Black Women Novelists You Should Be Reading

5 Books Of Low-stress Nonfiction For Your Summer Reading List

Every summer reading season, I recall stories of completely inappropriate books I've toted to the beach or pool.

This year is no different. I'm currently reading a book I'll share in an upcoming newsletter, and it's not a flirty rom-com about a Malibu meet-cute – though I would love to read one of those if you have recommendations. (And by the way, we'll be sharing a fresh helping of romance recs with you soon, too.)

That said, I do often misunderstand the assignment: I once spent a good chunk of a bachelor weekend sitting by a hotel pool reading Robert Crais's "L.A. Requiem." And when not reading by the pool? I read in my room.

This week, though, I'm focusing on a different summer reading tradition: Pop culture-infused nonfiction, which is always a good choice for hot weather: breezy histories, juicy memoirs and refreshing dives into films, music and more.

If you're looking for a story to get lost in as your loved ones build sandcastles or do cannonballs in the pool, one of these may be just the thing.

A sampling of entertainment related nonfiction coming in summer 2024. (Courtesy of the publishers)

"Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV" by Emily Nussbaum (Out now)

With prose as bracing as a chilled Chardonnay tossed in your face, the New Yorker critic Nussbaum delivers an essential book on the development of reality TV, which is not the faint praise it may sound like. Some pop culture books can feel like overlong web posts, but Nussbaum digs deep into the genre's origins and often-queasy mix of high-flying rhetoric and lowdown showbiz chicanery. She writes about shows you'll remember and some you won't, crafting deft portraits of everyone from "Candid Camera" host Allen Funt and "Gong Show" impresario Chuck Barris to the inaugural "Survivor" cast and "The Apprentice" host Donald Trump. If you love reality TV, get it. If you hate reality TV, this is still the one you'll want to read.

"The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War" by James Shapiro (Out now)

Known for his books about Shakespeare, Shapiro has in recent years shifted his gaze to include more recent history, as in his 2020 book "Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future." "The Playbook" examines the political turmoil that erupted in the 1930s as the Federal Theatre Project attempted to employ actors and writers to bring plays to an American public struggling under the Great Depression, and the cultural battles that ensued will sound all too familiar to modern readers. Shapiro also dispels myths about a noted all-Black cast production of "Macbeth," which Orson Welles was long credited for masterminding but the actual story differs from the legend.

"Hip-Hop Is History" by Questlove and Ben Greenman (Out now)

Whether leading the Roots, DJing and producing music or writing books, hosting podcasts and making Oscar-winning documentaries, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson has already demonstrated a vast set of skills. Despite that, he remains a discerning fan of the things he loves. This book explores the development of hip-hop, spanning from its origin story in a 1973 Bronx rec room to the 2023 Questlove-produced Grammy salute to its first half-century music.

"The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982" by Chris Nashawaty (Out July 30)

Was summer of 1982 the best three months – heck, the best 8 weeks – in movie theaters ever? That brief period saw the release of eight science-fiction and fantasy heavyweights: "E.T.," "Blade Runner," "Mad Max: The Road Warrior," "Star Trek: Wrath of Khan," "Poltergeist," "Conan the Barbarian," "The Thing" and "Tron." Nashawaty zips nimbly through the era's creative clashes, cost overruns and box office bombshells (and bombs) and will still have you wanting more. (I added Paul M. Sammon's "Future Noir" about the making of "Blade Runner"to my library queue.) And there are always the films: I can personally attest that at a recent Vidiots screening of Steven Spielberg's "E.T." there was one man quietly bawling in my row. (We have an interview with Nashawaty coming, too.)

The Bookshop: A History of The American Bookstore by Evan Friss (out Aug. 6)

Readers of this newsletter might just be the target audience for this one — Allison K. Hill, our former book columnist and current CEO of the American Booksellers Association, is one of the interviewees. "The Bookshop" is deeply researched and packed with information about a selection of America's bookstores from Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia bookshop to a lovingly rendered ode to the staff and regulars at Three Lives & Company in New York City. I'm reading this one slowly, because I want to make it last.

For more, go to the Books section for a range of bestsellers, interviews and more

This is what we call a pool party. (Getty Images)

Laurie Devore wrote part of her novel sitting on the beach in Venice

Laurie Devore is the author of "The Villain Edit." (Photo credit Susan Lloyd / Courtesy of Avon)

Laurie Devore is the author of the YA novels "A Better Bad Idea," "Winner Take All," and "How to Break a Boy." "The Villain Edit" is her first novel for adults.

Q. Would you tell readers a little about your book, please?

"The Villain Edit" is about Jac, a down-on-her-luck romance author, who chooses to go on a reality TV dating show to revive her career. However, once these, she is confronted with Henry, a man from her very recent past who also happens to be a producer on the show. Jac soon realizes that Henry, along with the other producers, are casting her as the villain of the season, and this may not be the career comeback she had in mind.

Q. For those who don't know, what is a "villain edit"?

The villain edit is a phrase popularized by reality TV to describe when a contestant on a show is being framed as the villain by the producers or editors of the show. The villain edit is not necessarily a moral judgement on the person who receives the edit – it is left up to the audience to determine whether the contestant is a true villain or is just receiving a bad edit.

Q. Is there a book or books you always recommend to other readers?

For fellow fans of romance and women's fiction, I always recommend "The Royal We" by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan. It is a delicious contemporary royal romance with fully realized characters and it ALWAYS makes me cry both happy and sad tears.

Q. What's something – a fact, a bit of dialogue or something else – that has stayed with you from a recent reading?

I recently read "Piglet" by Lottie Hazell and there is a moment in the book that stopped me in my tracks. The main character's life is crumbling around her and she escapes to a local greasy spoon-type restaurant to indulge in her binge eating habit. Once there, she is confronted with several lies she has told to cover up the mess of her life. While reading the scene, I was so horrified and caught up in the narrative, I felt like it was happening to me. Like a big movie setpiece, I think that scene will be on my mind for a long time.

Q. Do you listen to audiobooks? If so, are there any titles or narrators you'd recommend?

I LOVE audiobooks and often take long walks so to enjoy listening to them. A recent favorite audiobook series of mine was "The Atlas Six" series by Olivie Blake, which has an incredible full cast of characters. I also love Kiley Reid's "Come & Get It" audiobook, a laugh-out-loud satire of Southern college life I could not put down.

I was lucky enough that one of my favorite audiobook narrators, Stephanie Nemeth-Parker, read "The Villain Edit" and did an incredible job. It may be taboo to admit to laughing at your own jokes, but Stephanie's reading amped everything up a notch and I couldn't help it.

Q. Which books are you planning to read next?

This is a loaded question as I have SO many books on my TBR right now. A couple I have in the pipeline are "A Love Song for Rikki Wilde" by Tia Williams, "Honey" by Isabel Banta, and "Margo's Got Money Troubles" by Rufi Thorpe.

Q. What's something about your book that no one knows?

I was lucky enough to be able to go on a research trip to Los Angeles while writing "The Villain Edit." I found it really helped me focus the tone and aesthetics of the book. Every day, I would walk down to the beach from my rented Airstream in Venice Beach and watch the sunset. I often took my laptop there with me and wrote on the beach during those evenings.

For more about the author, go to her website.

More bestsellers, authors and book stories

Liz Moore is the author of "The God of the Woods." (Photo credit Maggie Casey / Courtesy of Riverhead)

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A missing child, a summer camp and a serial killer fuel Liz Moore's "God of the Woods." READ MORE

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Lev Grossman, author of "The Magicians" trilogy, returns with a new novel, "The Bright Sword." (Photo credit Beowulf Sheehan / Courtesy of Viking)

What came after Camelot

Lev Grossman's "The Bright Sword" begins after King Arthur's death. READ MORE

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"Long Island Compromise" by Taffy Brodesser-Akner is the top-selling fiction release at Southern California's independent bookstores. (Courtesy of Random House)

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Kevin Barry's latest novel is "The Heart in Winter." (Photo credit Olivia Smith / Courtesy of Doubleday)

Western 'Heart'

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Gail Godwin, a three-time National Book Award finalist, reflects on life in her latest book, "Getting to Know Death: A Meditation." (Photo credit Jolanta Kaminski / Courtesy of Bloomsbury)

On 'Getting to Know Death'

At 85, Gail Godwin survived a broken neck. She reveals her 'extra life' in new book. READ MORE

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Priyanka Mattoo is the author of the memoir, "Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones." (Photo credit Beowulf Sheehan / Courtesy of Knopf)

'Bird Milk' memoir

From Kashmir to Hollywood, Priyanka Mattoo looks back in new memoir. READ MORE

• • •

What have you been reading this summer? Email epedersen@scng.Com with "ERIK'S BOOK PAGES" in the subject line and I may include your comments in an upcoming newsletter.

And if you enjoy this free newsletter, please consider sharing it with someone who likes books or getting a digital subscription to support local coverage.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Bookish (SCNG)

Next on 'Bookish'

The next event is scheduled for Aug. 16, at 5 p.M. Cathryn Michon will discuss "I'm Still Here," an illustrated book for grieving pet owners, and journalist Carol Mithers talks about "Rethinking Rescue: Dog Lady and the Story of America's Forgotten People and Pets." Sign up for free now.

Want to catch up on all the previous Bookish shows? Catch up on previous virtual events and more! 

Originally Published: July 19, 2024 at 3:29 p.M.

Lifting Up Young Readers: PW Talks With Deborah Ellis

Activist and author of more than 30 fiction and nonfiction books for children, many of them set in developing countries and centering young people suffering from the effects of war and poverty, Deborah Ellis is best known for her Breadwinner trilogy, about girls fighting to survive in war-torn Afghanistan. For her nonfiction work, she has interviewed Iraqi refugees in Children of War, American children of soldiers in Off to War, and Palestinian and Israeli children for Three Wishes. Her newest novel, The Outsmarters, though, takes place in a small town in Ontario, where 12-year-old Kate is being brought up by her indomitable (some might say downright nasty) grandmother, owner of the "largest junk business in the tri-county area," after her mother, who has been substance-dependent since being prescribed oxytocin as a teenager, left her there. Ellis spoke with PW from her home in southern Ontario about telling the stories of kids who are let down by adults, empowering young readers through her books, and how she chooses the best genre for doing both.

What was the origin of The Outsmarters? Did you start with a character, or were you drawn to a particular issue?

I started the book quite some time ago, but I do remember that I was drawn to the question of what tools we have when the supports we need are no longer in place. Where can we go to find the knowledge and supports we need? If you're a kid, you have very few resources. So where do you turn?

My whole career, as a writer and an activist, has been about what happens to kids when the adult world lets them down through our policies and our actions: on a large scale—wars, climate change—and on a smaller, personal, one: poverty, child abuse and covering up for the perpetrators of child abuse. If we are ever going to create a world without war, for example, we have to change our thinking. We have to stop seeing "others" as enemies or potential enemies, and realize once and for all that we're all just trying to get through life as best we can. It would be helpful if people could no longer make money off weapons. The motivation for war might go away if nobody could profit from it.

"

"My whole career, as a writer and an activist, has been about what happens to kids when the adult world lets them down."

"

The book has multi-layered aspects and many fully developed characters. What's your process of constructing a complex novel like this one, and, in particular, how did the main character of Kate come into being?

I don't make a lot of notes; I just start writing—and I rewrite a lot! I write the whole book a few times until I think it's worth my editor Shelley Tanaka's time. I send it to Shelley when I think it's great and she says, "Nah, do it again." We probably went back and forth with the entire manuscript three or four times.

As to Kate, she emerged pretty full-grown! I knew from the start that she was an angry kid and had been on some difficult journeys. She is treated very badly at the start of the book and something in her character knows that this is wrong, and that she deserves better. She has the gumption to go after that—to be treated better. As I worked on the book, she became deeper and more complex.

In fact, Kate and her grandmother were both there at the start—though my only vision of the grandmother was seeing her in a junkyard. I soon understood that Kate and her grandmother are locked in anger and sorrow about the same woman—Kate's mother—who is an unreachable person because of her addiction.

I know a lot of kids struggling with their parents' addictions, or kids with parents in prison—we don't hear a lot about those kids, but that's our problem as a society. Writing about these kids helps bring their stories into the light. Young readers might start thinking about the whole picture. They might start seeing more of the complexities, the fallout from decisions, and the intended or unintended consequences that might make the overall problem worse instead of better. Maybe they'll even come up with creative solutions that adults have not thought of yet. Often, though, there are no solutions, no happy endings; these kids just have to build their lives somehow.

You've written both fiction and nonfiction. How do you decide which genre is best for exploring a specific subject?

It depends partly on what is possible—if it's possible for me to go somewhere and to interview children, for example, for a nonfiction book. And then I consider whether it would be a useful endeavor: would the book get published? I don't want to waste people's time interviewing them if that doesn't seem like a strong possibility. I also think about whether I'll be able to give young readers a clear enough sense of what's going on in a situation through the interviews and other material in the book. For example, I wrote a book called My Story Starts Here, about young people in the criminal justice system. The interviews showed a clear line between parental addictions and other issues that led to behavior on the part of the young people that led them to be incarcerated. But there are lots of kids affected by their parents' addictions who are not in the criminal justice system and they are hard to get to. You can't interview them without parental permission.

Sometimes, though, I hear a character speaking to me from the start—then it seems clearer that I'm going to write a novel. Sometimes we can understand things through stories that we can't through nonfiction.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

I hope readers will realize that even if it feels like your life is a train wreck, it doesn't have to stay that way, and that you have more power than the people around you are telling you that you have. I especially want them to understand that you get to decide who you are and what your life is about. And finally, I want them to understand that sometimes adults are idiots.

The Outsmarters by Deborah Ellis. Groundwood, $18.99 Aug. 6 ISBN 978-1-77306-857-2

The Creative Month So Far

by Stephen OlsenBe it free arts events like the IHC Arts Awards hosted by Webbs Auction House on Marion Street, or a plethora of book launches and readings and zinefests, or film festivals like the recent DocEdge and the upcoming NZ International Film Festival, no culture-nerds in Pōneke Wellington can complain about any lack of a beating creative pulse. Here's a select sampling from the month so far.

ENJOY ART SPACE

With the two exhibitions launched at the Enjoy Contemporary Art Space at 211 Left Bank last Friday night, Wellington's alternative gallery scene sent out a wave of provocative public discourse on two city-living topics: postering the city's walls and on the meanings of home, shelter and belonging.

The postering exhibition – titled iMpOrTanT iNforMaTiON – is the work of the restlessly piratical crew of 5ever books.

As well as re-situating 'found poster walls' into the gallery space from afar as Cambridge Terrace, Riddiford Street and Egmont Street, they have also compiled and bound five potent sets of A3 poster reproductions and are running a series of postering workshops on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.

As well as any posters that might be made in the rear work-room at Enjoy during the life of the exhibition, visitors can leave with two free guides: 'Postering 101', especially produced for Wellingtonians, and 'How to Street Poster: Ōtepoti', as first published in issue 5 of the popular Rat World magazine. IMpOrTanT iNforMaTiON will culminate with a panel discussion called 'The A3 City' on Saturday 31 August.

5ever's revelry of postering activism provides an open encouragement for "people to take their own voice, and their own city, into their own hands", and follows the remarkable documenting of four decades of Wellington's vibrantly-active graffiti scene in Jamie Baird's recently published book Here Today Gone Tomorrow. It's a topic that was also echoed by an academic presentation given at the State of Australasian Cities Conference held at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria Univeristy of Wellington in December about postering in Melbourne (read more on that at elementarycity.Blog. )

The other special treat at Enjoy until the end of August, before it travels on to The Physics Room in Ōtautahi Christchurch, is the screening of three moving image works created by artists from Aotearoa, Australia and Thailand under the title of Homing Instinct.

The three works are collectively described as a "response to living in a time that requires not only redress of housing inequalities, but more expansive conceptions of housing-shelter-belonging". They carry the provocation of considering the increasing numbers of people being diasporically displaced by everything from societal breakdown (think food poverty and obscenely criminal wars) to unfolding climate disasters.

A common "spark" for the exhibition is the community-based work and practice of Dieneke Jansen in Auckland. Dieneke's 2021 film This Housing Thing is also being shown at Enjoy. It makes use of family photo albums and fragments from internet scrolling, in a way that looks backwards as a hinge to looking forward to the ever-growing desire for housing security and housing access as universal human rights. A public talk stemming from the film's content will take place at Enjoy from 1pm on Saturday 10 August.

Still on housing, Urban Dream Brokerage turned over its 113 Taranaki Street venue on 11 July to a continuation a housing crisis project by conceptual Wellington artist Helyni Prately, who works in video, drawing, painting, sculpture, and performance. This revisited a 2022 installation project underpinned by interviews conducted around our central city to get true insights into the housing issues being dealt with in local communities.

Audiovisual bites from the interviews are projected on to a buoyant grouping of papier-mâché balls (as above), touching on and exposing discussions of rent increases, unattainable housing prices, a lack of affordable rental properties compounded by cost of living increases, as well as venturing into conversations about the chronic shortage of public/ social/ community housing next to the perilous and worsening situation of emergency housing.

UNITY BOOKS AND IIML

While the book launch and readings scene has been diminished by the closure in May of the much-loved Good Books, the intensity and regularity of events at Unity Books has, if anything, gone up a notch. (Supplemented even further by a kick-ass new website).

Notable launch highlights this month have included Lyndy McIntyre's compelling testament to the Living Wage Movement, Power to Win, and the stunning Sight Lines: Women & Art in Aotearoa – brought to book by art historian Dr Kirsty Baker (pictured above) and published by Auckland University Press.

On 12 July Unity generously hosted a panel discussion (also pictured above) on the topic of Creativity and the Cost of Living, timed just before the Wellington Zinefest.

In more refreshingly good news for lit-afficianados, July has also seen the International Institute of Modern Letters return with its free Writers on Mondays lunch time series.

This year's series is bigger than ever, with 76 poets, novelists, playwrights, and nonfiction writers lined up for 14 events across four venues until 30 September.

The rising popularity of creative nonfiction is in the spotlight with Te Herenga Waka/Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence Ingrid Horrocks having spoken about her shift from nonfiction to fiction.

The variety of scheduled discussions ahead includes: Literary couple Anna Smaill (Bird Life) and Carl Shuker (The Royal Free) in conversation with Emily Perkins about their new novels, Christine Jeffs' film of Shuker's A Mistake, and their writing lives; Randell Cottage writer-in-residence Hinemoana Baker speaking with poets James Brown and Tracey; and Tina Makereti talking about her new novel The Mires.

While Te Papa Tongarewa is the major venue, Circa Theatre is playing a part and there will be two special evening events at Meow. The series is supported by the Letteri family.

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