Scholastic announced Thursday that “Sunrise on the Reaping,” the fifth volume of Collins’ blockbuster dystopian series, will be published March 18, 2025. The new book begins with the reaping of the Fiftieth Hunger Games, set 24 years before the original “Hunger Games” novel, which came out in 2008, and 40 years after Collins’ most recent book, “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.”

Lionsgate, which has released film adaptations of all four previous “Hunger Games” books, announced later on Thursday that “Sunrise on the Reaping” will open in theaters on Nov. 20, 2026. Francis Lawrence, who has worked on all but the first “Hunger Games” movie, will return as director.

The first four “Hunger Games” books have sold more than 100 million copies and been translated into dozens of languages. Collins had seemingly ended the series after the 2010 publication of “Mockingjay,” writing in 2015 that it was “time to move on to other lands.” But four years later, she stunned readers and the publishing world when she revealed she was working on what became “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” released in 2020 and set 64 years before the first book.

Collins has drawn upon Greek mythology and the Roman gladiator games for her earlier “Hunger Games” books. But for the upcoming novel, she cites the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume.

“With ‘Sunrise on the Reaping,’ I was inspired by David Hume’s idea of implicit submission and, in his words, ‘the easiness with which the many are governed by the few,'” Collins said in a statement. “The story also lent itself to a deeper dive into the use of propaganda and the power of those who control the narrative. The question ‘Real or not real?’ seems more pressing to me every day.”

The “Hunger Games” movies are a multibillion dollar franchise for Lionsgate. Jennifer Lawrence portrayed heroine Katniss Everdeen in the film versions of “The Hunger Games,” “Catching Fire” and “Mockingjay,” the last of which came out in two installments. Other featured actors have included Philip Seymour Hoffman, Josh Hutcherson, Stanley Tucci and Donald Sutherland.

“Suzanne Collins is a master storyteller and our creative north star,” Lionsgate chair Adam Fogelson said in a statement. “We couldn’t be more fortunate than to be guided and trusted by a collaborator whose talent and imagination are so consistently brilliant.”

The film version of “Songbirds and Snakes,” starring Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler, came out last year. This fall, a “Hunger Games” stage production is scheduled to debut in London.

Ruddy died “peacefully” Saturday at the UCLA Medical Center, according to a spokesperson, who added that among his final words were, “The game is over, but we won the game.”

Tall and muscular, with a raspy voice and a city kid’s swagger, Ruddy produced more than 30 movies and was on hand for the very top and very bottom, from the “Godfather” and “Million Dollar Baby” to “Cannonball Run II” and “Megaforce,” nominees for Golden Raspberry awards for worst movie of the year.

Otherwise, he had a mix of successes such as “The Longest Yard,” which he produced and created the story for, and such flops as the Arnold Schwarzenegger thriller “Sabotage.” He worked often with Burt Reynolds, starting with “The Longest Yard” and continuing with two “Cannonball Run” comedies and “Cloud Nine.” Besides “Hogan’s Heroes,” his television credits include the movies “Married to a Stranger” and “Running Mates.”

Nothing looks better on your resume than “The Godfather,” but producing it endangered Ruddy’s job, reputation and his very life. Frank Sinatra and other Italian Americans were infuriated by the project, which they feared would harden stereotypes of Italians as criminals, and real-life mobsters let Ruddy know he was being watched. One night he heard gunfire outside his home and the sound of his car’s windows being shot out.

On his dashboard was a warning that he should close the production, immediately.

Ruddy saved himself, and the film, through diplomacy; he met with crime boss Joseph Colombo and a couple of henchmen to discuss the script.

“Joe sits opposite me, one guy’s on the couch, and one guy’s sitting in the window,” Ruddy told Vanity Fair in 2009. “He puts on his little Ben Franklin glasses, looks at it (the script) for about two minutes. What does this mean “fade in?” he asked.’”

Ruddy agreed to remove a single, gratuitous mention of the word “mafia” and to make a donation to the Italian American Civil Rights League. Colombo was so pleased that he urged Ruddy to appear with him at a press conference announcing his approval of the movie, a gathering that led to Ruddy’s being photographed alongside members of organized crime.

With the stock of parent company Gulf & Western dropping fast, Paramount fired Ruddy, only to have director Francis Coppola object and get him rehired. In the end, mobsters were cast as extras and openly consulted with cast members. Ruddy himself made a cameo as a Hollywood studio guard.

“It was like one happy family,” Ruddy told Vanity Fair. “All these guys loved the underworld characters, and obviously the underworld guys loved Hollywood.”

With a cast including Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and Robert Duvall, “The Godfather” was a critical and commercial sensation and remains among the most beloved and quoted movies in history. When Ruddy was named winner of the best picture Oscar at the 1973 ceremony, the presenter was Clint Eastwood, with whom he would produce “Million Dollar Baby,” the best picture winner in 2005. Upon the 50th anniversary of “The Godfather,” in 2022, Ruddy himself became a character. Miles Teller played him in “The Offer,” a Paramount+ miniseries about the making of the movie, based on Ruddy’s experiences.

“Al Ruddy was absolutely beautiful to me the whole time on ‘The Godfather’; even when they didn’t want me, he wanted me,” Pacino said in a statement. “He gave me the gift of encouragement when I needed it most and I’ll never forget it.”

Ruddy was married to Wanda McDaniel, a sales executive and liaison for Giorgio Armani who helped make the brand omnipresent in Hollywood, whether in movies or at promotional events. They had two children.

Born in Montreal in 1930, Albert Stotland Ruddy moved to the U.S. as a child and was raised in New York City. After graduating from the University of Southern California, he was working as an architect when he met TV actor Bernard Fein in the early 1960s. Ruddy had tired of his career, and he and Fein decided to develop a TV series, even though neither had done any writing.

Their original idea was a comedy set in an American prison, but they soon changed their minds.

“We read in the paper that … (a) network was doing a sitcom set in an Italian prisoner of war camp and we thought, ‘Perfect,’” Ruddy later explained. “We rewrote our script and set it in a German POW camp in about two days.”

Starring Bob Crane as the wily Col. Hogan, “Hogan’s Heroes” ran from 1965-71 on CBS but was criticized for trivializing World War II and turning the Nazis into lovable cartoons. Ruddy remembered network head William Paley calling the show’s concept “reprehensible,” but softening after Ruddy “literally acted out an episode,” complete with barking dogs and other sound effects.

While Fein continued with “Hogan’s Heroes,” Ruddy turned to film, overseeing the low-budget “Wild Seed” for Brando’s production company. His reputation for managing costs proved most useful when Paramount Pictures head Robert Evans acquired rights to Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel “The Godfather” and sought a producer for what was supposed to be a minor, profit-taking gangster film.

“I got a call on a Sunday. ‘Do you want to do The Godfather?’” Ruddy told Vanity Fair. “I thought they were kidding me, right? I said, ‘Yes, of course, I love that book’ — which I had never read.”

The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a Penguin Random House division, announced Monday the dismissals of Alfred A. Knopf publisher Reagan Arthur and Pantheon/Schocken publisher Lisa Lucas. A publishing official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the restructuring was for financial reasons. Knopf and Pantheon/Schocken are two of the industry’s most established literary publishers and Arthur and Lucas two of the most widely liked editors. Their departures were met with surprise and dismay around the industry; author Sara Schaff wrote on X that the news was “demoralizing and short sighted.”

The book market has softened since early in the pandemic, when sales surged amid shutdowns in the entertainment industry and beyond. In a year-end company letter sent in December 2023, Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya referred to “very difficult and challenging” changes facing the company. On Monday, Knopf Doubleday publisher Maya Mavjee said the latest “realignment” was “necessary for our future growth.”

“Our new structure –- consisting of a nimble, concentrated leadership team –- will enable us to meet the trials of an ever-shifting marketplace, hone the shape and focus of our imprints, and continue to allow us to do what we do best: publish great books,” Mavjee said.

Jordan Pavlin, currently Knopf’s editor in chief, will now also serve as publisher. At Pantheon, vice president-editorial director Denise Oswald will report to the publisher of Doubleday, Bill Thomas.

Over the past few years, much of Penguin Random House’s leadership team has retired, died or otherwise departed. CEO Markus Dohle left after the publisher’s purchase of rival Simon & Schuster was blocked in 2022 by a federal judge, and numerous longtime officials accepted buyouts. Arthur’s immediate predecessor at Knopf, Sonny Mehta, died in 2019. One of Knopf’s most celebrated editors, Robert Gottlieb, died last year.

Arthur, who joined Knopf in 2020 after heading Little, Brown and Company, had worked with Ian McEwan and Nathan Hill among others. A Knopf novel, Jayne Anne Phillips’ “Night Watch,” is this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Lucas was also hired in 2020, after serving four years as executive director of the National Book Foundation, where she had been the first Black person and first woman to head the non-profit organization. Her books at Pantheon included Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s novel “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” a National Book Award finalist, and Laura Warrell’s novel “Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner prize.

Lucas wrote on X that she learned of her dismissal a few days after being honored by her alma mater, the University of Chicago, for professional achievement. The news also came almost exactly six years since the death of her father, musician Reggie Lucas.

“WILD RIDE FOR ONLY FOUR DAYS,” she wrote.

Adjei-Brenyah tweeted that Lucas had made Pantheon one of the industry’s most diverse imprints and that “to not even allow” her five years on the job was “pretty shameful.” Pantheon author Nina McConigley wrote on X: “As an author who signed with @PantheonBooks — @likaluca was one of the reasons I was so excited. She is a role model in so many senses of the word. So so brokenhearted.”

A spokesperson for publisher Penguin Random House Canada said Munro, winner of the Nobel literary prize in 2013, died Monday at home in Port Hope, Ontario. Munro had been in frail health for years and often spoke of retirement, a decision that proved final after the author’s 2012 collection, “Dear Life.”

Often ranked with Anton Chekhov, John Cheever and a handful of other short story writers, Munro achieved stature rare for an art form traditionally placed beneath the novel. She was the first lifelong Canadian to win the Nobel and the first recipient cited exclusively for short fiction. Echoing the judgment of so many before, the Swedish academy pronounced her a “master of the contemporary short story” who could “accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages.”

Munro, little known beyond Canada until her late 30s, also became one of the few short story writers to enjoy ongoing commercial success. Sales in North America alone exceeded 1 million copies and the Nobel announcement raised “Dear Life” to the high end of The New York Times’ bestseller list for paperback fiction. Other popular books included “Too Much Happiness,” “The View from Castle Rock” and “The Love of a Good Woman.”

Over a half century of writing, Munro perfected one of the greatest tricks of any art form: illuminating the universal through the particular, creating stories set around Canada that appealed to readers far away. She produced no single definitive work, but dozens of classics that were showcases of wisdom, technique and talent — her inspired plot twists and artful shifts of time and perspective; her subtle, sometimes cutting humor; her summation of lives in broad dimension and fine detail; her insights into people across age or background, her genius for sketching a character, like the adulterous woman introduced as “short, cushiony, dark-eyed, effusive. A stranger to irony.”

Her best known fiction included “The Beggar Maid,” a courtship between an insecure young woman and an officious rich boy who becomes her husband; “Corrie,” in which a wealthy young woman has an affair with an architect “equipped with a wife and young family”; and “The Moons of Jupiter,” about a middle-aged writer who visits her ailing father in a Toronto hospital and shares memories of different parts of their lives.

“I think any life can be interesting,” Munro said during a 2013 post-prize interview for the Nobel Foundation. “I think any surroundings can be interesting.”

Disliking Munro, as a writer or as a person, seemed almost heretical. The wide and welcoming smile captured in her author photographs was complemented by a down-to-earth manner and eyes of acute alertness, fitting for a woman who seemed to pull stories out of the air the way songwriters discovered melodies. She was admired without apparent envy, placed by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, John Updike and Cynthia Ozick at the very top of the pantheon. Munro’s daughter, Sheila Munro, wrote a memoir in which she confided that “so unassailable is the truth of her fiction that sometimes I even feel as though I’m living inside an Alice Munro story.” Fellow Canadian author Margaret Atwood called her a pioneer for women, and for Canadians.

“Back in the 1950s and 60s, when Munro began, there was a feeling that not only female writers but Canadians were thought to be both trespassing and transgressing,” Atwood wrote in a 2013 tribute published in the Guardian after Munro won the Nobel. “The road to the Nobel wasn’t an easy one for Munro: the odds that a literary star would emerge from her time and place would once have been zero.”

Although not overtly political, Munro witnessed and participated in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and ’70s and permitted her characters to do the same. She was a farmer’s daughter who married young, then left her husband in the 1970s and took to “wearing miniskirts and prancing around,” as she recalled during a 2003 interview with The Associated Press. Many of her stories contrasted the generation of Munro’s parents with the more open-ended lives of their children, departing from the years when housewives daydreamed “between the walls that the husband was paying for.”

Moviegoers would become familiar with “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the improbably seamless tale of a married woman with memory loss who has an affair with a fellow nursing home patient, a story further complicated by her husband’s many past infidelities. “The Bear” was adapted by Sarah Polley into the 2006 feature film “Away from Her,” which brought an Academy Award nomination for Julie Christie. In 2014, Kristen Wiig starred in “Hateship, Loveship,” an adaptation of the story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” in which a housekeeper leaves her job and travels to a distant rural town to meet up with a man she believes is in love with her — unaware the romantic letters she has received were concocted by his daughter and a friend.

Even before the Nobel, Munro received honors from around the English-language world, including Britain’s Man Booker International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award in the U.S., where the American Academy of Arts and Letters voted her in as an honorary member. In Canada, she was a three-time winner of the Governor’s General Award and a two-time winner of the Giller Prize.

Munro was a short story writer by choice, and, apparently, by design. Judith Jones, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf who worked with Updike and Anne Tyler, did not want to publish “Lives of Girls & Women,” her only novel, writing in an internal memo that “there’s no question the lady can write but it’s also clear she is primarily a short story writer.”

Munro would acknowledge that she didn’t think like a novelist.

“I have all these disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people’s lives,” she told the AP. “That was one of the problems, why I couldn’t write novels. I never saw things hanging together too well.”

Alice Ann Laidlaw was born in Wingham, Ontario, in 1931, and spent much of her childhood there, a time and place she often used in her fiction, including the four autobiographical pieces that concluded “Dear Life.” Her father was a fox farmer, her mother a teacher and the family’s fortunes shifted between middle class and working poor, giving the future author a special sensitivity to money and class. Young Alice was often absorbed in literature, starting with the first time she was read Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” She was a compulsive inventor of stories and the “sort of child who reads walking upstairs and props a book in front of her when she does the dishes.”

A top student in high school, she received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism as a “cover-up” for her pursuit of literature. She was still an undergraduate when she sold a story about a lonely teacher, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” to CBC Radio. She was also publishing work in her school’s literary journal.

One fellow student read “Dimensions” and wrote to the then-Laidlaw, telling her the story reminded him of Chekhov. The student, Gerald Fremlin, would become her second husband. Another fellow student, James Munro, was her first husband. They married in 1951, when she was only 20, and had four children, one of whom died soon after birth.

Settling with her family in British Columbia, Alice Munro wrote between trips to school, housework and helping her husband at the bookstore that they co-owned and would turn up in some of her stories. She wrote one book in the laundry room of her house, her typewriter placed near the washer and dryer. Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers and other writers from the American South inspired her, through their sense of place and their understanding of the strange and absurd.

Isolated from the literary center of Toronto, she did manage to get published in several literary magazines and to attract the attention of an editor at Ryerson Press (later bought out by McGraw Hill). Her debut collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” was released in 1968 with a first printing of just under 2,700 copies. A year later it won the Governor’s General Award and made Munro a national celebrity — and curiosity. “Literary Fame Catches City Mother Unprepared,” read one newspaper headline.

“When the book first came they sent me a half dozen copies. I put them in the closet. I didn’t look at them. I didn’t tell my husband they had come, because I couldn’t bear it. I was afraid it was terrible,” Munro told the AP. “And one night, he was away, and I forced myself to sit down and read it all the way through, and I didn’t think it was too bad. And I felt I could acknowledge it and it would be OK.”

By the early ’70s, she had left her husband, later observing that she was not “prepared to be a submissive wife.” Her changing life was best illustrated by her response to the annual Canadian census. For years, she had written down her occupation as “housewife.” In 1971, she switched to “writer.”

Over the next 40 years, her reputation and readership only grew, with many of her stories first appearing in The New Yorker. Her prose style was straightforward, her tone matter of fact, but her plots revealed unending disruption and disappointments: broken marriages, violent deaths, madness and dreams unfulfilled, or never even attempted. “Canadian Gothic” was one way she described the community of her childhood, a world she returned to when, in middle age, she and her second husband relocated to nearby Clinton.

“Shame and embarrassment are driving forces for Munro’s characters,” Atwood wrote, “just as perfectionism in the writing has been a driving force for her: getting it down, getting it right, but also the impossibility of that.”

She had the kind of curiosity that would have made her an ideal companion on a long train ride, imagining the lives of the other passengers. Munro wrote the story “Friend of My Youth,” in which a man has an affair with his fiancee’s sister and ends up living with both women, after an acquaintance told her about some neighbors who belonged to a religion that forbade card games. The author wanted to know more — about the religion, about the neighbors.

Even as a child, Munro had regarded the world as an adventure and mystery and herself as an observer, walking around Wingham and taking in the homes as if she were a tourist. In “The Peace of Utrecht,” an autobiographical story written in the late 1960s, a woman discovers an old high school notebook and remembers a dance she once attended with an intensity that would envelop her whole existence.

“And now an experience which seemed not at all memorable at the time,” Munro wrote, “had been transformed into something curiously meaningful for me, and complete; it took in more than the girls dancing and the single street, it spread over the whole town, its rudimentary pattern of streets and its bare trees and muddy yards just free of the snow, over the dirt roads where the lights of cars appeared, jolting toward the town, under an immense pale wash of sky.”

___

This story has been updated to correct the title of “The Beggar Maid.”

Cardinals spokesman Brian Bartow said Tuesday the team had been informed of his death by Herzog’s family. The team was not yet sure whether it happened Monday night or Tuesday. Herzog had been at Busch Stadium on April 4 for the Cardinals’ home opener.

A crew-cut, pot-bellied tobacco chewer who had no patience for the “buddy-buddy” school of management, Herzog joined the Cardinals in 1980 and helped end the team’s decade-plus pennant drought by adapting it to the artificial surface and distant fences of Busch Memorial Stadium. A typical Cardinals victory under Herzog was a low-scoring, 1-run game, sealed in the final innings by a “bullpen by committee,” relievers who might be replaced after a single pitch, or temporarily shifted to the outfield, then brought back to the mound.

The Cardinals had power hitters in George Hendrick and Jack Clark, but they mostly relied on the speed and resourcefulness of switch-hitters Vince Coleman and Willie McGee, the acrobat fielding of shortstop and future Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith and the effective pitching of starters such as John Tudor and Danny Cox and relievers Todd Worrell, Ken Dayley and Jeff Lahti. For the ’82 champions, Herzog didn’t bother rotating relievers, but simply brought in future Hall of Famer Bruce Sutter to finish the job.

“They (the media) seemed to think there was something wrong with the way we played baseball, with speed and defense and line-drive hitters,” Herzog wrote in his memoir “White Rat: A Life in Baseball,” published in 1987. “They called it ‘Whiteyball’ and said it couldn’t last.”

Under Herzog, the Cards won pennants in 1982, 1985 and 1987, and the World Series in 1982, when they edged the Milwaukee Brewers in seven games. Herzog managed the Kansas City Royals to division titles in 1976-78, but they lost each time in the league championship to the New York Yankees.

Overall, Herzog was a manager for 18 seasons, compiling a record of 1,281 wins and 1,125 losses. He was named Manager of the Year in 1985 and voted into the Hall by the Veterans Committee in 2010, his plaque noting his “stern, yet good-natured style,” and his emphasis on speed, pitching and defense. Just before he formally entered the Hall, the Cardinals retired his uniform number, 24.

When asked about the secrets of managing, he would reply a sense of humor and a good bullpen.

Dorrel Norman Elvert Herzog was born in New Athens, Illinois, a blue-collar community that would shape him long after he left. He excelled in baseball and basketball and was open to skipping the occasional class to take in a Cardinals game. Signed up by the Yankees, he was a center fielder who discovered that he had competition from a prospect born just weeks before him, Mickey Mantle.

Herzog never played for the Yankees, but he did get to know manager Casey Stengel, another master shuffler of players who became a key influence. The light-haired Herzog was named “The White Rat” because of his resemblance to Yankees pitcher Bob “The White Rat” Kuzava.

Like so many successful managers, Herzog was a mediocre player, batting just .257 over eight seasons and playing several positions. His best year was with Baltimore in 1961, when he hit .291. He also played for the Washington Senators, Kansas City Athletics and Detroit Tigers, with whom he ended his playing career, in 1963.

Ken Holtzman, who threw 2 no-hitters for the Chicago Cubs before winning 3 World Series in Oakland, dies at 78

“Baseball has been good to me since I quit trying to play it,” he liked to say.

After working as a scout and coach, Herzog was hired in 1967 by the New York Mets as director of player development, with Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan among the future stars he helped bring along. The Mets liked him well enough to designate him the successor to Gil Hodges, but when the manager died suddenly in 1972 the job went to Yogi Berra. Herzog instead debuted with the Texas Rangers the following season, finishing just 47-91 before being replaced by Billy Martin. He managed the Angels for a few games in 1974 and joined the Royals the following season, his time with Kansas City peaking in 1977 when the team finished 102-60.

Many players spoke warmly of Herzog, but he didn’t hesitate to rid his teams of those he no longer wanted, dumping such Cardinals stars as outfielder Lonnie Smith and starting pitcher Joaquin Andujar. One trade worked out brilliantly: Before the 1982 season, he exchanged .300 hitting shortstop Garry Templeton, whom Herzog had chastised for not hustling, for the Padres’ light-hitting Ozzie Smith, now widely regarded as the best defensive shortstop in history. Another deal was less far successful: Gold Glove first baseman Keith Hernandez, with whom Herzog had feuded, to the Mets in the middle of 1983 for pitchers Neil Allen and Rick Ownbey. Hernandez led New York to the World Series title in 1986, while Allen and Ownbey were soon forgotten.

Herzog was just as tough on himself, resigning in the middle of 1990 because he was “embarrassed” by the team’s 33-47 record. He served as a consultant and general manager for the Angels in the early ’90s and briefly considered managing the Red Sox before the 1997 season.

If the ’82 championship was the highlight of his career, his greatest blow was the ’85 series. The Cardinals were up 3 games to 2 against his former team, the Royals, and in Game 6 led 1-0 going into the bottom of the ninth, with Worrell brought in to finish the job.

Jorge Orta led off and grounded a 0-2 pitch between the mound and first base. In one of the most famous blown calls in baseball history, he was ruled safe by umpire Don Denkinger, even though replays showed first baseman Jack Clark’s toss to Worrell was in time. The Cardinals never recovered. Kansas City rallied for two runs to tie the series and crushed the Cards 11-0 in Game 7.

“No, I’m not bitter at Denkinger,” Herzog told the AP years later. “He’s a good guy, he knows he made a mistake, and he’s a human being. It happened at an inopportune time but I do think they ought to have instant replay in the playoffs and World Series.”

As if testing Herzog’s humor, the Hall inducted him alongside an umpire, Doug Harvey.

“I don’t know why he should get in,” Herzog joked at the time. “Doug kicked me out of more games than any other umpire.”

Kobabe’s coming-of-age story was published in 2019, and received the library association’s Alex Award for best young adult literature. But it has since been at the heart of debates over library content, with conservative organizations such as Moms for Liberty contending that parents should have more power to determine what books are available. Politicians have condemned “Gender Queer” and school systems in Florida, Texas and elsewhere have banned it. Last December, police in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, responded to a complaint from a custodian about the book by showing up and searching for it in an 8th grade classroom.

The ALA released its list Monday, along with its annual State of America’s Libraries Report.

“A few advocacy groups have made ‘Gender Queer’ a lightning rod,” says Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. ”People are trying to shut down conversation about gender identity.”

Many books on the ALA’s top 10 snapshot had LGBTQ themes, including the four works immediately following “Gender Queer”: George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” Juno Dawson’s “This Book is Gay,” Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and Mike Curato’s “Flamer.” The list’s other five books all were cited for being sexually explicit: Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Ellen Hopkins’ “Tricks,” Jesse Andrews “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan’s “Let’s Talk About It” and Patricia McCormick’s “Sold.”

“These books are beyond the pale for some people simply because they touch upon sex,” Caldwell-Stone says.

In March, the ALA reported that bans and attempted bans in 2023 again reached record highs since the association began tracking complaints in the early 2000s. More than 4,240 works in school and public libraries were targeted, compared to a then-record 2,571 books in 2022.

Many of the books challenged — 47% — have LGBTQ and racial themes.

The ALA defines a challenge as a “formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.” The association bases its findings on media accounts and reports from librarians but has long believed that many challenges go uncounted, or that some books are pulled by librarians in anticipation of protests.

“I think a lot of people re-evaluated what was important to them during the lockdown and we realized the place we were always happy to be at was a bookstore,” says the 30-year-old Callahan, who with Ross and Carter last year founded the Pocket Books Shop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, close to Carter’s hometown. The roughly 1,000-square foot store is located on the main floor of a Queen Anne style house where Callahan and Ross live upstairs.

“We looked at our lives and thought, ‘Why not?’ Nothing else felt guaranteed anymore so why not just try to be happy,” she added. “We’re not getting rich from this, but we’re able to pay our bills and pay ourselves.”

The new direction of the Pocket Books owners helped lead to another year of growth for independent sellers, with membership in the American Booksellers Association reaching its highest levels in more than 20 years. The ABA added 173 members last year, and now has 2,185 bookstore businesses and 2,599 locations. Three years after the pandemic shut down most of the physical bookstores in the U.S. and the independent community feared hundreds might close permanently, the ABA has nearly 300 more members (under stricter rules for membership) than it did in 2019, the last full year before the spread of COVID-19.

“It speaks to a sea change coming out of the pandemic,” says Allison Hill, CEO of the trade association, citing an overall rise in book sales as people spent more time at home.

One longtime ABA member, Mitchell Kaplan of Books & Books in Coral Gables and other Florida locations, says business has been strong the past couple of years and the customers have been younger, in their teens and 20s. Some are seeking books by Colleen Hoover, Emily Henry and others popular on TikTok, but many are anxious to buy other works.

“I feel like young people are re-discovering the bookstore and the importance of community after being locked down,” he says. “And you’re seeing interest across the board. The other day I had a young person come in who was interested in short stories and wanted to buy a book of Chekhov.”

The ABA also continued its recent trend of not just adding stores, but more diverse stores, whether the kinds of operations or who runs them. Independent stores these days range from longtime traditional sellers such as Books & Books to pop-up stores, mobile shops and one that began as an online store and Instagram account, Black Walnut Books, in Glen Falls, New York.

Once overwhelmingly white, the booksellers association added 46 stores last year that reported diverse ownership, among them Rooted MKE in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Black Garnet Books, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Hillary Smith, owner of Black Walnut Books, is a member of the Dry Creek Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians who is focused on queer and Indigenous titles and works by authors of color.

“I am a mission-based bookseller,” she says.

Another new store owner, Heather Hall of Greenfeather Book Company in Norman, Oklahoma, also sees her job as a calling. Before the pandemic, she had planned to work in the legal profession, but found herself thinking of other possible careers and was surprised to realize that she had the financial resources and enough of a potential local market to go into bookselling — a seemingly distant dream.

Hall is a self-described “loud mouth” who soon became active in countering the state’s book bannings. After a Norman high school teacher was criticized (and eventually resigned) for sharing the QR code to the Brooklyn Public Library’s Books Unbanned Project — an initiative to enable students nationwide to access books banned in their communities — Hall decided to give away T-shirts with the library’s code.

“Being loud and obnoxious is a normal part of my life,” she says with a laugh. “I am 100% in with the ability to have a conversation about every aspect of books. I’m not talking from an ivory tower perspective. It can be romance novels, science fiction, genre fiction. I’m talking about graphic novels. These conversations are the things in my life that make it better and happier and more wonderful.”

Hill says sales appear “softer” in 2023 than in the last couple of years, but still anticipates further growth for the trade association, with 56 member stores added so far and 18 closing.

Prospective owners include 32-year-old Paullina Mills of Perry, Iowa, who had worked in education for the past decade until recent state legislation — including proposed restrictions on what books can be taught — made her consider a new path. This summer, she plans to open Century Farm Books & Brews, and have it live up to its name as a gathering place for drinks and books and bookish conversations.

“I wanted a place where people would come and get a glass of wine and maybe have a book club,” she says. “I think in general we have missed personal connections (during the pandemic) and this seems like a great way to fill a hole in our community. It seemed like a pipe dream at first, but then I found a building and it was like, ‘OK, I’m going to jump in headfirst and see how it goes.”

The Open Field, a Penguin Random House imprint overseen by Maria Shriver, announced Tuesday that Kinzinger’s “Renegade: My Life in Faith, the Military, and Defending America from Trump’s Attack on Democracy” is scheduled for release on Oct. 17.

“Ever since my final falling-out with the GOP, on the day of the deadly January 6 attack on the Capitol by Donald Trump’s followers, I have wanted to tell the inside story of how my party and also my faith have been hijacked by extremists who represent a real danger to our democracy,” Kinzinger said in a statement.

“This book is the result, a full telling of my experience from a pilgrim with genuine values to a conservative who has no home but is determined to play a role in our recovery from a devastating political war,” he added.

Kinzinger, an Iraq War veteran first elected to Congress in 2010, became a leading GOP critic of Trump and his Republican colleagues after Jan. 6. He denounced Trump for inciting “an angry mob” with false claims the 2020 election was stolen and voted to impeach the then-president. He was later one of two Republicans, along with Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who joined the House committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack.

Last fall, he announced he would not seek reelection after the Democrat-controlled Illinois Legislature approved new congressional maps that would have forced Kinzinger and a fellow Republican incumbent, Rep. Darin LaHood, into a primary matchup.

Kinsinger “examines the forces that allowed such an attack to happen in the first place, from the misinformation campaign waged by Fox News and partisan media to the inculcation of extremism in families and faith communities,” according to his publisher.

The publisher described the book as “part memoir, part searing examination.”

The book will offer “an inside account of one of the most tumultuous events in recent American history and sounds the alarm on the devastating consequences of letting extremism go unchecked,” the publisher said.

Su deceso en un hospital de Los Angeles fue confirmado por su madre, Priscilla, pocas horas después de que su hija fue llevada de emergencia después de sufrir un accidente de salud en su domicilio.

“Con profundo pesar debo compartir la devastadora noticia de que mi hermosa hija Lisa Marie nos ha dejado”, dijo Priscilla Presley en un comunicado. “Ella era la persona más apasionada, fuerte y cariñosa que he conocido”.

Presley, la única hija de Elvis y Priscilla Presley, tenía el mismo encanto taciturno de su padre, sus ojos caídos, la sonrisa insolente, la voz grave y sensual. Lanzó sus propios álbumes de rock en la década del 2000, y se presentó en el escenario con artistas como Pat Benatar y Richard Hawley, entre otros.

Incluso tuvo vínculos musicales con su padre, acompañándolo con las voces de grabaciones de Elvis como “In the Ghetto” y “Don’t Cry Daddy”, una triste balada que le recordaba a él de la muerte prematura de su madre, la abuela de Lisa Marie, Gladys Presley.

“Ha estado toda mi vida”, dijo a The Associated Press en 2012, al hablar sobre la influencia de su padre. “No es algo que escuche ahora y sea diferente. Aunque lo puedo escuchar con más atención. Me mantengo en el hecho de que siempre he sido una admiradora. Él siempre ha sido una influencia en mí”.

Su nacimiento, exactamente nueve meses después de la boda de sus padres, fue una noticia internacional y sus orígenes no eran pasados por alto por ella. Para apoyar el musical de Baz Luhrmann “Elvis”, Lisa Marie y Priscilla Presley han asistido a alfombras rojas y premiaciones junto con las estrellas de la película.

Lisa Marie estuvo en los Globos de Oro el martes, a tiempo para celebrar el premio de mejor actor de una película de drama para Austin Butler por interpretar a su padre. Días antes, estuvo en Memphis, Tennessee, en Graceland — la mansión donde vivía Elvis — para conmemorar la fecha de nacimiento de su padre, el 8 de enero.

Vivió con su madre, actriz conocida por “Dallas” y las películas de “Naked Gun” (“Agárralo como puedas”), en California después de que sus padres se separaron en 1973. Tenía memorias tempranas de su padre durante sus visitas a Graceland, montado en carritos de golf por el barrio y haciendo entradas impactantes en su propia casa.

“Siempre estaba totalmente, totalmente arreglado. Nunca lo veías en su pijama bajando por las escaleras, nunca”, dijo Lisa Marie a The Associated Press en 2012. “Nunca lo veías si no fuera con un atuendo de ‘listo para ser visto'”.

Elvis Presley murió en agosto de 1977, cuando apenas tenía 42 años, y Lisa Marie 9 años. Ella se estaba quedando en Graceland en ese entonces y recordaba que él se despidió con un beso de buenas noches horas antes quedar inconsciente y nunca recuperarse. Al día siguiente, cuando ella lo vio, él estaba bocabajo en un baño.

“Tenía una sensación”, dijo a Rolling Stone en 2003. “De que él no estaba bien, todo lo que sé es que tenía esa sensación, y ocurrió eso. Estaba obsesionada con la muerte a una edad muy temprana”.

Tiempo después, ella generó sus propios encabezados. Tuvo problemas con drogas y matrimonios muy conocidos. Sus cuatro esposos incluyen a Michael Jackson y Nicolas Cage.

Jackson y Presley se casaron en República Dominicana en 1994, pero el matrimonio terminó dos años después y estuvo definido por numerosas apariciones en público extrañas, incluyendo un beso inesperado de Jackson durante los Premios MTV a los Videos Musicales y una entrevista conjunta con Diane Sawyer en la que ella defendió a Jackson contra las acusaciones de que había abusado sexualmente de un menor.

Su otro matrimonio famoso duró incluso menos: Cage pidió el divorcio después de cuatro meses casados en 2002.

“He chocado con muchas paredes y árboles”, dijo a AP en 2012. “Pero ahora puedo ver en retrospectiva y decirte que … Fue un proceso de crecimiento, sólo que de diferente manera. Yo simplemente estaba frente a todos todo el tiempo. Porque todo eso está documentado, claro”.

Lisa Marie se involucró en numerosas causas humanitarias, desde programas contra la pobreza administrados por la Fundación Caritativa Elvis Presley a esfuerzos de socorro tras el Huracán Katrina. Por sus labores fue reconocida en Nueva Orleans y Memphis, Tennessee.

Presley tuvo dos hijos, la actriz Riley Keough, nacida en 1989, y Benjamin Keough, nacido en 1992, con Danny Keough. También tuvo a las mellizas Harper y Finley Lockwood, con su exesposo Michael Lockwood en 2008.

Su matrimonio con Lockwood terminó en un divorcio complicado y largo que comenzó en 2016 y todavía no se resolvía cuando murió, aunque fue declarada oficialmente soltera en 2021. En la pelea las mellizas, de ahora 15 años, fueron puestas temporalmente bajo tutela para protegerlas en 2017. Presley y Lockwood compartieron después la custodia, pero seguían en conflicto por el tema y Lockwood buscaba más manutención de Presley.

Benjamin Keough se suicidó en 2020 a los 27 años. Presley fue abierta sobre su dolor y en agosto pasado escribió un ensayo sobre “vivir la horrible realidad” desde la muerte de su hijo.

“He lidiado con la muerte, el dolor y la pérdida desde los 9 años. He tenido más que la carga justa de eso en mi vida y de alguna manera he llegado hasta aquí”, escribió en el ensayo que compartió con la revista People.

“Pero esta, ¿la muerte de mi hermoso, hermoso hijo? El ser más dulce e increíble que haya tenido el privilegio de conocer, que me hacía sentir tan honrada cada día por ser su madre. Que se parecía tanto a su abuelo en tantos niveles que de hecho me asustaba. Que me hacía preocuparme por él más de lo que lo haría naturalmente”, continuaba el ensayo. “No. Simplemente no, no, no, no”.

Lisa Marie se convirtió en la única heredera del fondo de Elvis Presley después de que su padre murió. Junto con Elvis Presley Enterprises, el fondo administraba Graceland y otros bienes hasta que ella vendió su parte mayoritaria en 2005. Ella conservó la propiedad de la Mansión de Graceland, los 13 acres (5,2 hectáreas) que la rodean y los objetos dentro de la casa. Su hijo está enterrado ahí junto con su padre y otros miembros de la familia Presley.

Lisa Marie Presley fue miembro de la Iglesia de la Cienciología, su hijo nació en 1992 siguiendo los preceptos establecidos por el fundador de la iglesia L. Ron Hubbard, de acuerdo con un reporte de AP de entonces. Tiempo después abandonó la iglesia.

Lisa Marie y Priscilla Presley solían hacer viajes a Graceland para enormes celebraciones con fans en las que conmemoraban la muerte y el nacimiento de Elvis. Uno de los dos aviones de Graceland se llama Lisa Marie.

Después de su primer álbum “To Whom It May Concern”, en 2003, algunos fans llegaron a verla presentarse en vivo tan solo por curiosidad por su famosa familia, dijo a AP en 2005.

“Primero tuve que superar la idea preconcebida sobre mí”, dijo sobre las barreras para convertirse en una cantautora.

“De alguna manera debía quitarme eso de encima y presentarme y ese era el primer obstáculo, después cantar enfrente de todos y, ese era el segundo (obstáculo), y yo soy la hija de, ya sabes de quién soy la hija, tenía algunos obstáculos que superar sin duda”, señaló. “Pero la balanza nunca se fue a la otra dirección demasiado”.

The question he kept hearing: “What about McCarthyism?”

The future Nobel Laureate wrote that the practice embodied by U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was “simply a new name for something that has existed from the moment when popular government emerged.”

“It is the attempt to substitute government by men for government by law,” Steinbeck continued in a 1954 column for Le Figaro that had rarely been seen until it was reprinted this week in the literary quarterly The Strand Magazine. “We have always had this latent thing. All democracies have it. It cannot be wiped out because, by destroying it, democracy would destroy itself.”

Steinbeck was closely associated with his native California, the setting for all or most of “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Of Mice and Men” and other fiction. But he lived briefly in Paris in the mid-1950s and wrote a series of short pieces for Le Figaro that were translated into French.

Most of his observations were humorous reflections on his adopted city, but at times he couldn’t help commenting on larger matters.

“Anyone even remotely familiar with Steinbeck’s works knows that he never shied away from taking on controversial topics,” Andrew F. Gulli, managing editor of The Strand, writes in a brief introduction. The Strand has unearthed obscure works by Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and many others. Gulli calls Steinbeck’s column in the French publication a timely work for current concerns about democracy.

“The Grapes of Wrath” was a defining work of the Great Depression. Steinbeck held to an idealistic liberalism that was formed in part in the 1930s by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, deepened by the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in World War II and eventually tested by the Vietnam War. He despised both McCarthyism and communism, opposing what he called “any interference with the creative mind” — whether censorship in the U.S. or the persecution of writers in the Soviet Union.

“He stated in the 1960s that the role of an artist was to critique his country,” says Susan Shillinglaw, who directs the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University.

Steinbeck believed that the United States was a force for good and fortunate in its ability to correct itself. He advocated a version of tough love hard to defend now, likening democracy to a child who “must be hurt constantly” to endure and regarding McCarthyism as a passing threat that would strengthen the country in the long run.

“In resisting, we keep our democracy hard and tough and alive, its machinery intact. An organism untested soon goes flabby and weak,” he wrote.

McCarthyism was peaking around the time of Steinbeck’s column and McCarthy himself would be censured by his Senate peers within months and dead by 1957. Political historian Julian Zelizer says that Steinbeck was not alone in recognizing the dangers of anti-communist hysteria, while maintaining an “unyielding optimism” that “the constitutional separation of powers and pluralism would keep these forces on the margins.”

Lucan Way, whose books include “Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics,” tells The Associated Press that “in principle the clear and unambiguous defeat of anti-democratic actors” such as McCarthy might have a positive effect.

But he does not think Steinbeck’s column can be applied to contemporary politics.

“What is going on now is not an example of this phenomenon (the fall of McCarthyism),” Way says. “Trumpism has not been clearly defeated but has instead helped to normalize anti-democratic behavior that was previously considered out of bounds.”