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| Happy Spring, Friend! We’re heading into our favorite books season of the year, with big releases in everything from literary fiction to romance to sci-fi coming in the next few weeks, including two huge debuts out today. If your vitamin D levels haven’t caught up yet, we also have a list of YA books guaranteed to make you cry. Plus, all the best books out this week. |
 | Bookmarks |
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Critical Love
Esquire says Catherine Lacey’s fictional biography is “a staggering achievement” and Kirkus calls it “breathtaking in its scope and rigor.” |
 | | Biography of X | | After the death of her wife X, journalist C.M. writes a biography of the enigmatic and beloved artist. As she explores X’s history, she begins to wonder how well she actually knew her partner. | | Add to reading list |
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The Big Debut
Esther Yi’s pop culture fever dream is one of the hottest debuts of the year, appearing on most anticipated lists from Vulture, EW, Elle, and more. In an early review, PW called it “strange, haunting, and undeniably beautiful.” |
 | | Y/N | | A copywriter living in Berlin becomes a superfan of a Korean boy band and buys a one-way ticket to Seoul to meet the object of her obsession. | | Add to reading list |
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 | Bookworld |
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👑 Good news for Grishaverse fans: Netflix is eyeing an adaptation of the Six of Crows duology.
🙏 A new documentary offers a loving look at the original queen of YA.
🏡 John Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor home will become a writer’s retreat.
💄 Paris Hilton talked to NPR about her juicy and surprisingly intimate new memoir.
❄️ The adaptation of One Day In December casts its lead. |
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 | Hitting the Shelves |
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 | The Introduction |
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| Julia Langbein’s “Deeply Hilarious, Delightfully Strange” Debut |
The Book
In American Mermaid, a broke young English teacher-turned-novelist moves to California to adapt her surprise bestseller about a mermaid named Sylvia into a movie. Hollywood isn’t what she expected, and things go very sideways for Penelope. The novel is drawing rave reviews from the authors like Madeline Miller (Song of Achilles) who called it ”brilliantly sharp, funny, and thought-provoking” and Julia May Jonas (Vladmir) who said it’s “deeply hilarious, delightfully strange.”
The Author
Before she became a novelist, Julia was a standup and improv comedian and a doctoral student in art history. Her writing has appeared in Gourmet, Salon, Eater and more. Her much-raved debut novel is out today.
There are two stories in American Mermaid: Penelope's and Sylvia's. Why did you decide to use the book-inside-a-book format?
Julia Langbein: I had been doing tons of improv comedy, particularly this longform game called "Harold" which involves returning over and over to the same scenes. When I started writing a novel, it was just second nature to think this way. And from the get-go it just worked: I found it was producing all these hilarious connections and really building meaning and comedy for me better than I could have imagined. It was just luck that I was so deep into the improv at that moment that the rhythms of comic scene-building on stage were part of the way I was thinking.
Read the rest of our Q&A with Julia, and check out three books that inspire her: |
 | | A Way of Life, Like Any Other | | JL: “A semi-autobiographical story of a boy growing up in Los Angeles with eccentric parents caught up in the biz. It's absolutely drop-dead hilarious and captures LA not as a stereotype but as intimate and strange and comically warping.” | | Add to reading list |
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 | | The Girl with the Louding Voice | | JL: “A perfectly told, electrifying story of one girl fighting for her physical and intellectual survival in rural Nigeria and then Lagos, but what really astonished me was the voice itself. From the first sentence, she's hilarious, she's herself, you understand from the first page how important she is, and you're in the fight with her 1000%.” | | Add to reading list |
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 | | The Force of Such Beauty | | JL: “With clear parallels to the life of Princess Charlene of Monaco, this story of an athlete-turned-princess-turned-prisoner of her own luxurious life is both an empathetic portrait of an individual caught in a nightmare fairytale and a chilling reminder of the real economic inequalities that ‘princess’ myths obscure.” | | Add to reading list |
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 | The Highlight |
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| “In the dream he has again and again, he walks into the ocean, fully dressed, the wet fabric a weight. He pushes the waves aside as he goes deeper, and finds himself back in that ballroom, leaving as others are arriving, his shoulders brushing against them, trying not to stare at the faces of the incoming parents, knowing that his eyes must mirror theirs, shocked to find themselves in this place, having made this decision, to send their children far away. Alone, across the sea.” |
 | | Beyond That, the Sea | | In 1940, 11-year-old Beatrix is sent from London to Boston as part of a program to protect British children during WWII. After the war she returns to England, but she’s haunted by the family she left behind. | | Add to reading list |
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 | 20 Words: Guess The Novel |
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| A boy benefits from his connections with a blacksmith, a convict, and a jilted bride with a sense of fashion. | |
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| Answer in footer |
 | The Stack |
Together with  |
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| Teen-centric Tearjerkers |
On days when we need a good cry, there’s nothing like an emotional young adult novel with a heroine we can root for facing extraordinarily difficult circumstances. As devastating but ultimately hopeful YA reads go, The Way I Used to Be is a stand-out, following a good-girl teenager whose life unravels after her brother’s best friend rapes her and threatens to kill her if she tells anyone.
Here are three more wrenching YA reads we recommend: |
 | | The Silence That Binds Us | | May is devastated when her older brother dies by suicide. When a white tech mogul claims that May’s Chinese-American parents put so much pressure on Danny that he took his own life, her grief turns to rage. | | Add to reading list |
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 | | The Secrets We Keep | | When Emma’s best friend Hannah accuses Emma’s dad of sexual assault, Emma must face long-held secrets about her family and decide whether her loyalty to them is more important than the truth. | | Add to reading list |
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 | | Yolk | | Estranged Korean-American sisters—one an intimidating overachiever, one a struggling student—reunite when the older sister is diagnosed with cancer in this reflective and moving story. | | Add to reading list |
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| And for readers looking for more, these YA books are sure to tug heartstrings too. | |
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