Sorry, Fourth Wing fans. Rebecca Yarros is going to be busy this fall, but it won’t be with promotion for Book 4 in the Empyrean series.

The author appeared on TODAY earlier this week to announce the publication of Peculiar Stars, a standalone contemporary romance coming November 17.

• Yarros introduced the “castaway romance,” with a question: “What would you do if you were stranded for 543 days on a deserted island with your fiancé’s cousin?”

The news about Peculiar Stars comes just a week after an untitled book without a cover listed as “Untitled Empyrean (Not Book Four)” soared to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list.

• Yarros’s fans found the listing before she even had time to announce it, prompting her to clarify in an Instagram post that the drop-in title, intended to be a surprise for fans, doesn’t change the timeline of Book 4.
• The mysterious drop-in title listed at 176 pages is due out September 29.

How much longer will Fourth Wing  fans have to wait for Book Four? The answer remains TBD as Yarros, who has been open about the toll that writing Onyx Storm took on her, just confirmed last month that she’s begun work on the penultimate installment in the planned five-book series.

Great news if you’ve been dreaming of owning your own bookmobile. The Dayton Memorial Library (OH) has listed their former bookmobile for sale. It spent many years crisscrossing Montgomery County delivering books. 

What could you do with a used book mobile? 

• 🚐 Start your own mobile bookstore, perhaps with a genre focus (Horror! Romance! Children’s literature!)
• 🍔 Reconfigure the inside to create a food truck, perhaps with a literary theme (serve up an Edgar Allan Po(k)e cake, maybe?)
• 🎨 Park it in your yard and create your own private reading or art oasis (talk about a reading nook that would be the envy of every book lover!)

The vehicle was made in 2005 and runs on diesel fuel. Drivers must have a CDL, as it comes in at over 31,000 pounds. There are about 132,000 miles on it, which translates to a lot of readers and a lot of great books passing through! 

The book mobile is listed for $35,000, and more information—as well as a ton of photos—can be found on the SVS website.

• Bonus: check out the other bookmobiles that have been listed and sold previously. Who knew!

Never fear: the Dayton Memorial Library didn’t ditch mobile services. Last year, the library upgraded their wheels, thanks to funding from community gifts. The new mobile library has a more accessible design for wheelchair users and continues the library’s long history of delivering materials to people countywide. — KJ

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Laura McGrath’s new book, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction, shows the various ways literary agents shape the modern publishing industry. I spoke to McGrath about what agents do and why they matter, including just how much the books business runs on relationships—with the agent often at the center.

  "Whether you’re an agent, an agent, or an editor, you’re looking at agents. You’re looking at editors, you know, you can look at someone’s list and get a really good sense of the sort of work that they like. But what you can’t figure out is what they’re like to work with. So the matchmaking that agents do is both who’s gonna be the right fit for this project, but also what sort of editor is going to be the right fit for this client.

You want to match up personalities to think about the creative collaboration that you’re putting together, not just the business collaboration that you’re putting together. What’s the sort of editor that’s going to really bring out what’s best in this author? How are they possibly gonna work well together? And an agent is thinking about their individual writer, but they’re also thinking about their whole entire list.

How can I maintain great relationships so that when I want to query them or when I want to pitch them in like five years with another writer, I still have goodwill left in the bank? Because without that trust or without that belief in the agent’s taste there, there’s a breakdown that ends up impacting not only how the agent can function, but how all of their clients are going to be perceived."
__________________

The excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.

🎧 You can listen to our full conversation on this episode of the Book Riot podcast.

Few people in modern media are better positioned to adapt a classic story about toxic boyhood than Jack Thorne, who is following up the success of Adolescence with a new spin on William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, directed by Marc Munden.

The new four-part mini-series, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, will hit Netflix on Monday.

Here’s a look at the reviews:

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "Stunningly good, a horror story told with tenderness...a first-class example of an adaptation done right, and television breathing new life into a familiar story." — Anita Singh, The Telegraph

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "It may centre children, but this is, of course, far from a children’s story - yet by the same token, it’s a series made for the most enlightening kind of family viewing, from which all generations can really take something." — Hugh Montgomery, BBC

⭐️⭐️⭐️ "Every episode feels simultaneously bloated and thin, a feeling only reinforced by denaturing the otherwise saturated palette during the scenes of violence - primitive, you see? It feels like a gimmick trying to hide the absence of real emotion." — Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

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April is Arab American Heritage Month, and Libro.fm is highlighting some fantastic audiobooks at sale prices. Add these to your listening library: an award-winning family saga spanning four decades and two continents, a genre-bending memoir by a Palestinian American journalist, and a debut short story collection exploring an Arab-American community in Michigan.

• Bride of the Sea by Eman Quotah - Newlyweds Muneer and Saeedah are expecting their first child in America. When they divorce, Saeedah goes into hiding, taking on assumed names and moving around the country so that Muneer will not find her and take their daughter, Hanadi, back to Saudi Arabia. When Hanadi comes of age, it will be up to her to reconcile the differences between her two parents, the world she grew up in, the family she never knew, and where her identity lies.
• The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza - This genre-bending memoir begins in October 2019, when Sarah Aziza is hospitalized for an eating disorder. As she is brought back from the dead, she reflects on her ancestral and personal past as the daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees. As she has dreams of her family over the next several months, she uncovers a history of family trauma that also helps shed light on her personal struggles.
• Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine - This award-winning debut short story collection examines the Arab American community in Dearborn, Michigan. A mysterious stranger stirs up drama when he shows up at a local gym pool. A father teaches his son how to cheat the IRS. A failed actor attempts to drive a young Lebanese man to L.A. Sometimes humorous and often poignant, these stories span several decades and explore themes of identity, generational conflict, war trauma, sexuality, belonging, and more.
  

You can see the full list of Arab American Heritage Month titles here!

Rebecca Mahoney is the author of Thrall, a queer vampire novel out now from Disney Publishing. Below, she writes about the long history of queer horror and monsters.

It’s no secret that many queer people love horror, villains, and monsters.

Oftentimes, it’s personal. It’s unfortunately never been much of a leap for many of us to connect to the feared and the persecuted. I live in the Boston area, and have spent many an overcrowded afternoon in Salem—well-known for its hub of dark tourism, and maybe a little lesser-known for its thriving queer community—and I remember once seeing a letter someone left at the memorial for the witch trial victims. I think I could have been you, was the gist of it. People think I’m strange, too. 

I always thought this queer love of monsters was more of a reclaiming, a decision to love and empathize with queer-coded villains created from a place of homophobia. There are many instances of that, for sure. But lately, what has really enriched my love of horror has been exploring how deep the history of queer horror goes, and learning about the queer writers who shaped it in every age. 

Several scholars have theorized that Bram Stoker was working through his repressed attraction to men as he worked on Dracula. James Whale, the godfather of the Universal Studios monster movie, was openly gay, and he enriched movies like The Bride of Frankenstein with queer themes. Even when you look at some of the classic villains outside of horror, you get characters like The Little Mermaid’s Ursula, who playwright and lyricist Howard Ashman lovingly crafted in the image of drag queen Divine.

Throughout history, queer fiction has had so many lines to toe: to be invisible, to be tragic, to be palatable. But in these villains, we get messiness and humor and camp that may not have been expressed otherwise. It’s bombastic. It’s cathartic. And it’s always fun.

So sometimes, the queer love of monsters is a reclaiming. But other times, it’s an intentional foundation that we are so fortunate to keep building on. I am so thrilled to have Thrall, which was queer from the second it was a tiny idea in my head, be a piece of that structure.

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Did you know? Annie Dillard decided to write a book about everything that happened over a three-day period on Lummi Island, a small island in the northernmost part of the San Juan Islands in Washington State. On the second day, a plane crashed into the island. The book she went on to write is called Holy the Firm.

👰‍♀️ Say "I do" to a wedding dress made from recycled books.

🎉 Celebrate Latine poets as National Poetry Month winds down.

🍿 Watch the teaser trailer for the upcoming adaptation of Verity.

✅ Plan your summer reading with Publishers Weekly’s seasonal preview.

🚫 Fight book bans and defend the freedom to read with info from our Literary Activism newsletter.