48 new eBooks and audiobooks coming out January 17 - 23, 2023

By Kobo • January 17, 2023New eBooks and Audiobooks

New eBooks and audiobooks out this week

If you don’t know the name Rick Rubin, you certainly recognize some of the music he produced over the last 40 years with The Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Johnny Cash, Run-DMC, and many, many other artists. It’s safe to say Rick Rubin knows a thing or two about the creative process. In his new book The Creative Act: A Way of Being he outlines his views about creativity. Whether you’ve picked up a new hobby recently or are trying to get unstuck, Rubin’s advice might be just the thing to help you reconnect with that most innocent part of yourself, which would put you in the company of some very talented and accomplished artists. For starters, he doesn’t see volume of output as having any relationship to one’s creative capacity: as the subtitle says, creativity to Rubin is about how you exist in the world, not the stuff you fill the world with. It’s a brief book, enough to fill a quiet afternoon, which will leave you plenty of time to put its wisdom into practice.

In Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart, novelist Jen Sookfong Lee reflects on her relationship to the popular culture that shaped her as an adolescent and young adult. Though she found comfort in iconic real-life and fictional figures like Princess Diana and Anne of Green Gables, with a maturing perspective she realized that as the daughter of Chinese immigrants determined to fit into a foreign society, she wasn’t exactly the intended audience for these cultural products. While the themes are substantial, her sense of humour keeps the book from getting weighed down. At a time when there’s never been more abundant diversity in popular culture (setting aside for a moment the question of how much would be enough) this is a book that provides an enlightening and extremely personal context for how we got here.

Grady Hendrix’ How to Sell a Haunted House tackles one of the most unsettling and least-explored themes in contemporary horror novels: real estate. Louise and Mark are siblings with a troubled relationship, but the death of their parents throws them together as they ready the family home in Charleston for sale. Louise is flying in, putting her successful life on pause to handle her parents’ affairs; but Mark never left their hometown, stumbling from job to job with no real direction. There are memories for both of them in this house, buried amongst their father’s academic detritus and their mother’s puppet collection, and the house isn’t going to let them forget a thing. Hendrix has proven his talent for scaring readers, and in this book he gets hearts racing while tapping into deep-set feelings.

More books coming out January 17 – 23, 2023