek to the great Sandra Cisneros, who called it “the great novel of Las Américas.” 

If you’re a horror fan who loves monster stories, then you’re probably just as excited as we are for Nat Cassidy’s latest, When the Wolf Comes Home, which hit shelves this week. You might read the title and think, “Okay, this is surely a werewolf story. I know what to expect.” But horror fiends, you would be wrong. Cassidy’s novel is going to surprise you, and so do these three wolfy horror novels. So while you’re waiting to get your hands on your When the Wolf Comes Home library hold, check out these creepy werewolf (and other werecreature) tales.

Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones Stephen Graham Jones’ Mongrels is a coming-of-age story about a young boy living with his aunt and uncle who are both mongrels, beasts who belong on the outside of society. As the young boy grows older, he must decide if he’s meant to live a life like his aunt and uncle’s or if there’s some other life waiting for him with the people on the other side of the tracks. With every passing day, the boy draws closer to the moment when he’ll find out who he truly is.

Such Sharp Teeth by Rachel Harrison Rory Morris has reluctantly moved back to her hometown, a place with nothing but bad memories and regrets. Then at a night out at a bar, she accidentally hits a strange beast with her car and gets attacked. From that moment on, nothing is the same for Rory. She starts to feel different. She becomes unnaturally strong. She can’t stand silver. And she finds herself pulled in by the allure of the moon. Such Sharp Teeth is a werewolf story that’s as creepy as it is humorous.

Bishop by Candace Nola In this novella, Erin and her daughter Casey have been missing for five days. So Erin’s brother Troy sets out into the Alaskan wilderness, seeking Bishop, a strange and secretive loner who might hold the key to where Troy’s sister and niece are hidden. Meanwhile, Erin is somewhere in the woods injured, and a frightened Casey searches for help. But they’re not in the woods alone. Something is watching their every move. Something that is hungry for blood.

Hungry for more werewolf books? Check out Book Riot’s picks for the best in werewolf books (in many genres, not just horror). Or… maybe you’d love these books about women gone feral. Happy reading, horror fans!

For Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, who spent much of her childhood in Stalin’s Soviet Union shuttling between orphanages, Young Pioneer camps, and tuberculosis sanatoria, storytelling began as a form of survival. “Every night before bed I’d tell the whole ward a scary story—the kind that makes people hold their breath,” she told me when I interviewed her for The Paris Review’s new Spring issue. Petrushevskaya, who was born in 1938 in Moscow, went on to become a prolific writer, a darling, she says, of the noosphere, a cloud that dictated stories to her “down to the final phrase.” Beginning with her collection Immortal Love, which came out in 1988 and immediately sold out its first run of thirty thousand copies, Petrushevskaya has published dozens of collections of prose, drama, and fairy tales. A mother of three and, subsequently, a grandmother, Petrushevskaya was also always making up stories for her children. From 1993 to 1994, she published a series called Wild Animal Tales in the daily magazine Stolitsa. They feature a cast of recurring characters, including Hussein the Sparrow, Lev Trotsky, Rachel the Amoeba, a.k.a. MuMu (who splits into Ra (Mu) and Chel (Mu)), Officer Lieutenant Volodya the Bear, Zhenya the Frog, Pipa the Foreign Frog, and many, many others. As usual, Petrushevskaya’s work resists easy categorization; while all these creatures are childlike and cute, the things they get up to are squarely adult. How much should a child know about the prevalence of infidelity among mosquitoes? How old should she be when she learns about cockroaches, bedbugs, and flies huffing inhalants? In any case, it is never too late to find out the truth about the creatures who live among us.

—Bela Shayevich

 

A Domestic Scene

Against the backdrop of a cold white room, Iris Apfel’s yellow outfit, which she wore on the occasion of her hundredth birthday, sings its own joyous song. Both here and elsewhere, Apfel, an artist and fashion designer, often paired gorgeous things sensually by color and texture, rather than by invoking some obvious theory or idea. She was not afraid to wear a yellow tulle coat with yellow silk pants (which she designed herself in collaboration with H&M). She celebrated yellow vivaciously; she took up space with yellow. With her arms raised in this picture, she looks like some sort of bishop or religious figure. Her open palms throw spectral glitter upon us. A spiritual icon. Just by looking at her, I feel her upturned palms manifesting my dreams.

Apfel famously said: “More is more and less is a bore.” This statement was in conversation with Coco Chanel’s equally famous fashion advice: “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and remove one accessory.” Apfel’s embrace of “more” surely was a celebration of life itself.

Apfel passed away in 2024. With her passing, she took away from this world a joy in everyday living and a view of the self through the lens of quotidian but bombastic fashion. She emboldened others to embrace their truest selves. Her looks asked us to dress not to gain the acceptance of others, but to be guided instead by our own visions. Her outfits combined items from high and low culture and seemingly unrelated accessories that coexist through poetic connections, all within the spirit of abundance.

My mother, Carole Lasky—an artist, art historian, art collector, and professor—passed away in 2024 as well. My life and style are forever in homage to her. My mother taught me that everyday life demands adornment, and that each day your aesthetic choices become important costumes of the self. Like Apfel, my mother worshipped abundance. She saw a sort of spiritual freedom in always embracing more. When I was a newborn baby, one of the first things she said to me was “We will have fun in this life—we will go shopping!”

ARRIVAL IN KEY WEST

I arrive in the afternoon. My baggage is lost in Orlando. It’s Epiphany.

The airplane’s wings made
A crucifix in the clouds;
I let things happen.

I spend the first night in my room with a head cold and fever. I sit in the jacuzzi. I phone James Merrill, as instructed. It is 1993. Rudolf Nureyev is dead from AIDS. I need a job and receive a phone message from Lucie Brock-Broido about an interview at Harvard. A cat meows on her tape machine in the background. My room feels warm. A ceiling fan hums overhead. There is sweat on my brow. The crow of roosters reminds me of my youth in the South and the unruly men in whose company I was reared. I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s long poem “Roosters” (set in Key West) and how she disdains their virile presence. It appeared in The New Republic in 1941 and is her war poem, with roosters standing in for a military presence. In a letter to her mentor Marianne Moore, she wrote that she wanted “to emphasize the essential baseness of militarism.” In my military family, there was really only one version of masculinity, and I wanted something different. Perhaps writing poems was my own rebellious, antimasculine act, since gender is of no consequence, only our humanity and being alert to the secret vibrations of the universe. Still,

What do we hold fast, what do we let go? The question, like a living being, hovers onstage in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov. It hovers, whirls, mutters, speaks aloud, corrects itself, mutters, as Firs—an elderly butler who has faithfully served the Ranevskaya estate for so many years, his chest covered in medals from forgotten skirmishes—is left behind when everyone departs for the train station. In the beautiful rendition of the play now at St. Ann’s Warehouse, even Firs’s voice, with its House of Lords vowels, is a murmur of an annihilated past, gone now to the carapace of lost things.

Thwack! is the sound of the ax in the cherry orchard where Lyubov Ranevskaya sees her dead mother walking in the evening among the white blossoms, the trees like angels of heaven that the gods have not neglected. My grandmother loved the theater, and when my grandfather’s hearing began to fail, she began to take me with her. I was then probably seven. About the theater she used to say, “You could get me up in the middle of the night.” When she was young, she’d been an actress in the Yiddish Theatre—somewhere there is a photograph of her playing Ophelia at the Henry Street Settlement, with her hair down to her knees. She lived for Chekhov. How many productions of The Cherry Orchard, of The Seagull, did we see together? “Shh,” she would say. I wasn’t allowed to whisper, ever, after we took our seats. “Shh,” she said, “you’ll wake the actors from their dream.”

What is the story of The Cherry Orchard? Lyubov Ranevskaya returns to her family’s estate, which has within its precinct a famous cherry orchard. The estate is inhabited by characters who filter in and out: her brother, Gaev; her adopted daughter, Varya; the old servant, Firs; her drowned son’s tutor, Trofimov, who is a perpetual student, waving his rhetorical fists. The estate is heavily mortgaged, and there’s no money to pay it off; Lopakhin, a rich businessman whose father was a serf on the estate, offers to buy it and subdivide the land for holiday houses. The orchard is untended; there are no longer any serfs to turn the cherries into jam. A frenzy of regret and magical thinking ensues—the old question, wearing its fools cap: What do we let go?

A long time ago and far away, in the year when stood we stood six feet apart, washed milk cartons before putting them away, when death knocked hastily at the door, a friend who is a theater director, and his wife, a dramaturge, brought together a small ensemble of actors and nonactors to read the four major plays of Chekhov. Between the surreal first days of lockdown and that early summer, we read The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, and Three Sisters. Our performances, such as they were, occurred about three weeks apart. On a series of evenings, each from our small lit square on a screen, we read the plays aloud. Afterward, we discussed them. Those evenings felt like small makeshift Quonset huts—structures assembled quickly with unskilled labor that provided shelter in desolate times. Chekhov is a writer of answers that lead to questions. The old riddle “Which weighs more, a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks?” might have been his.

Something has changed since Richard and I got married in December. I’m not sure what. Have you ever looked in the mirror and noticed you are able to cock one eyebrow higher than ever before? I’m happier. I didn’t imagine I would feel this way when I went downstairs to his studio and said, “I think we should get married.” He looked up from his book and said, “Okay.” Was he bemused, half smiling? I can’t remember.

It’s been three and a half months since we met with a judge in the courthouse in Hudson, where we live, and he pronounced us “married people.” Afterward, Richard and I had happy hour drinks on Warren Street with a friend. For the first few weeks, we imagined the marriage dividend was we wouldn’t get on each other’s nerves as much as before. This has proved untrue.

The thing we did was not twisted up with family and property. It’s more a tighter squeezing of the hands as we slip off the surface of the earth. The earth that appears, understandably, to be sloughing off the pesky Homo sapiens species overall. What I’m describing is a party when the power shuts down. The party is us getting married.

I remember such a party in 1965, during the huge power failure in New York City. I was nineteen, and going to Barnard College, and living with a roommate in a small apartment on Broadway and 107th Street. My boyfriend, Bruce, was more or less living with us, and also living in the building were Dave Bromberg and his girlfriend, whom I’ll call Trudy. I think that was actually her name.

The writer Zheng Zhi’s first novel, Floating, was published in China in 2007, when he was nineteen years old. Since then, he has published three more—a fifth will come out this year—as well as numerous volumes of short fiction, all while writing prolifically for film and television. His literary career has placed him at the vanguard of what is now known as the Dongbei renaissance, a group of writers hailing from the northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Zheng’s native Liaoning, all of whose upbringings were marked by the recession that occurred there in the eighties and nineties. Given Zheng’s stature in his home country, it feels surprising that “The Hedgehog,” which appears in the Review’s new Spring issue, is his first work of fiction to be published in English. With help from the novelist Jeremy Tiang, who translated the story, we spoke to Zheng about the turns of fate and the funding issues that have, over the years, led him away from and back to serious writing, as well as about his childhood fear, which makes its way into the story, that his sanity would hold out for only so long.

—Owen Park

 

INTERVIEWER

For the past decade, the “Ghost of Reem Island,” as she was referred to in the press, has haunted me.

On December 1, 2014, Ala’a al-Hashemi, a Yemeni-born Emirati woman, murdered a Hungarian American schoolteacher in a public restroom in Abu Dhabi. The media cited the incident as a “lone act of terror.” I too was an American teaching in Abu Dhabi and, by a bizarre coincidence, had been spending an inordinate amount of time in public restrooms, photographing female bathroom attendants for a creative research project.

More than ten years after the murder, I still find myself sifting through the little that was left behind—the government search-and-arrest video that went viral, news articles chronicling the political landscape of the time, and my own photographs of bathrooms and their attendants.

***

It’s finally spring here in the northern hemisphere, and I’m already thinking about summer books. I keep a running list of upcoming queer book releases I’m excited about, which means I’m always living a few months in the future, at least in terms of my TBR. So, I thought I’d share five of the queer books out this summer I’m most looking forward to. Publishing has a funny way of defining seasons, but I’m counting books out from June to August.

It includes an F/F multiverse love story, a trans satire about volleyball players, toxic lesbian vampires, a dystopian graphic novel with a trans guy main character, and a bi4bi genderqueer apocalyptic YA thriller.

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