Last month, the Maya Angelou estate joined in a lawsuit filed against the state of Utah’s book banning law.

• The suit challenges the legality of Utah’s “sensitive materials” law, which had at that point banned 22 books from every public school in the state.
• Just days later, the state would add a 23rd title to the list, Bag of Bones by Stephen King.

This week , Utah has added four more books to its list of titles banned from every public school in the state, including an additional title by one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Those books are:  

• Breathless by Jennifer Niven
• The Carnival at Bray by Jessie Ann Foley
• The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel by Margaret Atwood and illustrated by Renee Nault
• Red Hood by Elana K. Arnold (a party in the lawsuit against the state).

📚 That brings the total to 27 books banned statewide.

Despite claims this is about “local control,” schools in the state are forced to follow the decisions made in other districts.

• There are 42 public school districts in Utah, but only nine districts have accounted for the book bans.
• Among those, Davis has been included in 26 of the bans and Washington, 25.
• Nebo has been part of eight bans, with Alpine, Jordan, and Toole school districts each account for seven.

In other words, two school districts in the whole state account for the vast majority of bans.

Clearly, the lawsuit filed against HB 29 isn’t deterring the most important work in the state education system: removing books that have been on shelves for decades. If anything, it has accelerated the book bans since January this year.

🚫 Read more about Utah’s book banning law and the full list of censored titles here. - KJ

Call it a controversial opinion, but there are too many books. In order to help you narrow down the options, we’ve created a highly scientific vibes-based process of elimination to determine the It Book of the Month.

The ideal It Book rings four bells:

• 🔔 Art - Is it good?
• 🔔 Acclaim - Will it contend for awards and best-of lists?
• 🔔 Sales  - Where’s the money?
• 🔔 Zeitgeist - What’s the buzz?

This month’s contenders include a dishy memoir from an icon of stage and screen, cracked historical fiction in which Anne Boleyn goes on a revenge tour after being beheaded, an exploration of the roots and impact of the great replacement theory, and the first collection of short stories from one of our most celebrated living American writers.

🎧 Listen as we play a knockout round with 10 of the month’s most interesting new books.

Fourth Wing meets The Hunger Games in Dire Bound by Sable Sorenson, a spicy, page-turning romantasy where humans and direwolves forge unbreakable bonds and fight for survival.

The stunning deluxe limited edition is a collector’s dream, featuring dazzling sprayed edges, full-color endpaper scene art, a foil-stamped case, and special jacket effects. It also includes two bonus chapters—featuring the fan-favorite tattoo scene.

Get your copy while supplies last.

The Audie Awards were given out earlier this week to honor the past year’s best audiobooks and spoken-word entertainment. Award categories included Autobiography/Memoir, Best Non-Fiction Narrator, Best Author Narration, awards for individual genres, and beyond.

• There was also an “audiobook to rule them all” category that was won by one of the most popular dystopian series ever. Beyoncé and Reese Witherspoon even made appearances among the night’s victors.

🏆 Among the winners:

• Audiobook of the Year: Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins, narrated by Jefferson White
• Autobiography/Memoir: Matriarch by Tina Knowles, narrated by Tina Knowles, Beyoncé, Solange, Kelly Rowland, and Angie Beyincé
• Mystery: Gone Before Goodbye by Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben, narrated by Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine, Kiff VandenHeuvel, Suehyla El-Attar Young, Peter Ganim, Saskia Maarleveld, and James Fouhey
• Best Non-Fiction Narrator: Blair Underwood, for Truly by Lionel Richie
• New Voice Award: Judges’ Category: Gem Carmella, for The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

Check out the full list of winners. - EE

If your ebook queue is looking a little dusty, consider this your sign to shake things up. From buzzy recent releases to under-the-radar gems that deserve a spot on your nightstand, these new and notable picks are available now on Kindle Unlimited.

🏒 Thrown for a Loop by Sarina Bowen - If you can’t get enough hockey romance, or you’re nursing a Winter Olympics hangover, here’s a second-chance love story between a hockey player and a former figure skater.

🇲🇬 Red Island House by Andrea Lee - A travel epic set on the lush and mysterious island of Madagascar from a National Book Award-nominated writer

💍 The Wedding People by Alison Espach - A tender and hilarious novel about the unlikely friendship that forms when a woman at a crossroads crashes a stranger’s wedding at a boutique Newport hotel

♥️ An American Marriage by Tayari Jones - Yes, this is a Tayari Jones fan account, and for good reason. Catch up on Jones’ backlist with this award-winning novel about the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young Black newlywed couple.

🐦‍⬛ Starling House by Alix E. Harrow - A modern gothic fantasy with a haunted house, a cursed town, and everything we’ve come to love from this bestselling author

Some other notable titles: Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez, the first eight(!) books in Katee Roberts’ Dark Olympus series, and the first three books in Joe Ide’s IQ series.-VD

💄 It’s so much more than makeup.

In Lipstick , Eileen G’Sell explores one of beauty culture’s most recognizable objects and reveals the surprising politics behind it. Moving beyond the usual empowerment-versus-oppression debate, G’Sell unpacks the contradictions embedded in lipstick: glamour and labor, agency and expectation, ritual and rebellion.

Smart, lively, and refreshingly accessible, Lipstick examines how beauty becomes a site of play, power, and cultural meaning, without losing sight of the pleasure that draws people to it in the first place.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s take on The Bride of Frankenstein hits theaters this weekend, featuring Christian Bale as Frankenstein (yes, I know that in the original novel, the creature is not called Frankenstein—more on that in a second) and Jessie Buckley as The Bride, playing what looks to be a sort of undead Bonnie Parker by way of Cruella de Vil. 

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) was one of the early cinematic sequel successes and is generally thought to be superior to the film that inspired it, Frankenstein (1931). That film was in turn based not on Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, but a stage adaptation of Frankenstein by Peggy Webling. A spate of horror adaptations were popular in the theater in the late 1800s, and so when Hollywood realized that horror played even better on screens, there was a rush to get the classic scary characters on the screen. 

As I mentioned before (and as you surely know), Mary Shelley never referred to the creature as Frankenstein, and it has become an auto-reply of bookish know-it-alls to correct anyone who does. But they can be forgiven, as these later adaptations do in fact name the creature itself Frankenstein.

There are two other additions to the popular imagination of Frankenstein that also came from Webling: the idea that the creature was revivified via electricity and that it was assembled out of pieces of multiple corpses (hence the stitches and bolts). Neither of these are mentioned in the original novel: Shelley kept the means of bringing the creature to life ambiguous. Nor, it should be said, is The Bride.

Jordy Rosenberg is the author of Night Night Fawn, available now from One World.

I’m still thinking about this thing Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel said in their milieu-defining, We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics: “Poetry provides a way to inhabit revolutionary practice, to ground ourselves in our relations. . .[and] to think about an unevenly miserable world and to spit in its face.”  

Especially since the recent resurgence of zealous mildness into the literary discourse, these words resonate more than ever. In the spirit of not excusing art from the sphere of the political, here are three works that spit in the face of an “unevenly miserable world.”

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 by Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O’Brien: This collectively-written speculative oral history of a post-revolutionary society has developed a cult following in four short years. Messy, contradictory, inspiring renovations of society and self abound! The radically experimental anti-doomscroll novel exists!

This Watery Place: Four Essays on Gestation by Emma Heaney: Memoir + essay + the only truly dialectical autofiction I have ever read.  This Watery Place’s sections advance an argument that is clear and profound: a baby is, at some point, a stranger, and yet this stranger becomes the object of a previously unimaginable love. If we can love this one stranger, then why not a world of them. From the fortressed singularity of the nuclear family, Heaney wrests a radically open proposition (that’s dialectics).

Audition by Pip Adam: Pip Adam is hellbent on pushing prose as close to poetry as humanly possible, to transcendent effect. In Audition, three giants grow uncontrollably in the bowels of a spaceship, stuck in separate sections and hurtling toward a black hole. Obliteration awaits. Or does it?? 

• On an alien planet they are freed from their ship, but Adam leaves us guessing until the very last sentences about whether it will be truly possible for our giants to shed the mental strictures of their prior world and be renewed. 
• No spoilers. But I did say this was a list of books that do a certain amount of righteous spitting.

Take a trip back in time with ThriftBooks Rewinds, where nostalgia lives on every shelf. From Super Mario Adventures and Sweet Valley High drama to classic Star Trek journeys, you can rediscover the stories that shaped your childhood—or explore throwback favorites by decade to relive the eras you love most.

With over 19 million new and used titles in stock, including rare and out-of-print gems, it’s never been easier to bring beloved characters back home where they belong. Plus, enjoy FREE shipping on domestic orders over $15, making your walk down memory lane even sweeter.

Did you know?: Sarah J. Maas began writing the story that would become her debut novel, Throne of Glass, at age 16.

📚 Stash your bookmarks in a cute container and never dog-ear a page corner again.**

🚀 Blast off with the best new sci-fi and fantasy books out in March.

🔪 American Psycho is getting a remake, and Christian Bale has thoughts.

🤎 See the first comprehensive report on the state of America’s Black-owned bookstores.

✍️ Take your shot. Submissions are open for The Black List’s 2026 Unpublished Novel Award.

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