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Zibby Owens
Hi everyone. If you are already sharing links to what you love and you're not on Shop My yet, you have to be. It makes everything more organized and you can actually earn from it. I'll leave my referral link in the show notes if you want to get set up. It's Shopmy Us joinzibbyowens Check it out.
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Zibby Owens
Today's episode is sponsored by Nutrafol. Do you know that feeling when you're brushing your hair and somehow it just looks a little thinner than usual, maybe a little less full? And you're like, what is going on here? Well, Nutrafol supports hair health from within, helping you grow stronger, visibly thicker hair so that those moments happen less often where you're worried about your hair. Nutrafol is the number one dermatologist recommended hair growth supplement brand and it's the number one hair growth supplement brand personally used by dermatologists and by the way, personally by me. This is the brand that I trust. Adding Nutrafol to your daily routine is easy. Order online, no prescription needed, with automated deliveries and free shipping to keep you on track. Plus, with a Nutrafol subscription, you can save up to 20% and get added perks to support your hair health journey. So let your hair be one less thing to worry about. See Visibly thicker, stronger, faster Growing hair in three to six months with Nutrafol For a limited time, Nutrafol is offering our listeners $10 off your first month subscription and free shipping when you visit nutrafol.com and enter promo code Zibby Z I B b y that's nutrafol.com spelled n u t r-a f o l.com promo code ZIBBY Enjoy. Hi, this is Zibby Owens and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly Moms don't have Time to Read Books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to stay in the know, get insider insights and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com and follow me on Instagram ibeowens. Today is a special bonus episode. I hosted the Summer Reads Party where I invited all the authors from the most anticipated summer list, which I will link in the show notes below, and about 30 of them came to my apartment. We had such a nice time and while we were schmoozing and eating and getting to know each other, we all went into my living room and I asked everyone to go around and introduce their books to the rest of us. And then I thought wouldn't this be fun as an episode so all of you could be in the room where it happened and hear from from all of the authors directly. So this is literally with my tiny little microphone going around the room where everybody answered the question what's your book about and when is it coming out? I hope that this little preview makes the list come to life for you in the way it did for me and we will also link in the show notes pictures to the event so you can see just how fun it really was. I hope you enjoy. Let me know what sounds great.
Kate Durgie
Hi, I am Kate Durgie and I have written Reimagining Grief A New Path to Finding Healing Strength and Joy After Loss. This is the book that I wanted when I lost my father to heart
Imogen Waiting Author
failure, my mother in a car crash
Kate Durgie
five days before Christmas, and my beautiful
Sarah Bliss
daughter penny at age 16.
Imogen Waiting Author
So I hope this book will reach
Sarah Bliss
all the people out there I know need it. So so it's coming out June 16th and I'm so excited.
Imogen Waiting Author
Thank you Zoe
Kate Durgie
and Sara's my co author.
Sarah Bliss
I'm Sarah Bliss. I am a writer and co author of several books and this is my latest project with Kate and it's just been an incredibly inspiring I used to do a lot of ghost writing for famous people and some books are known and I have a bunch of books that no one knows that I wrote and recently I decided I wanted to actually when my son had cancer, I decided I wanted to put my creative energies towards projects that I felt like really mattered. And then I met Kate. And the book is coming out soon, and I hope it will really inspire and help a lot of people.
Imogen Waiting Author
That is a tough act to follow. My book is also out June 16th.
Sarah Bliss
I'm.
Kate Durgie
Yes.
Sarah Bliss
Thank you. Hi, Kate.
Imogen Waiting Author
It's called Imogen and Waiting, and it's a memoir of modern reproduction. I have the BRCA1 gene, and this book is my experience as a carrier of the gene as told to an embryo. I make not to pass on the gene and then discover is female and just like me. And I debate whether or not to bring her into being. Given my experience and if my parents had the choice, I would want to be alive. So, yes, that is my story. And I discover my capacity as a woman, wife and mother and return to my creative self. So thank you.
Sarah Bliss
Hi, I'm Beatrice Williams. My book is called when youn Loved Me, and it's out June 23rd, which is, I guess, five weeks from almost today, tomorrow. And it's about a young widow. She returns with her daughter to the New England island where she grew up. In the wake of her father's death, she goes to settle his estate and discovers a trail of breadcrumbs leading to a pirate treasure and her long lost love, who is now a disgraced former NFL star. And he's also the last man to have seen her father alive.
Kelly Link
Wow.
Brenda Janowitz
Hi, I'm Lisa Scottellini, and this Changes Everything is out July 14th. It's my 40th thriller.
Kate Durgie
I think I've been writing it.
Brenda Janowitz
I know I started writing before you
Kate Durgie
were born because I really felt like
Brenda Janowitz
we needed women in crime fiction to be the stars. And so in this one, it's about a woman who has a very dear best friend and has a premonition of her best friend's grandmother's death. And then the character starts to understand that her intuitive power. Remember when we talked about female intuition? Well, it's actually real. I kind of think we all have it.
Sarah Bliss
And she discovers that she has some power she didn't know she had.
Brenda Janowitz
Hi, I'm Jean Kwok. And first of all, I want to thank Zibi for being such an incredible champion of all of us and of all authors. So my book is called Dominion. It is a romantasy. And those of you who know me know I've always written literary fiction and suspense. But then I got divorced. I was like, okay, all right. We're doing something else. And my divorce was a surprise to me, although not to everybody involved. And so I just wanted to do something that I loved and that I always kind of read for solace and hope. And I really hoped that I could bring that to people with my own book. Dominion is an Asian inspired cross between Hunger Games and Fourth Wing, about a ribbon dancer with amnesia and little magic who gets thrown into a deadly tiger bonding trial by a fierce warrior. Yes, it is very hot. Thank you guys so much. And it's out July 14th.
Sarah Bliss
Hi, I'm Anna Johnston and my book is When Lemons Give youe Life. I describe it as a cross between a man called Uwe and the Disney film Ratatouille. So it's about a retired Michelin star chef now living in a nursing home, who is grumpy, depressed and ready to take his own life. Determined that his last meal will not be the beige slop that they serve at the nursing home, he breaks into the nursing home kitchen to cook himself one last lemon tart. And the act of cooking stirs a long dormant joy. Soon he begins sneaking in after dark and cooking for other people and bringing joy and finding his way back into the world one plate at a time. It is out August 4th. Hi everybody. I'm Diane Dubrovnir. My book is Roxie in color. It's out June 2. It is a middle grade novel.
Imogen Waiting Author
I think I might be the only
Sarah Bliss
children's book here, but it's my debut novel. It's about a girl whose parents are both blind and she's starting seventh grade in a new town and she just doesn't want to be known as the girl with blind parents anymore. So she decides to try to keep their blindness a secret until the other kids get a chance to get to know her. Some of the chapters are told by her mother's guide dog. So there's a dog element in the book. And it was based on an article that I wrote for Parents magazine back in 2019. And I have a co author, Stacy Cervenka, who's one of the blind parents who I interviewed for the article. And it's been a great experience working together. And it's coming out from Candlewick Press. Hi, I'm Kimberly McCrate. This is my ninth literary thriller, which now sounds like nothing because Lisa went first. It is, yes. The title is Someone Else's Husband. It comes out on June 16th. I think the title is a little bit self explanatory, but it does involve a love triangle. It involves a climb of Mount Kilimanjaro, a climb I have done myself, among other climbs. So a young artist named Frankie meets a married man on this climb. But it really, more than anything, is the story of the two women. A wife narrates part of it and the quote unquote, other woman. And it's really meant to humanize and to show the layers and complications and that kind of situation where I think so often one or the other is villainized or made to look stupid or silly. And I didn't want that to be true. So I hope you enjoyed it.
Kate Durgie
Hi, I'm Sabrina Rudin, and my book
Sarah Bliss
Healthy with a Side of Happy came
Kate Durgie
out on April 28.
Sarah Bliss
It's a cookbook. It has two missions.
Kate Durgie
One is to remind people that if
Sarah Bliss
you want to change how you feel, change the way you eat. And the second is how to cook vegetables. And that vegetables are actually really vital to health.
Kate Durgie
And I just want to thank you all and especially Zubi for having me here.
Sarah Bliss
I'll say, the one thing I've wanted
Imogen Waiting Author
to do more than anything in my
Kate Durgie
life is an author. And this event in this room with all of you, even though I've done
Sarah Bliss
some cool things for this book, this makes me feel it more than anything.
Imogen Waiting Author
So thank you.
Brenda Janowitz
Very happy to be here.
Sarah Bliss
Hi, I'm Lisa Rowe, and my book is called Big and Lily. It's coming out August 11th. I call it Happiness for Beginners meets Wild. And it's a story about two sisters who take Alaskan survival trip that they have no business being on and they almost don't make it out of the wilderness.
Kate Durgie
But in the meantime, they learn to
Sarah Bliss
get over their sibling rivalry and their
Kate Durgie
grief and their guilt, and they learn to have a new perspective on life in the woods.
Sarah Bliss
Great. Hello.
Imogen Waiting Author
My book is Worse Than Strangers and I am Kylie Letty.
Sarah Bliss
It comes out June 23rd. My very quick pitch is always Gilmore
Imogen Waiting Author
Girls meet Strain Austen on Nantucket. But it's really kind of a beachy retelling of Persuasion by Jane Austen.
Sarah Bliss
And at the core, it's a mother daughter story. And both their past loves come back and have very different outcomes.
Kate Durgie
So that is the mysterious pitch. But thank you so much for having us.
Sarah Bliss
It's wonderful.
Imogen Waiting Author
Hi, everyone, I'm Sunel Barnes. Thank you again, Zibby. This is such a great party and I'll tell you why it's so exciting to be here for me. But I'm Sanel. I am a travel writer and memoirist, and I was actually on assignment for Travel and Leisure when I had a brain aneurysm rupture And I was also in the middle of writing the book within this book, which was the travel memoir part. And now it's kind of like this palimpsest where like old and new come together and make something completely different. So you get the story of me traveling home and traveling around the world, traveling home to my birth country of the Philippines for the first time in 20 years and then making my way home to myself after memory loss and cognitive decline and not knowing who my husband was. And he ended up being actually my hands and feet. To finish this book I dictated. I still have trouble looking at screens and sometimes typing. I am very heavily medicated to talk to you right now. But he and my daughter helped me type the rest of the book so that I could complete it and celebrate it with you today,
Sarah Bliss
June 9th.
Dara Levan
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I'm Lu Chakowski. This is my book. It's called Don't Buy what I'm Selling on Breaking Up With Advertising and Finally Learning to Love My Whole Fat Self. It's the longest title my editor, Vivian Lee, who is also your editor, has ever published. I'm proud of being very wordy. They told me that in advertising I always had a lot of words. It's basically about my career in advertising and how it almost killed me. I worked at places like MTV, Comedy Central. My last job was at Facebook in 2018 as the Cambridge Analytica scandal was breaking. And I also suffered health consequences. And I've worked the last seven years to figure out how to tell my story and to not be a brand or a product but myself. And so it's a memoir and investigation of that.
Zibby Owens
Thank you all.
Sarah Bliss
Hi, I'm Annabelle Monaghan. This is Dolly all the Time. It's out on May 26th and it is a story about Dolly Brick, who is a single mom with a full time job and three side hustles and she's everybody's emergency contact and she has to go back to her Hometown of Whitfield, RI to care for her father and her disabled brother and finds herself in a fake dating situation with Stuart Whitfield himself, who also has the weight of the world on his shoulders. So it's a love story between two people who basically have the exact same issue to work out. It was pretty interesting to write from that perspective, but it's a story for anybody who needs to be reminded to put themselves back on their own to do list. Hi everyone, I'm Jackie Friedland and this is my first time ever speaking into a little microphone like this. So I hope I'm doing it right. This is my sixth book, which I thought was a lot and was totally wrong. It's called Breathing Underwater and it's about two women at very different stages of their life division. One college athlete who has been framed for something she didn't do and is at risk of losing her scholarship and her livelihood basically. And a middle aged mom who is staring down an impending empty nest and struggling with that transition. And an autistic teenager who helps both of these women get through their issues and becomes the hero of the book. It's out August 4th.
Zibby Owens
And after Dara, I want to hand it to Anne and you can talk about Emma's book. How about that?
Sarah Bliss
Start at the Emma Bright.
Kate Durgie
Yeah, Kathleen.
Zibby Owens
I was going to have Kathleen talk about 40 love, but she could do both. If you'd rather you want Kathleen to do both, okay, Kathleen will do both.
Dara Levan
My name is Dara Levan. My novel is out June 23rd. We have a lot of book birthdays at the same time, which is fun. It's called Shaken to the Core and it's about a photographer named Joy who she and her husband Andre go to the mountains of Vermont to escape the glitz and glam of Miami. But she's thrown. First when her mother dies suddenly and then when her husband receives devastating news that's altering the very carefully curated lives they've always had. They always thought they wouldn't have children. She suddenly yearns for it. And I won't ruin the rest of it. One of the big themes that explores is how motherhood and mothering transcend biology and how we can hold hope, healing and heartbreak all at once. So it's ultimately an uplifting story, lots of tears and very much inspired by my mother in law who died suddenly right before my wedding.
Kate Durgie
So thank you.
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Zibby Owens
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Zibby Owens
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Kate Durgie
Hello.
Steph
Okay.
Brenda Janowitz
Hi, I'm Brenda Janowitz.
Sarah Bliss
I have typically written women's fiction, but
Brenda Janowitz
this is my debut young adult novel and it's coming out this August.
Kate Durgie
It's called the Introvert's Guide to Kissing in Europe. And it's the story of a teen who impulsively takes a gap year throughout Western Europe.
Brenda Janowitz
It's a coming of age story and
Kate Durgie
it's loosely inspired by my own time studying abroad.
Sarah Bliss
Hi, I'm Amy Czozik. This is my debut novel, With Friends like youe. It's out July 21st. I think at its heart, it's a thriller about female friendship. It's about a new mom in New York who's lost and lonely and depressed. And she decides that the answer to her happiness is finding her former best friend who disappeared 15 years earlier and became a sex worker and is now a high end escort. So right when she has a new baby, she sort of dives into this world of sex work to find her friend. Previous to this, I was a journalist for many years. So this, the story started when I was three weeks postpartum. I had a brand new baby and Anna Wintour wanted me to profile Stormy Daniels for Vogue. So I literally left my baby to go to strip clubs in Milwaukee. And I was interviewing sex workers and I just thought what these two worlds colliding is just. It kind of stayed with me and it became this novel. And thank you so much, Siby.
Kate Durgie
My name is Nadie Marilyn. And I'm Lois K. Hall. And it comes out a 26, the week before the centennial of Marilyn Monroe's birth. So we're inundated with Marilyn Monroe books, but nothing more than this one because it's a novel. So with it, on the night of Marilyn Monroe's death, she didn't die during the five hours that no one called the police. She got away and she was issued a new identity by, I don't know, someone in the White House. And she decided to have the role of a lifetime, intriguing mother. She would shut up. That's all she ever wanted, was sexual. And she ends up in a place called Haycock, Massachusetts. And the role of a lifetime is to work in a diner or you do money gallery or what have you. Fast forward to 2019. Two reporters, young kids in the day of social media and all the insanity of the world, get a tip that she's alive. One from a dying coroner who says, I was there that night. I'm 95 years old on my deathbed. I'm telling the story now. She didn't die. We switched a body from the mort drawer, put a platinum wig on her and called her on my room. The other reporter gets a tip from a dying mobster. He said I worked for Jimmy Papa. I was sent to kill her. We let her go. So whether the reporters find Marilyn Monroe or not in 2019 remains to be seen. But what they do find is her very alive 24 year old Nandar. I just want to say it's a book about survival instead of being a big one. It's a book for women, for set issues. So I think this is the Marilyn media prefer in this hinge. This is novel my sophomore novel Heather My name is Caitlin Mullen June 9th not to be confused with the Winona Rider cult classic movie Heather's Vacant may also know so Heather is set between two timelines, 1990 and 2023. It's centered on a pair of twins. In the 1990 timeline, Twin Sister, super quite a bit of neglect and they disappear at 1991. And then in the present day timeline, a young woman who's returned to her hometown in Pine Baron, New Jersey uncovers this cold case and starts to excavate what actually happened. And then what she finds will undermine everything she knows. Hi I love and yee this my second novel. It's called Crash into Me. It will be in stores on July 7th. It's the story of Cecilia Chen who is a Jamaican Chinese bi artist living in Paris with her husband and two kids. She was raised in the state that led to Paris from the and her husband's a French filmmaker. He gets a huge deal shooting a trilogy in Los Angeles and they pick up and move to the very wealthy enclave on the west side of LA after she's been in Kuwait for 20 years. At feels very much like a reverse culture shock. And very early on in the story he runs into someone uppercast holy accident and they develop this very intense and relationship that threatens up into her entire life. And it's another woman. And so this story about identity, sexuality, desire, power, yourself the length of hi, I'm Elizabeth Januzzi. My debut memoir comes out July 21st. At age 38. I was living in the suburbs of New Jersey raising three young children when my life boded. Specifically my husband discovered I had a one night affair. With that discovery I admitted to my alcoholism. I'd been drinking vodka pretty much all day every day, but I was really good at hiding it. So this led to me entering recovery going to my first AA meeting where the women told me, you never have to feel this way again. It is a recovery story, but it's also a love story, as my husband and I were able to, using the 12 steps, find our way back to each other. So this is the bunk I wish I had when I first entered the meetings. It'll resonate with anyone in recovery, anyone who has a loved one, you know, struggling with addiction, anyone whose life imploded and needs to believe in secondhand.
Kelly Link
Hi, everyone. I'm Kelly Link. My next clip is called the affairs out is my 41st.
Sarah Bliss
Nope,
Kelly Link
it's called the Au Pair. This is the company. You know what it's about. You tell. I've been genuinely moved and inspired by so many descriptions of books here. They're not different ones. What's the opposite of moved? Inspired. That took this.
Steph
That's like it.
Kelly Link
Fun, hot. It's founded. When you got ringing bad, I broke the little mic.
Kate Durgie
Hi.
Kelly Link
Thank you, Zibby. So Zibby and I run into each other in very unglamorous places like the Warbury parking lot, and we just kind of look away. So it's nice.
Zibby Owens
I said, I said, hello.
Sarah Bliss
You were looking away. And I was like, hi, John.
Kelly Link
We used to have a thing. So I was the books editor and inventor of Cosmo for you. We used to have a chip in Cosmo that was. You want to treat your how we met story. You just add the words in Paris at the end. We met in the Watkins park in Paris. Anyway, my book is Single Girls that you're hold up out of Dallas. But the very peak cover looks very excuse and that. So I usually write character driven suspense. But I always wanted to write a book about Cosmo because 23 years ago I moved to the city, had no money, waiting tables. I got horrible rejections on a novel and I heard about a job opening in the books department. A Paulson and I went on the interview and a friend of mine said, I said, I guess I need a resume.
Kate Durgie
You're a writer.
Kelly Link
Writers don't have resumes. So when the very glamorous book senator said, well, where's your resume? I said, well, writer, we don't have those.
Kate Durgie
She hired me.
Kelly Link
She felt sorry for me. So that was under Helen Gurley Brown. And I'm excited. Yes, she has a message. Helen too. So Helen and I, she hired me and we, we stayed friends for many, many years. And I used to go to her office and see her, send me these notes. And I always said, someday I'm going To write a novel, but no longer with us. I wish she was. The book is dedicated to her memory, but it's about cosmo in the 1960s, when Helen takes over the magazine and hires a team of women to transform it into the best selling women's magic team of all time. And it's very fun. I usually write these dark, creepy suspense novels, and then I go on book tour and these women come up.
Steph
They're like, you seem so bright and
Sarah Bliss
sunny, too afraid to read your books.
Kelly Link
They're really creepy.
Kate Durgie
So now I feel like I have
Kelly Link
a book for them. It's a very pink book, and I see so many familiar faces of people. Like Annabelle Hive's book I talked about on the Today show or Lisa or different people over the years. I've done the magazine, so it's nice to be with all of you. Beautifully dressed. Thank you.
Steph
Hi. I want to say thank you. You really are extraordinary. And you landed in my neighborhood with a giant pop. I live in Santa Monica, and Zibby's store is completely fabulous and cozy, and it's just a wonder. That's all I can say. And so are you. This is all really hard work, and people don't realize that it actually is really hard work. Some of it's really fun, and some of it is not so fun. That's all I can say. I have a new book called Unseasonably Cold. It published last week. It's set in 1939. An heiress in New York City who writes a column for the Delineator disappears. And when Jane disappears, she had been with her best friend. And the story starts to be told by her best friend, although it's told by a number of other people, too. There are secrets, there are betrayals, there's lack of trust, there's suspects. It's a love story. It's historical fiction. It's a mystery, and I hope you like it. That's all I can say.
Kate Durgie
Thank you, Steph.
Sarah Bliss
Thank you.
Steph
One other thing, which is what happened that was very odd to me is the background of 1939 suddenly became much more like today, where we all have a kind of calm exterior, but underneath it, there's the kind of turmoil of wondering what's going on today, particularly once again. And I think the same thing is true of the plot of the novel, because everyone's holding onto a kind of grief that they're putting out a placid exterior. I didn't quite do it on purpose. The book ends the day before London was bombed. Wow. Thank you.
Zibby Owens
By the way Amy and Brenda contributed
Kate Durgie
to my anthology I'm Being Jewish now.
Zibby Owens
Just saying.
Kate Durgie
Everyone. So I'll talk about two of our recent books. 40 Love is actually Coming out tomorrow. It's by Jean Costello, who's a best selling author in the UK right now. It's about Jules, who is facing an empty nest. Her she's recently widowed. Her daughter's going on a gap year before going to college. She doesn't love her job, so she's facing this big question like what is next for me? So she gazes out her window and looks at the local tennis club next door that she's lived next door to her entire life. Her friends have cajoled her. Come on, just come out in the court. She hasn't wanted to do it. Finally she agrees and her life transforms. She meets this wonderful group of friends, but even more important, she runs into her old crush, Stamina, who's got a wicked forehand. And what Jules does every day as she wins matches, she lose matches. She just starts to find herself again and she really discovers what's next for her. So this is a story of a woman in midlife trying to decide the next big questions who she meant to be, what's next for her. Life is not over and she just wants to have some fun. So it's a really great story and we love it so much. And Start at the End by Emma Gray this came out last month. This is our third book published by Emma. She also wrote the Last Love, no Interest of you. And Emma's known for her signature emotional, sweeping romances and this one's no different. It's about Audrey and Fraser who have this epic, epic love. They fall madly for each other. Their lives are seemingly endless to be together and then tragedy strikes and their world completely implodes. And what happens next I can't really share because it's a bit of a spoiler, but let's just say they both go down paths unimagined but end up finding themselves at the center of it all over again. It's about creativity and ambition and a lot of what many people were saying here about coming back and finding yourself after all those years. It's a beautiful story. You will see that I have some things I like.
Zibby Owens
A lot of the themes pervade some of these books. I also have my own book coming out in September that I'm really excited about.
Kate Durgie
So that is my seventh book since 2021.
Sarah Bliss
Thanks to all of you.
Zibby Owens
Because without the podcast I couldn't sell anything and it's a collection of essays about a decade of my life of extreme change, from the moment when I told my girlfriends that I was getting a divorce all the way up until now. And it includes moments of loss, a lot of funny stories of all the mistakes I made with my kids. It's about female friendships, loss, divorce, pain, finding love again, reinvention, and making the most of the time that we have. But it's hopefully funny and it's a really quick read and I hope that people will read it in between all
Sarah Bliss
of your amazing books.
Zibby Owens
Thank you all so much for coming today and I hope you will have some lunch and get to know each other. And congratulations on all your grades. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby for Formerly Moms don't have Time to Read Books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram ibbyoens and Spread the Word. Thanks so much. Oh and buy the books.
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Podcast: Totally Booked with Zibby
Host: Zibby Owens
Date: May 29, 2026
This special bonus episode offers listeners a front-row seat to Zibby Owens’ “Summer Reads Party”—a lively, intimate gathering of over 30 authors featured in her most anticipated summer reading list. In a unique format, Zibby passed a microphone around her NYC apartment living room, inviting each author to introduce themselves, share their upcoming book, and give a preview of its premise and inspiration. The episode becomes a vibrant celebration of the literary community, providing listeners with an engaging, behind-the-scenes glimpse at a selection of new and forthcoming books across genres.
Each author introduces themselves, their book, and a quick pitch or backstory. The segment offers insight not just into upcoming releases but also the personal motivations, emotional journeys, and voice behind each work.
[04:15] Reimagining Grief: A New Path to Finding Healing, Strength and Joy After Loss
Kate Durgie & Sarah Bliss
[05:30] Imogen & Waiting
Imogen Waiting
[06:20] When You Loved Me
Beatriz Williams
[07:01] This Changes Everything
Lisa Scottoline
[07:45] Dominion
Jean Kwok
[08:58] When Lemons Give You Life
Anna Johnston
[09:55] Roxie in Color
Diane Dubrovnir
[11:41] Someone Else’s Husband
Kimberly McCreight
[11:43] Healthy with a Side of Happy
Sabrina Rudin
[12:19] Big and Lily
Lisa Rowe
[12:59] Worse Than Strangers
Kylie Letty
[13:29] What We Carry Home
Sunel Barnes
[14:44] Don’t Buy What I’m Selling: On Breaking Up with Advertising and Finally Learning to Love My Whole Fat Self
Lu Chakowski
[15:30] Dolly All the Time
Annabelle Monaghan
[17:05] Breathing Underwater
Jackie Friedland
[17:20] Shaken to the Core
Dara Levan
[21:39] The Introvert’s Guide to Kissing in Europe
Brenda Janowitz
[22:02] With Friends Like You
Amy Chozick
[22:53] Lois K. Hall & Caitlin Mullen present...
[27:44] Crash Into Me
Loven Yee
[27:57] Elizabeth Januzzi’s Memoir
[27:44] The Au Pair
Kelly Link
[30:44] Unseasonably Cold
Steph
[32:48] Spotlight: Recent Book Releases
Kathleen (publishers’ representative)
[35:14] Zibby’s Upcoming Book
Zibby Owens
The episode is warm, enthusiastic, and communal—a rapid-fire celebration of books and the personal stories behind them. Zibby's energy is supportive and inclusive, echoed by the gratitude and camaraderie of the authors. The collective wisdom on resilience, transformation, and storytelling underscores the episode.
The episode functions as a joyful literary roll call—sharing not only what to read this summer but why these stories matter to their creators. It's a valuable sampler for book lovers searching for inspiration and connection, and a love letter to the resilience and depth of women’s stories.