Letter From the Editor: June, 2015
I send monthly updates on the what-nots and whatevers of Book Riot to our contributors and I recently had a light bulb moment: our readers would probably appreciate something like that. Therefore, I present unto my bookish brethren a monthly letter from the editor (that’s me), wherein I’ll gab about news you need, posts I’ve loved, books I’m reading, and whatever else catches my fancy:
Goings-On You Should Know About:
–The Morley Walk 2015! We’re partnering with Melville House (love those guys) for a reader’s tour of Brooklyn this Saturday! Join us for a marathon (and mobile) reading of Christopher Morley’s Parnassus on Wheels, coupled with a day spent hanging out in some of the raddest book shops in the borough.
-We’ve added such awesome programming to Book Riot Live, from book Jeopardy to live recordings of the podcasts to a Farm-To-Table panel about how books are made. We’ve also had to add a second cocktail party at the Strand’s Rare Book Room because the first one sold out. Be there or be square.
-We’ve got a Favorite Beach Reads 2015 Surprise Box! That’s four surprise books hand-picked by the Riot for your beach reading pleasure, along with a few items from the Book Riot Store, for only $100. You’ll get lots of bang for your buck, I tell you what.
-We’ve got a new podcast! All the Books! is a weekly 30 minute show hosted by Liberty Hardy and Rebecca Schinsky, and it’s all about the rad new books coming out this week. We’re only four episodes in, so get to listening.
Posts From Last Month That I Loved With Many Loves:
This post about struggling to finish Thucydides scratched the itchiest of my History major itches. Liberty’s alternative summer reading list made in response to the NYT’s all-white reading list made me “fuck yeah” all over the place. This tongue-in-cheek (heh) post about single librarians looking for love. This about why kids need queer books in school. This dispatch from the Bureau of Serious Literature about female characters. This post about finally learning to love Ulysses (a book I appreciate more than I enjoy).
Check This Box for Other
We’re in the process of bringing on the new contributors from this spring’s open call. They’re a brilliant, raging, funny, irreverent, thoughtful bunch- in other words, they’ll fit right in.
Books I’m Putting In My Face
Azar Nafisi’s The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books is the book we should all be reading about literature and the American spirit and yes I’m still side-eyeing Harold Bloom’s new book, why do you ask. The brilliance of the Sinclair Lewis section is worth the price of entry. I’m also in the middle of Tiffany Reisz’s The Saint, a book in her series about a Catholic erotica author involved in a long-term BDSM relationship with her priest. Reisz’s work asks fascinating questions about boundaries and faith, all while being smokin’ hot. If anyone tells you smut can’t be smart, shove this in their faces (and then stop talking to them because they don’t know what they’re talking about, and ain’t nobody got time for that).
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading our site. You’re my favorite people.
Amanda Nelson,
Managing Editor, Book Riot
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Book Riot Live is coming! Join us for a two-day event full of books, authors, and an all around good time. It’s the convention for book lovers that we’ve always wanted to attend. So we are doing it ourselves.
