What to Read Right Now: Timely Books With Hollywood Appeal
Each week, The Hollywood Reporter will offer up the best new (and newly relevant) books that everyone will be talking about — whether it’s a tome that’s ripe for adaptation, a new Hollywood-centric tell-all or the source material for a hot new TV show.
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40 by Alan Heathcock (WME)
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In a thriller that imagines an apocalyptic, if eerily familiar, future America that has been ravaged by climate change and pandemics, a fundamentalist group (whose HQ is set up among the ruins of Hollywood studios) goes to war with the government.
Room & Board by Miriam Parker (Trellis)
For lighter fare, this frothy beach read follows a onetime bigwig Hollywood publicist whose fall from grace sends her back to her alma mater: She moves into her old boarding school to serve as a dorm mother. Think The Chair meets The House Bunny.
Kiki Man Ray by Mark Braude (Aevitas)
Kiki de Montparnasse, born Alice Prin and muse to Man Ray, finally gets her literary due in this, the very first biography to center her story — it’s filled with tales of artistry (and partying) in the Roaring ’20s of postwar Paris.
Fruit Punch by Kendra Allen (Janklow & Nesbit Associates)
The poet goes longform with a memoir that uses conversations with her therapist and flashback scenes of her childhood in Dallas to excavate lessons from her life as a sexual assault survivor and a Black woman who navigated the politics of the Deep South.
Recommended Reading
Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton
Alderton, who made the literary circuit two summers ago with Ghosts, her millennial-forward (in a good way!) novel about the perils of dating in our current modern/technological hellscape, brings her 2018 memoir Everything I Know About Love to the small screen. The show, which premiered for U.K. audiences in June, will begin streaming on Peacock Aug. 25 and follow a similar model to Phoebe Robinson’s Everything’s Trash: It’s a fictionalized adaptation of what was once Alderton’s life story. The book is a delightful time capsule of her early 20s, flailing (in a good way!) around London searching for a career and her way in life.
Scenes From My Life by Michael K. Williams with Jon Sternfeld
The late actor’s memoir, which was nearly completed at the time of his death last September, hits shelves on Aug. 23. It’s written as glimpses of his life, from childhood in Brooklyn, to his early days in the theater and on the backup dancer circuit, to his time playing pivotal roles like Omar in The Wire and Freddy Knight in The Night Of. Those scenes are used to reveal how he came into a life of activism, particularly surrounding youth justice reform, and how he found his desire to “leave bread crumbs,” as he writes, out of the projects in which he was raised.
