HOT STUFF

Serena Valentino lands at #2 on our children’s fiction list with Fire and Fate, the 10th volume in her Villains series for Disney. It focuses on Hades, god of the Underworld and the main antagonist in the 1997 animated movie Hercules. The 10 books in the series have sold a combined 935K print copies to date.

Scare Tactics

Chuck Tingle’s Camp Damascus, #18 on our extended hardcover fiction list, marks the erotica author’s traditional publishing and PW list debut. It’s “an eerie but empowering queer horror story,” according to our review, one that Tingle intentionally populated with human as well as demonic monsters. “Writing horror for any marginalized group,” the author told PW in a prepub interview, “you have to recognize that what is happening in the dang world—without any supernatural elements—is already traumatic.”

The Play’s the Thing

YA author Chloe Gong makes “her wonderfully high-concept adult fantasy debut,” per our starred review, with Immortal Longings, #20 on our extended hardcover fiction list. Her first novel, 2020’s These Violent Delights, is a fantastical Romeo and Juliet retelling that takes place in 1920s Shanghai, a setting she’s revisited in other YA stories. Her first adult novel, which kicks off the Flesh and False Gods series, is an epic fantasy riff on Antony and Cleopatra.

NEW & NOTABLE

JACKIE
J. Randy Taraborrelli
#7 Hardcover Nonfiction
Taraborrelli, a celebrity biographer whose previous books include several on the Kennedy family, draws on “interviews and previously unpublished material from the JFK Library” for this portrait of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, per our review. “Readers who enjoyed the author’s other Kennedy biographies will not be able to put this down.”

EASY MONEY
Ben McKenzie
#15 Hardcover Nonfiction
Gotham actor McKenzie, writing with journalist Jacob Silverman, delivers a “zippy polemic” on crypto, according to our review. “The crypto-curious will appreciate the authors’ accessible explanations of how digital currencies work, and the profiles illuminate how hype and irresponsible business practices inflated the crypto bubble for years before its inevitable burst.”