The Dayton Literary Peace Prize celebrates writers "whose work uses the power of the written word to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding." That is: they use books’ power for good. The 2025 recipients are:

🏆 Salman Rushdie will receive the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award for his "persistent and courageous efforts to guide readers through experiences they often aren’t equipped to understand on their own."

• We recommend Rushdie’s memoir Knife for a fierce and challenging defense of the freedom of speech. Hear our discussion of it on the Book Riot Podcast.

🏆 Kaveh Akbar will receive the fiction prize for his 2024 novel Martyr! Priscilla Morris, author of Black Butterflies, was named runner-up.

🏆 Sunil Amrath has won the nonfiction prize for The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years. Lauren Markham’s A Map of Future Ruins is the runner-up.

The winners and runners-up will be honored in a ceremony in Dayton, Ohio the weekend of November 8-9. Each winner receives a $10,000 prize. Runners-up take home $5,000. – RS

A three-pack of new releases in the spotlight today:

Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung is a "novel-in-ghost-stories" about an unnamed narrator wandering around a seemingly abandoned research facility. All that remains are a series of objects, which structure this strange, funny, and poignant book. Readers who discovered Chung through Cursed Bunny will be more than satisfied.

Somebody is Walking Over Your Grave by Mariana Enriquez began when the author learned that the body of someone she knew was discovered in a mass grave. Enriquez’s morbid travelogue is a tour of gravesites around the world, and the customs and stories to be found there.

Heart the Lover by Lily King might have been genetically engineered to rend the heartstrings of book lovers. A story of three friends who meet in a lit class and the love triangle and literary pursuits that follow, Heart the Lover is ready to get you all up in your feelings.

Also out this week:

• An investigative reporter goes deep on the U.S. and China fight for TikTok
• A new novel from Jade Chang on the blessings and curses of unexpected fame
• The second installment in Kate McKinnon’s (yes that Kate McKinnon) uproarious middle grade series, The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science.

Can’t get enough new releases? We’ve got you covered. – JO

As the days get shorter and the nights get cooler, it’s time to stock up on all things cozy, and this delightfully spooky sweatshirt is at the top of our list. It’s the perfect bookish tribute to the season, ideal for all your fall reading marathons. Grab yours and get to reading!

It’s impossible to capture Toni Morrison’s impact in one sentence, but the 1993 Nobel Prize committee came pretty close when they described her as a writer "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."

Morrison’s 1970 debut novel The Bluest Eye is as potent today as it was when it was published. At the heart of the story is a young Black girl who, abused by her father and rejected by her community, dreams of having blonde hair and blue eyes.

Here are the costs of racism. Here are the pains of internalized hatred. Here are the intersections of race, class, gender, and color nearly two decades before Kimberlé Crenshaw formally introduced the idea of intersectionality.

🎧 Listen to this week’s episode of Zero to Well-Read for a conversation about why The Bluest Eye is an essential American novel and what made Toni Morrison one of the best to ever do it. – RS

Banned Books Week is coming up October 5-11, and you won’t want to miss these events.

Libro.fm and Silent Book Club have teamed up to host read-ins at nearly 450 independent bookstores and libraries in protest of ongoing censorship.

Events will include silent reading sessions in addition to opportunities for literary activism like writing postcards to representatives, signing petitions, and preparing for school or library board meetings. All attendees will receive a free audiobook courtesy of Libro.fm.

🗓️ Find an event near you and check your bookstore or library’s website for details.

Here is the perfect scent to pair with your fall reading list. The Brown Sugar + Fig candle, hand-poured in the Pacific Northwest, brings a warm and inviting aroma, making it a must-have for your home library. Light it up, and let your next read inspire you.

Ada Limón is a former Poet Laureate of the United States and was the first Latina to receive the honor. Startlement: New and Selected Poems, out today from Milkweed Editions, presents new poems alongside work collected from Limón’s six previously published books. Here’s one of our favorites:

Do yourself a favor and listen to Limón read it.

Each week, we do our own temperature check of what books readers are buying. To get these numbers, we look at lists from the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, USA Today, Amazon Charts, and Indie Bestsellers. While we don’t have exact sales data, seeing what books are appearing on multiple lists gives us a pretty good sense of what is popping. Here is what is charting this week:

Books on all five bestseller lists:

• The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown

Books on four bestseller lists:

• Katabasis by R. F. Kuang (Publishers Weekly, USA Today, NYT, Indie Bestsellers)

Books on three bestseller lists:

• Wild Card by Elsie Silver (Publishers Weekly, USA Today, NYT)
• The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Publishers Weekly, Amazon, Indie Bestsellers)
• All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation by Elizabeth Gilbert ( USA Today, NYT, Indie Bestsellers)
• Buckeye by Patrick Ryan (NYT, Amazon, Indie Bestsellers)

📚 Learn about how we make this list and see what’s popping at indie bookstores. – DE

Calling all Hocus Pocus fans and Halloween lovers! This vintage-inspired art print will put a spell on you. It’s the perfect way to bring a touch of bewitching fall decor into your home, incantations optional.

🎧 Get 3 free audiobooks from Audiobooks.com, a $45 value just for Book Riot Newsletter subscribers.**

📱 Stay on top of the next BookTok trends with one expert’s predictions

🎬 Get the skinny on how production companies are developing books and their adaptations simultaneously.

🪩 Check out the lineup of authors for next year’s BookCon.

📘 See all the Gen-Z slang that made it into the latest edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

🤑 Consult the bookies’ odds for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

_{**This is a product recommendation from the Book Riot team. When you buy through these links, we may earn a commission.}

Correction: In the 9/25 edition, we cited The Banned Wagon fundraiser as being run by Kate Fugett. Her name is Karie. Thanks to eagle-eyed readers for pointing this out.

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

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