Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for reading along with me.
It’s August, the classic dog days of summer, but somehow a raft of information crossed my radar this week that I wanted to flag for you.
I talk a lot about beach reads, but I had never thought about the history of the beach read or even if it had a history. (Of course it has a history; everything has a history.) The idea of beach reads, as Smithsonian magazine reveals, goes back to the 1870s when increasing numbers of middle-class Americans started heading to places like Newport, Rhode Island, and Cape May, New Jersey, to escape the summer heat. And, of course, the idea of young women reading so-called trashy novels (evidently beach reads have always been “trashy”) sparked a moral panic. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I intended to post about this last week, but it got bumped for space. Still, this knock-on-effect of Heated Rivalry’s popularity is worth a mention. It seems gay porn maker — um, excuse me, adult entertainment company Falcon | NakedSword is branching out into erotic fiction. Their FalconINK, NakedSword Books and Raging Stallion Books will start with two novellas: Hard Ball, an original sports romance, and Wild Game: Open Season, a prequel to the company’s new porn film Wild Game. The introduction of the line is explicitly linked to Heated Rivalry’s success and touts the company, which has been around since 1971, as the OG male/male romance — thus, in its mind, perfectly positioned to attract the new audience of women fans.
Here’s an update on Jerry Falade, the author who lost a $2.4M book deal (and many hundreds of thousands more on a potential screen deal) over accusations of AI use. Falade, who is Black, gave an interview to The Guardian, where he denied using AI and suggested his takedown was part of broader racial bias in the publishing industry. He’s also posted some evidence on his Instagram Stories to defend himself. Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly has a look at what’s next in the scandal.
L.A. Material — a great newsletter, btw — has an interesting scoop: The estate of the late heavyweight journalist Nikki Finke is shopping her unpublished memoir — a history of Hollywood from the 1980s through the aughts. The book, whose working title was “Hollywood Hubris: An Epic Saga of Power and Ambition,” was described by someone who helped edit it as “a juicy history of a bygone, freewheeling town.” The book was scheduled for publication in 2007 before Finke pulled it. L.A. Material has all the details here.
Here’s an interesting book-to-TV-to-book sequence involving Prime Video’s Reacher series. Neagley (full name Frances Neagley) is a side character in Lee Child’s popular Jack Reacher book series; she was first introduced in the sixth book of the now 31-book series. On the Prime Video series, the character (played by Maria Sten) has proved so popular that she’s getting her own spin-off series — and now her first spin-off novels.
Speaking of Reacher, show star Alan Ritchson has agreed to make a MotoGP heist movie as one of his first projects under a new deal at Netflix. It’s the third motorcycle racing movie in the works. A Channing Tatum picture about the famed Isle of Man TT race has been filming on location this summer, and Timothée Chalamet will play a former MotoGP racer who turns to bank robbery in a movie for James Mangold set up at Paramount last year. It’s about time. I’ve long thought motorcycle racing had untapped screen potential. Watch a few clips on YouTube to get a sense of how scary/dramatic it is. What I think would be even cooler would be a period motorcycle racing movie when the racing was truly seat-of-your-pants, and the danger was omnipresent.
Two numbers worth paying attention to:
Emily Wilson has gotten a lot of flak for her film criticism of The Odyssey, but sales of her lauded translation of the Homer epic have taken off. It was the No. 2 bestselling book last week per Bookscan via Publishers Weekly, moving 31K copies for a YTD total of 125K.
Finally: Per its recent earnings call, Spotify says that more than 1.5M subscribers have added the new audiobooks tier since it was introduced in late May.
This is one of these issues that just kept getting stronger as the week went on. It has two backlist gems and a front-list swashbuckling epic. It also has two news stories that are a little off the beaten path and a little quirky, but that I really can imagine being developed into something fab.
🏴☠ A swashbuckling epic that’s a potential prestige series that combines Outlander’s female heroine and Vikings’ sweep and political intrigue.
📺 BACKLIST GEM Cross I Saw the TV Glow with The Wicker Man for this limited series about the revival of an old kids’ show that, umm, brings back more than the cast.
🐉 A darker YA The Shape of Water meets Widow’s Bay for the big screen about a teen who summons a wish-fulfilling sea creature with disastrous effects.
🎓 BACKLIST GEM A younger Fleabag meets Booksmart in this potential college-set coming-of-age series.
📸 In journalism, a potential feel-good procedural centered on a do-gooder who reunites people with lost family heirlooms.
👟 Also in journalism, a Dumb Money meets How to Make It in America potential series about sneaker hustlers flipping stolen kicks for big profits.
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