Delia Owens’s debut novel, Where the Crawdads Sing—the surprise-hit romance-mystery set in 1950s North Carolina—has now sold more than 1 million copies this year.
Amazon recently banned the sale of books by Dr. Joseph Nicolosi and other proponents of “gay-conversion therapy.” At VICE, Daniel Newhauser reports that House Republicans are now pressuring Amazon to resume selling those books, including Nicolosi’s A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. According to a document circulated by the Republicans: “These books were available on Amazon until an LGBT activist repeatedly petitioned Amazon to remove the ‘homophobic books’ from the company’s website. Amazon removed Dr. Nicolosi’s books and those of several other authors on similar topics. It is not clear that any of the banned books have violated an Amazon policy, but rather that the company is choosing to censor speech.”
Molly Crabapple, author of the memoir Drawing Blood, remembers Brazenhead Books, the beloved “secret bookstore” that the late Michael Seidenberg ran out of his small apartment on the Upper East Side.
Jonathan Shanin, the editor of The Guardian’s long-read section, has been named the paper’s “head of opinion.” He is currently looking for a deputy editor.
Dennis Lim, the author of David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, has posted a list of his favorite movies in the Criterion Collection.
Bestselling author Dean Koontz, whose most recent book was published by Bantam, has signed a deal with Amazon Publishing’s Thomas & Mercer imprint to write five books. As Publisher’s Weekly reports: “This deal, for an undisclosed sum, follows a string of seven-figure agreements that Amazon Publishing has recently struck with major bestsellers, including Patricia Cornwell, Sylvia Day, Barry Eisler, and T.R. Ragan, who all have multibook agreements.” In other book-deal news, Megan Rapinoe of the US World Cup soccer team has signed a two-book deal with Penguin.
