The free digital Publishers Lunch Buzz Books have proven themselves accurate predictors of bestseller and best-of-the-year titles, before they are published. This season Publishers Lunch has gathered substantial excerpts from 54 of the most buzzed-about books scheduled for publication this fall and winter in two exclusive, free new ebooks, BUZZ BOOKS 2015: Fall/Winter and BUZZ BOOKS 2015: Young Adult Fall/Winter, offered in consumer and trade editions.
Book lovers get an early first look at new books from New York Times bestselling authors Mitch Albom, Geraldine Brooks, Alice Hoffman, and Adriana Trigiani, and popular and critically acclaimed writers Lauren Groff, Janice Y.K. Lee, Elizabeth McKenzie, and Belinda McKeon; columnist and television host Jason Gay’s first book, the \"whip-smart\" fiction debut of Academy Award-nominated actor Jesse Eisenberg; an unprecedented look at feminist and legal pioneer Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik’s Notorious RBG; Dick Van Dyke’s memoir Keep Moving; Jesse Itzler on living with a Navy SEAL; and the first novels from essayist Sloane Crosley and award-winning short story writer Claire Vaye Watkins.
Following its highly successful introduction last year, Publishers Lunch again is presenting a stand-alone volume previewing exciting and outstanding material from publishing’s powerhouse sector, young adult and middle-grade novels, in BUZZ BOOKS 2015: Young Adult Fall/Winter. This edition holds a taste of eagerly awaited books like new work from bestselling and award-winning leaders in the field including James Dashner (The Maze Runner series), Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light and Revolution), Patrick Ness (A Monster Calls and the Chaos Walking trilogy), and Lauren Oliver (Before I Fall, Panic); authors best-known for their adult books (Eleanor Herman and Cammie McGovern); and a good number of exciting debuts (Tessa Elwood’s Inherit the Stars, Moïra Fowley-Doyle’s The Accident Season, and Estelle Laure’s This Raging Light, among others). Aaron Hartzler, author of the critically acclaimed YA memoir Rapture Practice, makes his fiction debut with What We Saw. In what appears to becoming a YA trend, four Buzz Books entries are highly graphic or archival-looking in form via vignettes, diary entries, texts, charts, lists, illustrations and more. These include Hannah Moskowitz’s History of Glitter and Blood, a lyrical fantasy with an unusual graphic format.
Of the 24 adult books previewed and published to date in the 2015 Spring/Summer edition, 19 have made \"best of the month/year\" lists and five are New York Times bestsellers.
BUZZ BOOKS 2015: Fall/Winter and BUZZ BOOKS 2015: Young Adult Fall/Winter are available for free download now on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple’s iBookstore, the Google Play Books store, and Kobo.
By Richard H. Weisberg
The recent Hobby Lobby decision, which ruled that corporations with certain religious beliefs were no longer required to provide insurance that covers contraception for their female employees — as mandated by Obamacare — hinged on a curious piece of legislation from 1993. In a law that was unanimously passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) stated that “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion.” The intention of RFRA was to offer an opportunity for religious people to challenge ordinary laws, state or federal, that had some adverse impact on their faith. The RFRA was a direct response to a case three years earlier, when the Supreme Court decided that laws that applied to everybody were acceptable even if they burdened a religious community. RFRA was Congress’ scream of protest to the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence.
By passing the RFRA in 1993, Congress was trying to steal the Supreme Court’s thunder. It was not fixing physical infrastructures; it was fixing a fellow branch of government. It was not over-ruling what it considered to be a faulty judicial reading of its own statutes; it was changing an interpretation of the Constitution itself. But isn’t the Court, for better or worse, the ultimate authority on the First Amendment? Didn’t the principle of separation of powers prevent the legislative branch from amending, by mere majority vote within its own chambers, the Constitution as understood by the justices at any given time?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, US Supreme Court Justice. Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States. Photographer: Steve Petteway. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Indeed, the Supreme Court went on to strike down RFRA in 1997, but only in part. It ruled that the states were not covered by RFRA’s change, but that the federal government was. This provided the opening for the Hobby Lobby decision, where several for-profit closely held corporations sought to defeat a federal regulation about contraception that applied generally to businesses, but offended their own belief systems.
Most discussion of Hobby Lobby, including even Justice Ginsburg’s dissent, has flexibly adapted to the idea that RFRA is constitutional, despite its extraordinary usurpation of judicial power. Her dissent correctly points out that her colleagues in the majority go even further than Congress in permitting religious belief to trump democratically passed legislation. Yes: the majority went much too far in holding that a corporation can “believe” anything or that free exercise rights are violated even when the central beliefs or practices of the religious are not directly implicated; but far worse was its acceptance, without discussion, of Congress’s power grab under RFRA. And the dissents doubled down on that departure from firm and fine traditions we call separation of powers.
Two examples of flexibility, however otherwise opposed, do not add up to the uncompromising defense of our Constitution needed at all times and perhaps especially now. The Supreme Court needed intransigently to re-assert its own power as a separate branch of government. Hobby Lobby’s attempt to veto part of Obamacare that offended its “corporate faith” would and should have been shut down immediately. Our Constitutional system of checks and balances required a clear statement. The Court, on both sides of Hobby Lobby, gave us the ambiguities that muddy the waters when compromise replaces principle.
Richard H. Weisberg, professor of Constitutional Law at Cardozo Law School, is the author of In Praise of Intransigence: The Perils of Flexibility.
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