 Avon; Orbit; Forever; Knopf Doubleday; Vertigo | I grew up during an era of extreme boob tube anxiety, when adults fretted that television would eradicate literature. It's true that I still have a better grasp of "Gilligan's Island" than Jane Austen's novels, but TV didn't entirely destroy my interest in books. In fact, a funny thing happened on the way to amusing ourselves to death: Literature became the engine of television. And in this perpetual-motion media marketplace, popular book-based TV shows generate more sales for books. On Monday, Netflix released a list of its most popular series of all time. Six – arguably seven – are closely related to books: - "Bridgerton" is a Regency-era drama based on Julia Quinn's romance novels (but with a diverse cast).
- "Lupin" is a modern-day thriller inspired by Maurice Leblanc's early 20th-century stories about the gentleman-thief Arsène Lupin. (A century of elegant crime.)
- "The Witcher" is a medieval fantasy based on the stories and novels of Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski. (How to get more Geralt.)
- "Sex/Life" is a hot drama based on B.B. Easton's memoir, "44 Chapters About 4 Men," which was originally self-published.
- "Stranger Things" isn't based on any particular book, but the science fiction/horror drama is haunted by Stephen King's "It." (An ode to a mishmash of ingredients.)
- "Money Heist" appears to be an entirely original Spanish thriller (and surprise hit).
- "Tiger King" is a reality show too bizarre to be derived from anything but real life. (How it started.)
- "The Queen's Gambit" is a drama based on a novel by Walter Tevis (who was hardly a one-hit wonder).
- "Sweet Tooth" is a post-apocalyptic fantasy based on a comic book series written and drawn by Canadian Jeff Lemire.
- "Emily in Paris" is a rom-com created by Darren Star. In her latest memoir, "Ladyparts," Deborah Copaken claims that she was not appropriately credited for her contributions, including details she chronicled in her previous memoir, "Shutterbabe." Star claims he did nothing wrong.
 If I had a trillion dollars for every book about our national debt. . . . (Brookings Institution Press; Thomas Nelson; Walker; Vintage; PublicAffairs; Oxford University Press; Westholme; Abbeville) | The sturm und drang in Congress over raising the national debt limit is among the most insincere of Washington's regular dramas. As we're seeing this week, both political parties proclaim their fiscal responsibility while dangling the nation's credit rating out the window by a footnote. (Default would cost 6 million jobs.) It's tempting to ignore this squabble, which is mired in posturing and highly technical arguments. But several books make it more comprehensible, though no less maddening. (The debt-ceiling fight, explained.) Back in 2012, when our national debt was a mere $16 trillion, Simon Johnson and James Kwak raised the alarm in "White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You." In a clear, engaging narrative, the authors describe the tumultuous role that borrowed money played in the early history of the United States. Then they explain why we're now left with an ever-filling "bathtub" of debt while our politicians "stagger from one election to the next peddling meaningless and contradictory slogans." If we continue along this path, they warn, our obligations will rise so high that the government will not be able to "borrow money at any price." At that point, Social Security, Medicare, military salaries — the whole federal payment system — would drown. Or maybe not. Now that our national debt has risen above $28 trillion, Stephanie Kelton argues that we're using the wrong metaphors. We need to throw out the debt with the bathtub. In "The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy," Kelton claims that the government is nothing like your household budget, constrained by the money you're taking in. "The United States never has to worry about running out of money. It can always pay the bills, even the big ones," she writes, "because Uncle Sam has something the rest of us don't." That's right: The government can just print more cash! Ultimately, I'm not convinced by Kelton's claims for Modern Monetary Theory, which is based on an economic idea called "chartalism," which my computer — or the ghost of Margaret Thatcher — keeps changing to "charlatanism." But trying to understand the broad dimensions of our fiscal crisis through competing books instead of soundbites and tweets makes this cliff-hanger week feel a lot more interesting.  W.W. Norton; Oprah Winfrey (Oprah's Book Club); Richard Powers (Dean D. Dixon) | For years, Richard Powers's cerebral novels — "Prisoner's Dilemma," "The Gold Bug Variations," etc. — were the exclusive treasures of equally cerebral readers. But his environmental epic "The Overstory," which won a 2019 Pulitzer Prize, expanded Powers's audience dramatically (rave). This week, Oprah chose Powers's new novel, "Bewilderment," as the next title for her book club. It's the poignant story of an astrobiologist and his little boy mourning the destruction of the environment. In her video announcement, Oprah said the novel "contains some of the most beautiful sentences ever written on the planet." (She modestly declined to say how its sentences compare to those written on other planets.) "Bewilderment" was selling well even before Oprah's blessing; it's currently No. 3 on our bestseller list (full list). And it's shortlisted for the U.K.'s Booker Prize and longlisted for a National Book Award. Critical response, though, has been mixed. The Guardian raved about "Bewilderment." But Some Other East Coast Newspaper called it "equal parts earnest opinion-page essay and middling Netflix science fiction product . . . one to give to your distant aunt, for her reading group." I managed to be less condescending toward your aunt and her friends, but I came to roughly the same appraisal of "Bewilderment" (meh review). Powers will appear on "Oprah's Book Club" on Oct. 22 (Apple TV+).  Erik Larson in the studio, narrating his author's note (Photo by Jeffrey Neira); Penguin Random House Audio; William James in 1903 (Notman Studios/Houghton Library, Harvard University) | While Henry James was tapping out ghost stories like "The Turn of the Screw," his brother William was trying to divine a scientific explanation for poltergeists. Now, more than a century later, that ghoulish confluence has lured Erik Larson to write his first work of fiction. "No One Goes Alone" was released yesterday exclusively as an audiobook — an incorporeal form that Larson calls "the ideal vehicle for presenting a ghost story." The author of such nonfiction bestsellers as "The Devil in the White City" and "The Splendid and the Vile," Larson started this story as a lark, just to see how effectively he could thread historical facts into supernatural fiction. The central fact in "No One Goes Alone" is that Harvard professor William James, the founder of American psychology, really did work with the Society for Psychical Research, which examined seances and haunted houses. Larson imagines Professor James traveling to a small island in 1905 to study a cottage where a family recently disappeared. Among his fellow investigators are a famous magician, a woman highly sensitive to the spiritual world and an expert in the new field of wireless communication, which seemed, at the time, analogous to speaking with spirits beyond the grave. The English actor Julian Rhind-Tutt narrates this seven-hour audiobook with subtle attention to all the different personalities and accents — American and English. And the text is charmingly shaded with the genteel manners and scientific obsessions of the early 20th century. "People report seeing ghosts — that is a fact," James tells his assembled team of ghost hunters. "But how do we explain these reports and their persistence through time? Can we simply dismiss them?" Soon, that question is not so academic. Their boat drifts away, trapping them on this eerily quiet island. And then the body of a boy dressed in 18th-century clothing washes up on shore. Who ya gonna call?  "Ivory-billed Woodpecker," from "The Birds of America," by John James Audubon (1829). (Gift of Mrs. Walter B. James/National Gallery of Art) | On Wednesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed declaring almost two dozen plants, fish and birds extinct. Among those vanished creatures is the ivory-billed woodpecker (story). If you can picture that bird, it may be from the famous painting included in "The Birds of America," created by John James Audubon in the first half of the 19th century. Only 120 complete copies are known to exist. In 2018, one sold at auction for $9.65 million. How bitter it is that this exceedingly rare book is not so rare as several of the now extinct birds it depicts. Last week, Princeton University Press published Errol Fuller's "Lost Animals: Extinction and the Photographic Record." It's a collection of pictures, starting around 1870, of 28 creatures that no longer exist. Fuller acknowledges that the black and white photos are often of poor quality, taken in difficult circumstances. But, he notes, "a photograph of something lost or gone has a power all its own." The first image in Fuller's book shows a state game warden in 1938 standing in a tract of untouched Louisiana woods. On the warden's hat sits a young ivory-billed woodpecker. The once funny photo now looks unbearably elegiac. At a particularly painful moment in Richard Powers's "Bewilderment," the narrator's little boy says, "There's no point in school. Everything will be dead before I get to tenth grade." I've been thinking lately about how we can respond to kids' concerns about the state of the Earth. Brushing away their despair as a morbid obsession of youth simply isn't tenable. Last year, Lydia Millet wrote a brilliant apocalyptic novel called "A Children's Bible," which examines the different ways adults and young people consider the destruction of the environment (rave). Feeling overwhelmed by this week's news, I reached out to Millet and asked what gives her hope these days. "The creatures give me hope. People among them," she tells me. "Extinctions are unbearable news, every single one of them. But they're not inevitable. We can stop them. We can take our grief and fear and turn them into action. Sometimes all it takes is the will of a single, small community. Other times, whole nations. All over the place, people are working to stop extinctions, both individual extinctions and the mass tide of disappearances we're causing. People's love of other animals and plants, their love of wild places and the mystery of other beings, is visible everywhere if you look. We have to push governments to meet that love with ambitious policy. And corporations to honor and embrace that policy." She notes that climate change is intricately related to the extinction crisis, and both require our attention right now. "We need whales and orangutans and elephants. And bumblebees and monarch butterflies. Not only for our own life support but for beauty and possibility and marvel. We need a world that's still rich with other lifeforms. We just have to fight for it."  Occult bookmaker Steven Metze (Photo courtesy of Steven Metze) | Steven Metze hoped to raise $10,000 to publish a spell book inspired by the demonic works of H.P. Lovecraft. He reached that goal in 38 minutes. This morning when his Kickstarter campaign closed, he'd raised more than $188,000. I suspect Satanic intervention. "That's possible," Metze admits, "but my lawyers won't allow me to say that out loud." A retired colonel who now manages a tech company in Austin, Tex., Metze is an amateur publisher for the forces of hell. He first heard the call of Cthulhu when his daughter gave him a quill pen for Father's Day. "You know what I'm going to do?" he thought. "I've always wanted a spell book that I can put on my shelf, so I'm just going to make one." By consulting occult sources (like YouTube), Metze taught himself calligraphy, papermaking, leather tooling and bookbinding. Over the last few years, his faux-antique books offered through Kickstarter have commanded hundreds of dollars. His current project is "De Arcanis Tenebris" ("Secrets From the Shadows"), "chronicling a sage's attempt to gather spells and incantations," which Metze says he conceived by closely reading Lovecraft's stories. Printed on artificially aged paper and bound in goat hide, "De Arcanis Tenebris" will include illuminated letters, painted illustrations and handwritten marginalia and translations from earlier readers searching for lost magic. He expects to start shipping books to his latest Kickstarter supporters in February. Metze admits that his profits are somewhat undercut by giving away copies to people he knows can't afford them. "Such an expression of charity," I say, "must disappoint the Dark Lord." Metze snickers at my innocence. "Half the horror stories in the world start with, 'This present is for you. What's the worst that could happen? Go home and read it.'"  Michael Caine plays a bitter, booze-addled author in "Best Sellers." (©2020 Atomic Autumn Productions Inc. and Best Sellers Film Limited) | These days so many films stem from books that it's nice to see one about the publishing industry itself. Unfortunately, "Best Sellers," starring Aubrey Plaza and Michael Caine, is so dull you'll need a series of papercuts just to stay awake. As the movie opens, young Lucy Stanbridge (Plaza) has inherited a once venerable publishing firm. To keep her company from bankruptcy, she tracks down legendary crank Harris Shaw (Caine) and demands that he submit the novel her father paid for half a century ago. Because if anything can save publishing, it's a manuscript from the 1970s by a misanthropic White guy. Shaw complies — of course — but insists he won't do a book tour, until — of course — he agrees to do a book tour. At a reading in Boston, he swears repeatedly and urinates on a copy of his novel. As the tour continues, he becomes a social media sensation. Hipsters eat him up! Can a cantankerous old codger and a determined young publisher create something wonderful together? The whole thing is achingly obvious, painfully sentimental. Close the book on "Best Sellers."  New MacArthur Fellows: Daniel Alarcón, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Nicole Fleetwood, Monica Muñoz Martinez and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation) | I'm inclined to make melodramatic claims about the power of poetry, but poetry literally changed the life of Reginald Dwayne Betts. When Betts was 16, he committed a carjacking in Virginia and was sentenced to nine years in an adult prison. While in solitary confinement, someone — he never learned who — passed him a copy of Dudley Randall's anthology "The Black Poets." Inspired by a poem by Etheridge Knight, who had spent time in prison himself, Betts decided he would someday become a poet. After his release, Betts made good on that plan and more. He earned a law degree from Yale, became an advocate for criminal justice reform and published three collections of poetry. His nonprofit, Freedom Reads, builds library collections in American prisons. A few months before the pandemic began, I interviewed Betts for Life of a Poet, a series co-sponsored by the Library of Congress (watch). This week Betts was named a MacArthur "genius," an honor that comes with $625,000 over five years to support "talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction" (story). Several other writers are among this year's group of 25 MacArthur Fellows: - Hanif Abdurraqib: music critic, essayist and poet (review)
- Daniel Alarcón: writer and radio producer (essay)
- Don Mee Choi: poet and translator
- Nicole Fleetwood: art historian and curator
- Ibram X. Kendi: historian and cultural critic (profile)
- Monica Muñoz Martinez: historian (essay)
- Safiya Umoja Noble: digital media scholar (story)
- Jacqueline Stewart: cinema studies scholar and curator
- Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: historian
 City Point Press | E. Ethelbert Miller is not just a poet, he's a poet of that quintessential American pastime, baseball. His new collection, "When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery and other Baseball Stories," uses the game as a lens through which to examine his own life and the erratic course of social justice for Black Americans. Here's compensation as the season winds down this weekend: When the Games Return
(for Emily) When the games return
we will not hide behind the mask.
We will race out onto the field
to bask in fellowship and embrace
the sky, sun, and the four bases below. There will be no fear in the air,
no sickness in the stands. There
will only be cheering and clapping
and a knowing that baseball is what
matters and our dreams are round
and hard and at times get caught
in our gloves. When the tarp is lifted and rolled
back a sudden beauty will appear.
It will be the memories of what
we missed and what we love. It will
be baseball. It will be prayer. From "When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery and Other Baseball Stories," by E. Ethelbert Miller (City Point Press, 2021). Reprinted with permission from the publisher.  The Little Fig and the Big Fig in Elsah, Ill., in 1990. (Photo by Dawn Charles) | October 1 starts the official Halloween season in our house. I can't break the spell – it's a family curse. Long before I was born, my grandfather carved the bottom out of a pumpkin, put it on his head and ran around the back of the house to scare some party guests. But before they spotted him, a clothesline caught him at neck level and catapulted him down a gully. It's our own Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Other families hang on to the good china; we hang on to the good costumes. In 4th grade, for Halloween I dressed up as the Big Fig. It was not entirely clear what I was supposed to be – some of the crueler boys suggested a booger – but I could do a fair imitation of the dance from the Fig Newton TV ad, and whatever ridicule I endured only steeled my commitment to the craft. The costume rested safely in the attic for decades until my first daughter was born and she could join me as the Little Fig. I'll try to keep Halloween items from taking over the newsletter this month, but no guarantees. It's been a seriously batty year, and these demons are ready to howl. Meanwhile, feel free to send any comments or questions about our book coverage to ron.charles@washpost.com. You can read last week's issue here. And if you have friends who might enjoy this newsletter, please forward it to them and remind them it's free! To subscribe, click here.
Interested in advertising in our bookish newsletter? Contact Michael King at michael.king@washpost.com. | 
Email 
