Ok fam, here are the new releases for April, below are the ones I've been notified about since posting this:

Ok since posting I've been made aware of:
Bleed Blue by Moxie St. Henry coming out on 4/6
Queenslander by Laura Garden coming out on 4/21

If I'me made aware of any more I'll update y'all! Tell me in the comments what you are most excited for!

Happy April everyone!! And since I HATE April fools pranks we are going to skip that and just announce our April reads! I am extra excited for the books that won the polls!

For our fantasy pick we will be reading The Book of Fallen Leaves by A.S. Tamaki

Our thriller pick of the month is If You Lie by Caleb Stephens

Make sure to join my discord so that we can all discuss!

Hi guys!

It's the time for our seasonal giveaway (where is time flying by AHH) and as I've had so much issues with my post office these last few weeks, we're going digital for this giveaway. Hopefully for the next season we can resume our mail giveaway but as of now, I'd rather make sure you guys receive your giveaway in time🥰

Before we dive into it, I just wanted to apologise that it has been a bit quieter in here! I do plan to send a longer email but this has been a crazy busy time with my health and life in general and hopefully we can get back on track but I am also looking to see how we can keep going sustainably! Thank you for sticking around 🤎

For this giveaway, you can choose to get a giftcard to any of the following:

• Bookshop.org or any indie bookshops

• Any small business that do any Cozy Hobbies, Teas or anything to support your slow living

• Steam or Indie Games giftcard

• Really anything within the same theme as above but might not exactly fit! (Feel free to DM/email me to dicuss this)

As usual, fill out this form before April 17th and I will be in touch with the winner! Can't wait to see what you guys choose for your giftcard🥰

🃏The Bookish Prankster This or That

Pick one from each pair but choose wisely!

Spine Cracker OR Dog-Ear Dealer

Fake Spoilers OR Cliffhanger Ending

Cover-less Books OR Upside-down Shelving

Glitter in Pages OR Invisible Bookmarks

Audiobook at 3x OR Reading the Last Page First

Book Snobbery OR Plot Twist Paranoia

🎭 The April Fools' Would You Rather

1. Would you rather have every book you touch turn into a How-To manual for tax law.. OR have every book end with and then they woke up and it was all a dream?

2. Would you rather accidentally tell someone the ending of their favorite series OR have someone glue two random pages of your current read together?

3. Would you rather only be allowed to read books with Comic Sans font OR only be allowed to read books with neon yellow covers?

4. Would you rather find a $20 bill inside a library book OR find a signed first edition of your favorite book at a garage sale for $1 but the signature is from the wrong author?

💡 How to Play Along

I’m a total Dog-Ear Dealer. I know, I know it’s a bookish sin, but sometimes a bookmark is just too far away! Also, if a book ends with'it was all a dream, I am officially retiring from reading forever.

❗️Tell me in the comments: What is the funniest or most evil thing you could do to a book lover within reason, of course?

Like the good corporate girlie I am, I think in quarters. So here are my top 5 new-to-me fiction reads of the 100+ I read in the first 3 months of the year. (And in full transparency, I'm writing this on the 28th in hope to tempt the book gods to give me another stellar read in the next few days!)

1. The Poet Empress by Shen Tao - I'm as surprised as you are that a non-Robin Hobb fiction book made it on this list. But this one has everything that I love in fantasy: political intrigue, well-drawn characters, and interesting themes to explore.

1. We Could be Rats by Emily Austin - Q1 2026 is when I discovered Emily Austin, an author I've been sleeping on for too long. I still have one more of her published novels to read, but this has been my favorite and is well-deserving of being on this list. I love a queer literary fiction book!

1. Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave - this absolutely was a sleeper pick...when I picked it up, I couldn't even remember why I ordered it through Book of the Month subscription. But, messy lesbians books have been a theme of this quarter and this has been my favorite of the bunch.

1. Midnight at the War by Devi S. Laskar - one of my favorite things of getting ARCs from publishers is getting to hype up books that absolutely deserve it, and this is one of them. This April release is incredibly timely, as our main character not only has a messy personal life, she seeks to humanize the brown people in the Middle East she reports on professionally.

1. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans - I'm sure you've heard of this one. I read it because my TikTok friend Kris sang it's praises, and I'm so glad I did. This is warm and cozy, but very real. And I absolutely love that our protagonist is an older woman.

Good morning, mis internet amigxs,

Apologies the link is a bit late, but we'll be chatting with Alvaro Enrigue on Monday, April 6th at 8:00 PM EST in lieu of our early sprints. The link for the chat is below. I ask that you DO NOT SHARE the link, as our chat with Alvaro is for Bindery subscribers only. In addition, since the chat will be recorded, please mute yourselves and turn off video before joining the chat.

Topic: Bien Leidos Author Chat with Alvaro Enrigue
Time: Apr 6, 2026 08:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
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Meeting ID: 834 3228 7765
Passcode: 230846

One tap mobile
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Join instructions
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Hi guys, here is the final vote for REVENGE! This will be the Wildcard category, so every book that has come 2nd so far is up for the running!

Truth and Courage!

Ed and Will

First, let's talk book club books.

Regrettably, I DNFed The Year of the Witching. This one just was not for me.

I made it to the last quarter of The Night Watchman and then was confirmed to moderate Bookcon and all plans changed. I then was confirmed to moderate Bay Area Book Festival.

My immediate reading priority: read all of the panel for Bookcon, finish The Night Watchman, read April's bookclub books, start reading the panel for May!

So far I've read:

Nothing Ever Happens Here by Seraphina Nova Glass

This one was a small town thriller with a missing husband who could be an attacker, and a senior community with a podcast who helped solve it all. ADORED.

Sundown Girls by LS Stratton

This was a YA thriller with a supernatural bent and focus on the history of sundown towns. UNPUTDOWNABLE. Kept you guessing to the very end.

How to Survive Your Murder by Danielle Valentine

Also a YA thriller with slashers. Fans of My Heart is a Chainsaw will love the movie references in this one! This one also has a bit of a supernatural bent.

You guys, I've already lost track of the body count! It's A LOT.

I'm currently reading Who's All Going by Lisa Springer

Another YA thriller! These have all been so great. This one is has influencers, a resort, a wellness cult. Hard to put down.

Have you read any of these?

Hello All,

As a reminder, today is the absolute last day to get a 15% discount on my Must Reads Indigenous Books list .

If you see anything not already on your bookshelf, please buy it! My hope is that this sale is successful and Bookshop continues to offer us discounts! (I have so many more lists I want to create!)

As a reminder, any order purchased today supports Black Walnut Books, an Indigenous queer woman owned bookstore.

Tomorrow, we change bookstores!

We have a new merch launch! We're announcing it here first in-case anything sells out. Everyone here will also receive a discount:

Pit Fighter - 5%

First Swords - 10% (up from the usual 5%)

Bright Stars - 15% (up from the usual 10%) Code - BrightStar15

Check the new merch on Fourthwall - https://thebrothersgwynne-shop.fourthwall.com/collections/all

Truth & Courage,

Will & Ed

We have a new merch launch! We're announcing it here first in-case anything sells out. Everyone here will also receive a discount:

Pit Fighter - 5%

First Swords - 10% (up from the usual 5%) Code - FirstSword10

Bright Stars - 15% (up from the usual 10%)

Check the new merch on Fourthwall - https://thebrothersgwynne-shop.fourthwall.com/collections/all

Truth & Courage,

Will & Ed

We have a new merch launch! We're announcing it here first in-case anything sells out. Everyone here will also receive a discount:

Pit Fighter - 5% (CODE PITFIGHTER5)

First Swords - 10% (up from the usual 5%)

Bright Stars - 15% (up from the usual 10%)

Check the new merch on Fourthwall - https://thebrothersgwynne-shop.fourthwall.com/collections/all

Truth & Courage,

Will & Ed

It's Tuesday, which means new sci-fi dropped and I have Opinions. I'm mainly using Storygraph and publisher sites to find them, so if you're an indie author and you've got something coming out let me know.

Ruiner by Lara Messersmith-Glavin (AK Press, one of my FAV indie presses) - Nonbinary MC, storytelling as literal combat magic, political fantasy about exploitation and environmental destruction. The world runs on stories and story tellers battle each other by spinning tales out of light, and a story lost in combat is lost forever, sometimes taking part of the teller with it. Which is both a beautiful metaphor for what it costs marginalized people to keep fighting AND an extremely cool magic system. This is an indie press debut and exactly the kind of thing the algorithm will not show you, which is why I'm here. Speaking of algorithms...

Love Is An Algorithm by Laura Brooke Robson (HarperCollins) - Gateway drug into sci-fi again (see last week's post.) I regret nothing. As usual I'm stretching the definition of sci-fi, this is sort of contemporary romance, but it's a satire of AI and tech startup culture and dating apps and it has a musician with writer's block (relatable - not the musician part, I am deeply and unapologetically terrible at music) and an app developer with anxiety whose creation starts telling people how to run their entire lives. I was in college during the creation of Facebook and the current dating scene is essentially another planet to me, but I'm still interested in this book concept.

Ruins by Lily Brooks-Dalton (Hachette) - I find it ironically funny that two books have Ruin in the name this week - if that doesn't tell you about the state of the world!!! If you watched The Midnight Sky on Netflix and then found out it was based on a book and the book was better (it always is), this is that author's new one. A post-climate-catastrophe archaeologist (what a mouthful) with a shitty marriage becomes obsessed (compensating much?) with proving a lost civilization existed that nobody else believes in, and then she undertakes an expedition that will either vindicate her completely or destroy what's left of her life. This is kind of speculative lit fic. Jeff VanderMeer called it "stunning and highly recommended" which means it's probably going to rearrange your internal organs. Though TBH I don't put much stake in author notes nowadays.

Event Horizon by Balsam Karam, translated by Saskia Vogel (The Feminist Press at CUNY) - Kurdish-Swedish author, feminist indie press, translated into English. A seventeen year old girl from the Outskirts (a stateless borderlands where women and children have been stripped of rights and legal status...sound familiar?) throws Molotov cocktails at a government building in protest, gets imprisoned as the instigator, is tortured, and given a final choice: public execution or being launched into a black hole as part of an experiment. She chooses the black hole. I would too. It's $16.95 from a feminist indie press. Buy it and eat a pb&j for lunch instead of takeout. Feed your soul, bestie.

Star Wars: Legacy of Vader — The Reign of Kylo Ren Vol. 2 by Charles Soule (Marvel Comics, which is now a Disney imprint) - Collecting issues 7-12 of the ongoing Marvel series, if you are in to this sort of thing (a super long term commitment where you have no idea where to start and will probably regret your life choices once you're too far in to stop.) On Goodreads I saw a reviewer describe Vol. 1 as "a gas station sandwich at 2am that somehow tastes better when you consider what else is available" which is TBH the most honest Star Wars book review I have ever read and I respect it enormously. If you are a Star Wars comics person, this is for you. I haven't read any of these so please feel free to come for my in my ignorance.

🔎The Watching You Book Club Kit Is Here!

If your book club loves dark psychological thrillers, twisty serial killer mysteries, and intense discussions, then you’re going to want this one ready for your next meeting.

Our complete book club kit for Watching You by Helen Sarah Fields is officially ready and it’s packed with everything you need to turn your next book club night into a suspense-filled experience. 📚

Set against the shadowy streets of Edinburgh, Watching You delivers chilling tension, shocking twists, and plenty of clues to debate. And now you can dive even deeper into the story with a themed book club night designed to spark conversation, theories, and maybe even a little friendly competition.

📖 What’s Inside the Book Club Kit?

The kit includes everything you need to host a memorable discussion:

🔎 Book Club Discussion Guide

Thought-provoking questions about the characters, twists, themes, and shocking moments that will get everyone sharing their theories.

🍽️ Themed Menu with Recipes

Delicious food and drinks inspired by the dark atmosphere of the story including a few treats that perfectly match the thriller vibe.

🎲 Interactive Book Club Activities

Fun mystery-themed games like Catch the Killer and Profile the Suspect so your group can step into the role of investigator for the night.

🎁 Themed Door Prize Ideas

Creative prizes to surprise your guests and keep the thriller energy going.

Whether your group loves solving mysteries, debating plot twists, or just enjoying a great suspenseful read together, this kit will make your book club night even more fun.

📚 Come join us in The First Editions to access our book club kits and much more!

Happy Tuesday, mis internet amigxs,

It's Trans Day of Visibility and I wanted to remind you that while Trans people are more visible than ever, but they are also increasingly targeted. Visibility alone is not the solution when our trans brothers and sisters are so violently targeted. They deserve to be safe, secure, protected, supported, valued and loved. While this list isn't exhaustive, here are some of the ways to support the trans community today:

Support mutual aid for your local trans community

Fight against misinformation both online and in person and learn more about the trans community

Donate to Transgender Law Center

Donate to Trans Lifeline

Read books by Trans authors

Contact your electeds about HR 7661. 5 Calls makes it so easy.

However you choose to honor the trans community today, please do so loudly an unapologetically. We need to support them now more than ever.

And now on to this week's Latinx releases...(as a reminder, if you subscribe at Libritos or Lectores level, you could have had this list earlier. Please consider subscribing at a paid tier to Bien Leidos to support the work I do every week).

TRANSLATED ECOLOGICAL FICTION

Only A Little While Here by Maria Ospina (Audiobook)

POETRY

the light of your body by ire'ne lara silva

xoxo,

Carmen

PS--There is a pretty big March 31st release by a Latina author missing from this list because if you don't want to claim your Latinidad, I'm not here to force an identity on your. Please keep that in mind before commenting on this missing release and any others moving forward.

Last Call!

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