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Let’s put a finger on the pulse of the publishing industry and check in with The Hot List, our monthly look at the books everyone is talking about, whether they’ve read them or not.

Tongues are wagging about Lindy West’s new memoir Adult Braces, and they’ve been wagging about Jeanette McCurdy’s Half His Age since the former Nickelodeon star announced her debut novel last year. Headstrong women who know what they want are often controversial, and readers can’t get enough of these two.

Abby Jimenez’s latest contemporary romance, The Night We Met, is also climbing charts, and the ceiling is extra high in a season without a new Emily Henry book.

Also on the April Hot List:

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The post The Books Everyone is Talking About in April appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

The National Book Awards Fiction Longlist Is In!

The Fiction longlist is in and I’m patting myself on the back because two of the books I selected for my Book Riot podcast fantasy league made the cut (I’ll share what those are below). These books–some of which release later in the year–are and will be everywhere. I already have a copy of Angela Flournoy’s newest coming to me and there was buzz around it before the Fiction list was out, so I had a feeling I’d be seeing it today. With all of the lists out, I’ll share my predictions for the win in each category and my reasoning on Monday. Without further ado, here are the books on the National Book Awards Fiction longlist:

The Most Disorienting Book of 2025 is Getting Adapted

If you judge your “It” books by adaptation action alone, I’m here to let you know that a book we already knew fell into that category is both being adapted and has some high profile celebrity involvement. Lucy Liu and Charles Melton are attached to star in an adaptation of Katie Kitamura’s Audition. When I saw that Laika is involved, I thought, That’s a fittingly weird choice for this book, because I associate the film studio with stop motion animation films like Coraline and ParaNorman. Variety reports that the film, directed by Lulu Wang (The Farewell), will be live-action. I am chin-hands about how they’re going to adapt this for film. This was my first Kitamura and I went in not knowing what to expect. I am still disoriented and its experimental narrative style makes it a divisive read even as it is firmly a critical success.

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Kwame Alexander and First Book Bring Us a ‘Literacy Pep Rally’

Kwame Alexander and First Book will present a 30-minute, nationwide Literacy Pep Rally on September 16 at 1 p.m. ET. The Newbery Medalist and author of The Crossover will team up with the community-oriented educational resource through Alexander’s literacy nonprofit, One Word at a Time. It sounds like a great time with stories, games, and conversation, plus, Alexander will announce a series of virtual author visits with big names in kidlit like Erin Entrada Kelly and Grace Lin. Register and find more info here.

In this, the year 2025, attaching the word “Freedom” to anything coming from this administration tells me a whole lot about what to expect. The IMLS announced mobile exhibits that will travel the country sharing the story of America’s founding for this country’s 250th birthday next year, but Kelly Jensen breaks down the press release to reveal the propaganda behind these Freedom Trucks.

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The post The Longlisted Fiction Books Everyone Will Be Talking About appeared first on Our Story Insight.

“My girlfriend, Tabby,” says a narrator from Ed Park’s new story collection, “reviews science fiction for a living, which just goes to show you that America is still the greatest, most useless country in the world.”

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Welp. I’m not even reviewing Park’s An Oral History of Atlantis, but writing—obliquely—about him writing it, which puts me sub-Tabby on the fantastic spectrum of American futility. I’m fine with that, because Park is precisely the sort of person you’d want to talk craft with. A bibliophile who can scarcely write a single page of prose without mentioning someone else’s novel—often sci-fi, often invented—he utilizes self-reference to absurd, slapstick peaks rarely matched in contemporary fiction. It’s not turtles on turtles, it’s books on books.

Park says he’s been into “art within art” since college, when Jorge Luis Borges and the surrealist painter René Magritte hit him “like a thunderclap.” This reverberation echoed through his alternate Korean history Same Bed, Different Dreams (a 2024 Pulitzer finalist) as it links the 16 pieces in An Oral History of Atlantis. One of the collection’s characters—a Yale undergrad named Ed—even writes a paper on Magritte, saying, “I’d been captivated by any work of art that contained a work of art within it… Was the interior work of art less ‘real’ than the surrounding work? If so, why does our mind attribute levels of reality to what is, after all, just color on canvas? Since a painter can paint a painter painting a painting, could we ourselves be paintings, painted by some larger, divine painter—i.e., God? Pondering such things probably wouldn’t help me get into law school, but I couldn’t stop.”

Park is a ponderer; An Oral History of Atlantis is a concentrated stockpile of musings. The earliest story here comes from way back in 1998. The title piece, though it reads like COVID-era dystopia, was written shortly before 9/11. “I’ve written more than 16 stories over the years,” Park says with a grin. “But a lot of them didn’t quite get the vibe. These ones, they seem to be communicating with each other.”

He’s right, in that certain motifs—science fiction, the modern publishing industry, music—thread the collection from front to back. But the stories themselves are a blur of style and wordcount, from quick-hitting screwball humor (“The wife on Ambien tries to order Ambien on Amazon.”) to Saundersesque metafiction (“Page seven: Who is Solomon Eveready? What is he doing in my book?”). The longest piece is a Blu-Ray commentary written out in dual columns, a sort of distant cousin to Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad PowerPoint chapter.

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I wondered how Park conceived such disparate works. Was it like ice fishing, shivering in an idea-less shanty and waiting for a bite? Or did it more resemble standing in a batter’s cage, taking a bunch of swings, missing some, clipping others, trying not to get smacked in the face?

“Some of these are basically one-concept stories,” says Park in response. “Those are gifts, right? Like, I get the idea and I can write it pretty quickly, in a way that I enjoy.”

But gifts are just that. A writer can only expect so many of them. Park says other stories simmer for a while and leak out onto the page in a kind of authorial reminiscing. “I don’t think I’d ever written a fiction story set at Yale,” he says of his alma mater and the aforementioned “Machine City,” published in The Baffler in April 2024. “But it felt like I had Yale in the background for years, never touching it. And then one morning I’m like, wait, I’ve got to write about this. And once I had the idea there, I could just keep remembering stuff.” In place of active brainstorming, Park says, “There’s just moments where a sentence will come to mind, or a situation. A story can unfold pretty rapidly from that.”

Finally there are pieces, like the Blu-ray commentary, driven by the framing device itself, for example a letter from an author to his terrible translator (Park: “I was thinking Nabokovian”), or a series of seven rapid-fire, interlocking character vignettes, a form borrowed from the English Author Max Beerbohm. Park has always tried to take advantage of “subliterary” writing. Letters, rants, lists. “It’s not a fixed thing,” he says of such forms. “It’s ephemeral.”

As for finishing the pieces he begins, Park says, “I always try to. But some stories I’ll have maybe half a page and keep it around for years. I think that’s always a good idea. Because time can pass and suddenly I’ll have the same idea again and think, oh, let me look at that stub that I started five years ago. And I’ll find something that I enjoy.”

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Seeing stories to their end is something that Park does not for publishing’s sake—“that feels a little out of my hands”—but for completion and, often, performance. He wrote some of this collection for public readings around New York, which he’s long taken part in as an editor and a teacher. “In my mind, those invitations let me try something new,” Park says. “It’s like a vacation from working on a novel. And for those, I usually write with an audience in mind. My title, An Oral History of Atlantis, reflects that a lot of these were read aloud.”

Park has always tried to take advantage of “subliterary” writing. Letters, rants, lists. “It’s not a fixed thing,” he says of such forms. “It’s ephemeral.”

It’s rather paradoxical that I should grill Park about craft, because his story “The Gift” proposes a general inscrutability in teaching or learning about writing. “The Gift” features one Professor Dublinski—“hottest prof three years running,” reports the campus rag—whose Fundamentals of Aphorism course is a survey in quasi-philosophical gobbledygook. “All true aphorisms aspire to anonymity. They are the only gifts to civilization.”

Like any eccentric modernist, Dublinski inspires some and frustrates most. His methods are, let’s say, questionable. “This story dates back to 2012,” says Park. “I had done some teaching back then. It’s a bit of an academic satire. But some of the teachers I had when I was younger, I still think about them. They were professional writers, and you kind of hung on their every word. I do wonder if something I might have gotten from them was just spur of the moment, and I’ve taken it as gospel.”

Park now lives on the other side of that equation. “Who knows,” he says. “When I teach workshops, I’m talking a lot. Maybe something I’ve said that I might not even remember, a student 10 years down the road will say, you know, I’ve always liked that. Or, I always thought that was utter bullshit.”

Across the publicly traded Zoom æther, this is essentially what I’m doing: gathering scraps, forming ideas, ice fishing in the frozen lake of Ed Park’s mind, taking a batting cage session with him as the machine. My last round of questions, particularly useless, equally American, involves the bewildering cultural cache that Park throws into his work. Some examples from this collection: De La Soul cassingles; the Jesus and Mary Chain; Elvis Costello (“widely considered to be one of our most gifted songwriters”); a 1913 art history book called The Gothic Image; another cassette tape, this time the Pet Shop Boys’ Behaviour; the Rod Stewart Song “Young Turks”; a Civil War chess set that, when viewed sideways, spells out “GOLFNUT”.

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How much is too much, is more or less what I’m trying to clear up. Does some of it get edited in or out after the fact? Is there a gigantic dial that Park rolls up and down, sort of like, let me try one, the tone control knob on a discontinued 1956 Fender Harvard?

“I came up with ‘De La Soul cassingles’ on my first draft,” says Park (not at all defensive about it). “But yes, in going over a draft, I think there probably is a bit of dialing up or down, with that specific level of consumer and pop culture.” The granularity here mirrors Park’s obsession with science fiction, a detail-oriented genre if ever there were. He often dives deep to summarize concepts involving vast worldbuilding and new-age technology. “I want to partake of science fiction without being science fiction,” he says, which sounds circular but tracks when you read Park’s work. “The De La Soul cassingles thing is sort of on the same wavelength.”

De La Soul tapes and “Zongan” technology, René Magritte and “hallucinogenic seaweed”—there’s a method to the madness here if one looks closely. But that risks overinterpretation. Park wrote much of An Oral History of Atlantis for humor, saying that short stories are “funnier per line, per paragraph,” than novels in order to keep a reader’s or a listener’s attention. Park’s overall aesthetic is perhaps best described by words that came from his own hand, a description of some work by a mysterious Kindle-hacking author named Rolph:

Every selection I came across was brilliant… and completely unlike any other part I’d seen. I had no idea how it would all hang together, even though I was privy to Rolph’s obscure architectural strategies and what he called his “ongoing hissy fit aimed at traditional narrative.” Basically, he longed for a text that wasn’t set in stone, something more akin to a living organism—a story with free will. He didn’t like that books started on the first page and ended on the last.

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The post Talking Craft and Completion with Ed Park ‹ appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Last week, President Donald Trump went on a seemingly bizarre campaign against dolls. In his May 4 interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he commented that “a beautiful baby girl” should have fewer toys. After all, he opined, she “can have three dolls or four dolls because what we were doing with China was just unbelievable.” JD Vance continued the doltish doll discourse. “We do need to become more self-reliant, and that’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s not always going to be easy,” he said. Then Vance went all faux Marie Kondo on us: “What I’d ask people is not whether they want… twenty dolls for their kids.”

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It was the latest example of how Trump’s and Vance’s rhetoric can take reasonable ideas—Buy fewer crappy and expensive things for your kids! Keep factories and auto plants in America!—and twist them into gibberish. These comments are clearly BS—a temporary and transactional austerity. Call it social class kitsch. But these most recent remarks do touch, unwittingly, on something that’s actually important: American kids are being overly defined by material goods and they and we need to buy less.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a book about the branding of youth culture called Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers. As a parent, I have come to understand that raising a child who rejects luxury goods and influencer-touted-lip gloss is harder than raising a child who will eagerly decry the concept of capitalism at the dinner table. I argued then that kids are overly dependent on defining themselves through branded stuff. That’s true whether it’s the Bratz and Abercrombie of yesteryear or the Barbie and Sephora of today. My reporting back then showed me that girls identified so heavily with brands because they felt insecure; some of that insecurity is from the hazards of traditional feminine socialization.

Today, however, it’s also very much an insecurity of our moment: kids and teens fear impending climate disaster and the loss of their bodily autonomy. According to the CDC in 2025, 11 percent of girls ages 3 to 17 have diagnosed anxiety. That’s more than one in ten girls: their rising consumption of a range of products targeted to them is not incidentally connected to their growing levels of unease.

“The reason they keep using dolls as their example is because they’re trying to frame caring about material stuff as feminine and thus inherently shameful.”

Do Vance and Trump care about girls forming healthy identities outside of dolls and cosmetics? No, of course not. As Susan Linn, the cofounder of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and author of Consuming Kids tells me, “Trump’s flippant remark is not anti-corporate, it is anti-family—especially in the context of an administration that threatens funding for parks and playgrounds, as well as programs that provide children with play alternatives to that which is being sold to them on screens.”

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And yes, there are other reasons why telling us to buy fewer dolls is patently ridiculous, especially when tariffs will raise the cost of basic goods, like building materials or avocados. Trump and his ilk will also soon want us to buy more and more, just expensive crap made in America: even late night television shows have created hilarious parodies of this, the best of which is the Tariff Tilly doll.

In addition, there’s a clearly toxic gender element to this particular meme: after all, Vance isn’t advising parents to purchase fewer Nerf guns for their man-o-spheric son. “The reason they keep using dolls as their example is because they’re trying to frame caring about material stuff as feminine and thus inherently shameful,” Leah Greenberg  of the progressive organizing group Indivisible recently wrote on Bluesky.

But the grain of truth that Vance and Trump have stumbled on with their soundbites is something parents today may know all too well. Raising unbranded kids—that is, kids not hypnotized by consumer products—means that children and teens get to grow up with non-commodified imaginations. Democratic leaders should not lose sight of the appeal of this for parents who are everyday being pestered for celebrity dolls and Brandy Melville hoodies. Protecting kids from online marketing, for instance, is the sort of pocketbook political ideal—call it “real family values”—that could be seriously popular.

Meanwhile, Trump continues his absurd and odd campaign, most recently threatening to stop Barbies from being sold in the US, a remark that’s even dumber than the social class kitsch that preceded it. We might even call it “sandbox politics.”

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The post Why Donald Trump and JD Vance Can’t Stop Talking About Dolls ‹ appeared first on Our Story Insight.