IP Picks🔎: An Unlikely Chicago Mobster, the Last Great Old West Bank Robbers
âž• a 'Normal People'-esque relationship drama and a revenge-filled #MeToo thriller
Welcome to The Optionist! A fun literary mystery played out earlier this week, driven by social media and pop music fanatics. Flatiron Books, a decade-old imprint of Macmillan that's published books by Joe Biden, Oprah Winfrey and, more recently, Matthew Perry's memoir, put up a routine placeholder pre-order page for a book — "4C Untitled Flatiron Nonfiction Summer 2023," publishing July 9. It's the kind of thing that's mostly for bookstores and librarians to pre-order material — it's where Amazon pulls its listing from. That’s why they’re able to show books available for pre-order so far in advance. It’s also why that information is sometimes wrong, because publishers change pub dates, delay books and even tweak covers and titles between listing a book and its actual publication.
This was one was a little curious though. It didn't have a cover (not that unusual) or a title or author (more unusual). Notes from the publisher attached to the listing added to the mystery: "A biography or autobiography [that's] fun, but not political," a Sunday publishing date instead of a Tuesday one, a first printing of one million copies, a high sticker price ($45) and 40 photos. Other tidbits of information included the fact that the author and title were to be revealed on June 13, a few days before pre-orders close, and a requirement that booksellers sign an affidavit not to break the sale embargo. Weird.
Things started to go nuts when a small bookstore in Lakewood, New York put up a TikTok putting together all sorts of clues speculating that the book was a Taylor Swift memoir: July 9 is in a lyric, 13 (the reveal date) is a favorite Swift number, the page count of 544 added up equals 13, etc. (Here’s a Swiftie explaining the logic.)
Swifties grabbed the bait and started pre-ordering the book in droves, even after Flatiron got the TikTok deleted. With the book number one on BN.com and in the top 10 on Amazon, Variety reported that it was absolutely not a Taylor Swift memoir. Others then used the same numerology to promote the idea that it's a book about South Korean boy band BTS (June 13 and July 9 supposedly relate to when the band and then its fan ARMY formed) — which turned out to be true. On Thursday, Flatiron revealed via the NYT that indeed the mystery book is an oral history of BTS by the band members themselves, proving that in the age of the social media hive mind no mystery remains one for long.
Don’t worry, there’s no mystery in this week’s picks. Just by chance, we’ve got two buzzy books by young Irish writers (the first two below) and a fantastic magazine story that could serve as the basis for a fresh spin on the Italian Mob movie. The lineup:
A relationship drama for fans of Sally Rooney.
A #MeToo thriller about a law student seeking revenge for the death of her sister.
A Western about the last great gang of Old West bank robbers.
A potential biopic about the highest-ranking non-Sicilian in the mob.
