“I believe there are monsters born in this world to human parents,” begins the trailer for Zoe Kazan’s adaptation of East of Eden, which looks freaking incredible.

Pugh leads an all-star cast that includes Tracy Letts as patriarch Cyrus Trask and Mike Faist and Christopher Abbott as his sons, Charles and Adam.

Novelist Alexander Chee stepped in to write an episode focused on Lee, who was omitted from the 1955 adaptation directed by Kazan’s grandfather, the legendary Elia Kazan.

If you’ve been waiting to read or revisit this beloved classic, the time to hesitate is through. Join our Zero to Well-Read guided read-along, kicking off next week. — RJS

It’s been a minute since we had a fall so loaded with big names and highly anticipated releases. The only problem is that it made our highly scientific vibes-based assessment of the It Books of the month damn near impossible.

The ideal It Book rings four bells:

This month’s contenders include an epic-in-every-sense novel being hailed as a modern masterpiece, a beloved YA author’s adult debut, the kickoff of a new series with dark academia vibes from the author of Practical Magic, and more.

Listen as we play a knockout round to crown the It Book of September.

A flood of new books clamoring for a spot on your TBR comes out every month, and with so many competing for your attention, it’s easy to lose track of the ones you’re most excited about. And often, you just end up hearing about the titles with the biggest marketing budgets.

So, how do you keep up with new releases without it spiraling into a part-time job of catalog reviews and spreadsheets? That’s where the New Release Index comes in.

The New Release Index is a database of upcoming books, curated by Book Riot. It’s organized by release date, and you can filter by genre. Above is a sneak peek of some of the new releases out this week.

Here’s how it works: scroll through the covers until you find one that catches your eye. Click on the cover for the book description, and then save the titles you’re interested in on your Watchlist.

The best part is that the New Release Index is included in your All Access subscription. For $6 a month, you not only get the New Release Index, but also all of Book Riot’s paid content. For a limited time, get 15% off an annual membership to celebrate Book Riot’s 15th anniversary!

Sign up for All Access to get started, or you can check out our guide to the New Release Index for more information.

You may or may not know that Pokemon cards are in full Dutch tulip mode right now. One of the results is that stores have had trouble managing demand and securing stock. Enter the Pokemon card vending machine, which is in both of my local grocery stores (one of them has two!). 

I have long wondered why book vending machines haven’t ever become a thing. There have been some educational/nonprofit uses, but straight-up cash-making versions? Never seen one, until I saw this story about book vending machines in a Tampa mall. Pretty straightforward: you agree to have one of these things in a store, hotel, whatever, and you get some portion of the sales. You don’t have to manage it, just put it somewhere and plug it in. Based on Got Books’ IG profile and website, I don’t think there are a ton of these out there (maybe even just a handful). But there should be more. Specifically in these three places:

Kindle Unlimited users get access to a library of over 5 million titles each month. Before you begin the infinite scroll, here are five standouts available now. 

Rachel Pastan is the author of We’re So Lucky to Live Here, about a young theater director who tries to raise enough money to keep her childhood home by staging a production of The Cherry Orchard in the turret house. It’s out September 15th from Delphinium. Below, she recommends three novels about alternative living arrangements.

When I think about stories with grand houses, Anton Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard—written over 100 years ago about a bunch of people trying haplessly to hang on to their beloved home—comes to mind first. I love stories that plop me down into interesting buildings, reconsider the many different ways of living in them, and explore the risk of losing cherished homes. Three more recent additions to the shelf explore what might happen when we give up conventional housing aspirations and invent new relationships to homes, and to each other.

Wolf Bells by Leni Zumas: Two old friends—former bandmates in a punk band—try to hang on to the big, falling apart house on a cliff high over the Pacific one of them inherited. Their plan: turn it into a place where older people, in need of care, live together with younger ones who share the caregiving. It’s a radical, beautiful, sometimes hilarious idea, and all kinds of unexpected things come of it, both lovely and hard. And the chapters are named after the rooms where they take place: dining room, back porch, downstairs bathroom!

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy: The house in East Detroit where the thirteen Turner children grew up is both a beloved link to the family’s past and an unmanageable burden. The mortgage now costs more than the house is worth. When the mother, Viola, can no longer live on her own, her children must decide how to care for her and what to do about the house, which may or may not be literally haunted, but is certainly suffused with love, grief, and also hope.

Dwelling by Emily Hunt Kivel: This odd, funny book begins with a thought experiment: What if every renter in New York City were evicted in a single day? A young woman named Evie finds herself in a strange town full of unlikely houses metastasized with wild additions and eventually moves into a building shaped like a shoe. She turns out to have mad cobblering skills! With a touch of fantasy and a sharp eye for the absurd, the novel offers a surprising happily ever after.

Did you know? At one point in the writing of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Desai had over 5000 pages of notes.

The new historical fiction books out in September include lots of historical horror for spooky season.

Channel back-to-school vibes with five great campus novels.

Queue up the best literary film and TV to stream in September.

This is how Blackwing pencils, beloved by many writers, are made.

Will AI replace celebrity ghostwriters?

Written by Rebecca Schinsky, Danika Ellis, Jeff O’Neal, and Vanessa Diaz. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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