In Readers and Book Lovers world this evening, bookgirl takes a look back at “the ones that got away” in 2023 fiction, while I’m taking a look forward to nonfiction coming in 2024. Happy New Year to all, and thank you for joining us each week. in The publishing world has been pretty dead these past holiday weeks, but now that 2024 is arriving, the book pipeline will pick up again. Here are twelve nonfiction books coming up in the next months that I’m looking forward to. All are available for preorder at The Literate Lizard, and your 15% off DAILYKOS coupon code will be applied when you enter it in checkout. . This only scratches the surface of what’s ahead!
- One Way Back: A Memoir, by Christine Blasey Ford. The woman who courageously testified at the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh, recounting how he had sexually assaulted her in high school. She recounts the months she spent trying to get information into the right hands without exposing herself and her family to dangerous backlash. The book reveals riveting new details about the leadup to her testimony and its overwhelming aftermath and describes how she continues to navigate her way out of the storm. Publication date March 19th.
- Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, by Salman Rushdie. On August 12th, 2022, 33 years after the fatwa that had been ordered against him by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini after accusations of blasphemy against Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was attacked onstage by a knife-wielding assailant who gravely injured him. Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again. Publication date April 16th.
- The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War. by Erik Larson. A new book by one or our finest nonfiction writers, author of Devil in the White City, In the Garden of Beasts, and more. This time, he offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.” Publication date April 30th.
- Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life, by Nicholas D. Kristof. I find Kristof to be one of the most inspiring and interesting among the New York Times’ stable of columnists. Reporting from Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo, while traveling far afield to India, Africa, and Europe, Kristof witnessed and wrote about century-defining events: the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, the Yemeni civil war, the Darfur genocide in Sudan, and the wave of addiction and despair that swept through his hometown and a broad swath of working-class America. Fully aware that coverage of atrocities generates considerably fewer page views than the coverage of politics, he nevertheless continued to weaponize his pen against regimes and groups violating basic human rights, raising the cost of oppression and torture. Some of the risks he took while doing so make for hair-raising reading. Publication date May 14th.
- The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History, by Karen Valby. At the height of the Civil Rights movement, Lydia Abarca was a Black prima ballerina with a major international dance company—the Dance Theatre of Harlem. She was the first Black ballerina on the cover of Dance magazine, and she performed in some of ballet’s most iconic works with other trailblazing ballerinas, including Gayle McKinney-Griffith and Sheila Rohan, as well as first-generation dancers Karlya Shelton and Marcia Sells. But decades later there was almost no record of their groundbreaking history to be found. Out of a sisterhood that had grown even deeper with the years, these Swans joined forces again—to share their story with the world. Publication date April 30th.
- The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians: Their stories are better than the bestsellers, by James Patterson and Matt Eversmann. The prolific author James Patterson offers an homage to booksellers. Since I’ve been in the biz for 24 years, as a manager at the downtown Philly Barnes & Noble, as manager of the Indie brick-and-mortar Literate Lizard in Sedona, Arizona, and now as owner of the online version of The Literate Lizard, after the owner decided to close the shop, I’m ready to read this book. Note also that Patterson has long been a big supporter of indie bookstores. One thing he does each year is give out $500 ‘holiday bonuses’ to indie booksellers. This year he gave out 600 hundred of them, culled from over 3000 nominees. I’m happy to say I myself and The Literate Lizard received one! Publication date April 8th.
- Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World—and How You Can, Too, by Ijeoma Oluo. Looking at many of our most powerful systems—like education, media, labor, health, housing, policing, and more—Oluo highlights what people are doing to create change for intersectional racial equity. She also illustrates various ways in which the reader can find entryways into change in these same areas, or can bring some of this important work being done elsewhere to where they live. Publication date January 30th.
- The Secret Life of Hidden Places: Concealed Rooms, Clandestine Passageways, and the Curious Minds That Made Them, by Stefan Bachmann and April Genevieve Tucholke. I’m a sucker for books like this, and I did, after all, spend my boyhood in San Jose, California, not far from the famous Winchester Mystery House. This wondrous guide for the curious and the intrepid takes readers on a lushly photographed and lyrically written tour of eighteen of the world’s most captivating architectural mysteries. Delve into both the secretive places themselves and the eccentric and obsessive minds that created them. Visit a chamber of skulls high in the Swiss Alps, a Japanese temple full of traps, a Parisian apartment locked and untouched since World War II, a Prohibition-era speakeasy in Washington, DC, and a spooky “initiation” well in Portugal built by a secret society. How far down can you climb before losing your nerve? Publication date February 13th.
- Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show, by Tommy Tomlinson. Here’s one for the sizable contingent of pet people here at Daily Kos. The author spends three years on the road and goes behind the scenes at dozens of dog shows across the country, where he is licked, sniffed, or rubbed up against by dogs of nearly every size, shape, and breed. Like a real-life version of Best in Show, Dogland follows one champion show dog—a Samoyed named Striker—and his devoted entourage of breeders, handlers, and owners as he competes in the Westminster Dog Show, the oldest and most famous dog show in America. Tomlinson brings the dog-show circuit to life as he witnesses teams scrambling from town to town in search of championship points and colorful ribbons. Along the way, he also speaks to scientists who have discovered new insights into how dogs and people formed their bond—and how that bond has changed over the centuries. Publication date April 23rd.
- The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, by Tricia Romano. A rollicking history of America's most iconic weekly newspaper told through the voices of its legendary writers, editors, and photographers. You either were there or you wanted to be. A defining New York City institution co-founded by Norman Mailer, The Village Voice was the first newspaper to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and Off-Broadway with gravitas. It reported on the AIDS crisis with urgency and seriousness when other papers dismissed it as a gay disease. In 1979, the Voice’s Wayne Barrett uncovered Donald Trump as a corrupt con artist before anyone else was paying attention. It invented new forms of criticism and storytelling and revolutionized journalism, spawning hundreds of copycats. Publication date February 27th.
- Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish, by Francesca Peacock. A biography of the remarkable—and in her time scandalous—seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish, who pioneered the science fiction novel. Margaret was a passionate writer. She wrote extensively on gender, science, philosophy, and published under her own name at a time when women simply did not do so. Her greatest work was The Blazing World, published in 1666, a utopian proto-novel that is thought to be one of the earliest works of science fiction that brought together Margaret's talents in poetry, philosophy, and science. Yet hers is a legacy that has long divided opinion, and history has largely forgotten her, an undeserved fate for a brilliant, courageous proto-feminist. This one comes out next week, on January 2nd.
- A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson, and the American Republic, by Francis D. Cogliano. The author considers the relationship between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in this measured and clarifying account. Analyzing the Virginians’ earlier lives as planters and slaveholders and their wartime careers, Cogliano shows that the two “were in broad agreement about the aims and objectives of the resistance movement in Virginia” from roughly 1769 until the war ended in 1783. Afterward, Washington and Jefferson “became political confidants,” whose shared commitments included “the process of Native displacement.” During Washington’s first presidential administration, he chose Jefferson as his secretary of state. But Washington and Jefferson drifted apart, with disagreement over the root causes of the Whiskey Rebellion contributing to their “estrangement.” In the polarizing 1790s, as their political opposition solidified, their friendship “crumbled.” Publication date February 20th.
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them, but If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be truly appreciated. I would love to be considered ‘The Official Bookstore of Daily Kos.’ Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 20% each week). I’m busily adding new content every day, and will have lots more dedicated subject pages and curated booklists as it grows. I want it to be full of book-lined rabbit holes to lose yourself in (and maybe throw some of those books into a shopping cart as well.)
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