Welcome to The Best of Book Riot, our daily round-up of what’s on offer across our site, newsletters, podcasts, and social channels. Not everything is for everyone, but there is something for everyone.
Prison Banned Books Week: Free Prison Tablets Aren’t Actually Free
This essay is part of a series to raise awareness during the second annual Prison Banned Books Week. Each essay, written by a currently incarcerated person, details the author’s experience of reading on prison tablets. Because every one of the 52 carceral jurisdictions in the country have different prison telecom contracts and censorship policies, it’s important to hear from incarcerated people across the country.
Single-state prison systems censor more books than all state schools and libraries combined. Recently, prisons and jails have been contracting with private telecom companies to provide tablets to detained and incarcerated people. Tablets have been used to curtail paper literature under specious claims that mail is the primary conduit of contraband. Most also have highly limited content. In many states, accessing the content is costly, despite companies acquiring these titles for free. This inaccessible and outdated reading material is used to justify preventing people from receiving paper literature and information.
10 Must-Read New Books Out in Fall 2024 to Preorder Now
Fall is the biggest new release season in publishing, and there are so many exciting new books to preorder (or place your library holds on). Strangely, publishers can’t seem to agree on the definition of seasons, so for the purposes of this list, I’m including upcoming books out in September, October, and November. Some of the biggest titles are out this week, so you don’t have long to wait!
These new books out in fall 2024 range from thought-provoking literary fiction to chilling horror, cozy fantasy, and engrossing dark academia reads. There’s something for everyone.
8 Slasher Books to Bring Some Scare to Your September
I freaking love slasher books. I tried to find a more eloquent way to explain to you how I feel about this subgenre, to wax poetically about its perfect cocktail of nostalgia, adrenaline, fear, and joy. But in the end, the simple fact is this: slashers are, to me, one of the most perfect, fundamental forms of horror, and I love them beyond reason. So many of the greatest villains of the horror genre are slashers. Masked killers wielding knives, machetes, axes, power tools, and more, intent on doing severe bodily harm to an unsuspecting ensemble cast, it’s just 110% a win-win scenario for me. I never get tired of it.
Because no two slasher books are ever really the same! June pool party disaster? August summer camp nightmare? October corn maze catastrophe (someone please write and/or point me towards a corn maze slasher, I beg you)? Be it prom or summer camp, sorority house or Hollywood studio, Halloween bash or small-town carnival, the setting is every bit as important as the killer…
Get Ready for Fall with these Autumnal Bookish Decor Items
Like many of my fellow readers, I eagerly look forward to each change in season as a time to switch up my reading. For those who like to read seasonally, fall presents the opportunity to visit cozy bookstores, streets dusted with autumn leaves, and ancient castles, all through the power of books. Whether your fall reading leans toward cozy stories, campus novels, or horror, there’s something about the shift in the year that invites us to shift our reading as well and this can also mean changing up the decor in our homes and reading nooks.
All the Finalists for the 2024 National Book Awards
Earlier this week we covered the 2024 National Book Awards Longlists for Young People’s Literature and Translated Literature. Now the longlists for Nonfiction, Poetry, and Fiction have also been released, rounding out all the contenders for this year’s awards.
The Bestselling Books of the Week, According to All the Lists
Welcome back to our roundup of all the bestselling books of the week. Today we’re back to having no books that made it to all five bestseller lists. We do have one newcomer in Ketanji Brown Jackson’s memoir, which ranked in four of the five lists along with a CoHo title and a repeat showing from Hannah Grace. Overall it’s a pretty familiar story, though: lots of familiar titles from the folks you’re used to seeing on these lists.
