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 This inaccessible and outdated reading material is used to justify preventing people from receiving paper literature and information.  10 Must-Read New Books Out in Fall 2024 to Preorder Now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.

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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.Unless you’re new here, you already know what I’m about to say: this list continues to have a lack of diversity on many levels, including being disproportionately by white authors. Some Indie Bestsellers you should know about are We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida and The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan.To get these numbers, we look at the USA Today overall top 10; Publishers Weekly overall top 10; The New York Times top 10, both Combined Print & E-Book Fiction and Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction lists; Amazon Charts top 10, both Fiction and Nonfiction; and Indie Bestsellers top 10, Fiction and Nonfiction, both Paperback and Hardcover. New additions to the list this week are bolded.Books On Four Bestseller Lists:It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover (Publishers Weekly, USA Today, NYT, Amazon)Lovely One: A Memoir by Ketanji Brown Jackson (Publishers Weekly, USA Today, NYT, Indie Bestsellers)Daydream by Hannah Grace (Publishers Weekly, USA Today, NYT, Indie Bestsellers)Books On Three Bestseller Lists:The Games Gods Play by Abigail Owen (Publishers Weekly, USA Today, NYT)Wild Eyes by Elsie Silver (Publishers Weekly, USA Today, NYT)Passions in Death by J.D. Robb (Publishers Weekly, USA Today, NYT)It Starts With Us by Colleen Hoover (USA Today, NYT, Amazon)The Women by Kristin Hannah (NYT, Amazon, Indie Bestsellers)A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (NYT, Amazon, Indie Bestsellers)The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (NYT, Amazon, Indie Bestsellers)The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk (NYT, Amazon, Indie Bestsellers)Go beyond the bestseller lists with made-for-you book recommendations from TBR, our book recommendation service!Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.Let’s Talk About Sex, ScullyGillian Anderson is probably so tired of people referring to her as Agent Scully–I was big into The X-Files and truly cannot help myself. I am also here for her new book all about women’s pleasure, Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous. In a New York Times profile, the Sex Education star talks about shame, self-loathing, and overcoming the external pressures that get in the way of pleasure. The book collects women’s anonymous fantasies gathered by Anderson from followers (I should make clear that these are not random slides into her DMs, but communications from people who responded to her requests for submissions). It’s great to see that she strove for inclusivity as well.Well-Read Black Girl Festival Lineup AnnouncedThis year’s Well-Read Black Girl Fest announced an exciting lineup of literary names you might know, including Nikole Hannah-Jones (Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and The 1619 Project author), Edwidge Danticat (Everything Inside), and Safiya Sinclair (How to Say Babylon). The event, themed New Visions in Storytelling, celebrates “radical perspectives and groundbreaking narratives on our bookshelves” and will be held on Saturday, October 26, at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. Glory Edim (Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me) is doing great things in the book world with WRBG–I highly recommend checking out the event and the work.Booktopia!No, Booktopia is not a bookish amusement park as I first hoped assumed when I read mention of it. It’s an assortment of book crowdfunding projects run under one umbrella on Backerkit by a group of writers and artists. I can’t remember seeing the likes of something like this before and I’d have to spend more time than I can fit into the morning to get a full view of the what and why, but I did find a video where two folks, Katie Lockwood and Rella B Books, talk about how Booktopia is their collab. It’s been running since September 5 and ends September 26, and they already have about $459K in funds raised–not too shabby, self-publishers, not too shabby at all!Books Win at the 2024 EmmysFind out which adaptations took home the biggest prizes at last night’s Emmy Awards, including the adaptation that broke the all-time record for a single season of TV. I have so much viewing to catch up on, y’all…What are you reading? Let us know in the comments!The comments section is moderated according to our community guidelines. Please check them out so we can maintain a safe and supportive community of readers!

Fall into books as diverse as the universe with hand-picked reading recommendations from TBR!