Soon the legends of these events solidified around a single explanation: A hard-to-find, abstract video game called Polybius was causing nausea, headaches and nightmares in players. The game was so addictive, rumor had it, that kids kept coming back to play Polybius until they went insane, committed suicide, or outright vanished. Those men in black suits? They were CIA agents, who had placed the dangerous video game in Portland arcades to test the effects of psychoactive stimuli on live subjects—which was why men in black had been collecting data from the machines all month long.

And the reason no one could find Polybius in arcades in Portland or anywhere else when they went looking for them now? That was obvious: when word got out about the top secret video game and its deadly effects on players, the men in black yanked them from arcades so their secret experiment wouldn’t be discovered.

Polybius remained nothing but an urban legend until GamePro magazine wrote an article about it. Their main source was a website called coinop.org, who even claimed to have an image of the arcade game’s home screen:

At last, some evidence! And a new clue: “Sinneslöschen” was the name of the software company that supposedly made it. But Sinneslöschen didn’t exist, in the United States or anywhere else. And translated from German, it roughly meant, “Sense delete”—aka sensory deprivation. Exactly what the men in black had been using Polybius to do!

So, was a secret, CIA-sponsored, psycho-addictive video game called Polybius really killing kids in Portland, Oregon and elsewhere in the early 1980s?

In a word, no.

It turns out there were pretty ordinary—though still interesting—explanations for every part of the story. First, two Portland kids really had gotten sick in the same arcade on the same day in 1981. The first one was 12-year-old Brian Mauro, who was trying to beat the Asteroids high score record of 30.1 million points in a single game. He was so serious about it that he had a chair with back support brought into the arcade, and wore gloves to keep his fingers from blistering. He even had a local news crew there to film the attempt.

Brian played for a whole day, accumulating enough extra spaceships that he could “let a few fall to hurtling asteroids and attacking enemy ships while he rested,” reported the Eugene Register-Guard in a short, entertaining write-up. The arcade’s owners massaged his hands when they cramped, and Brian heroically played some of the time one-handed. It was also Thanksgiving, and his mom, Anne, brought his Thanksgiving dinner to the arcade. (!)

Twenty-eight hours into his marathon attempt, Brian Mauro left the game feeling sick to his stomach and never came back. But it wasn’t because of a CIA psychotropic experiment. “He said he thought he drank too many Cokes,” a spokesperson for the arcade told the paper.

The other kid, Michael Lopez, coincidentally got a terrible headache while playing Tempest on the same day, at the same arcade, and later collapsed in a friend’s front lawn. It turned out he was having the first of the many migraine headaches he would continue to have for the rest of his life. “It’s not the game’s fault that my basal ganglia have some faulty parts in their complex harness of neurological wiring,” he told Retrocade Magazine in 2012. “Blame that on genetics.”

Neither of them had played a secret CIA mind-control game called Polybius.

And the men in black who had been taking pictures of high score screens, and fiddling with the backs of arcade game consoles? Well, that actually happened, but it was the FBI, not the CIA. Some Portland-area arcade operators had been using their video games for illegal gambling by modifying them with counters, and paying out cash to players based on how many points they scored in their games.

Before their raids, FBI agents had quietly gone into every arcade in the city and poked around the backs of the machines looking for the counters. They had also taken pictures of the video games’ high score screens—to try and identify player witnesses they could interview.

The truth is, Polybius the video game wasn’t real. Whoever started the rumor was clearly having a little fun. But I think they built a bit of a lesson into the legend too. You see, Polybius is the name of a real Greek historian who lived from around 200-118 BCE. His Histories is notable for being the only Hellenistic historical work to survive from that era, and his analysis of Greek constitutional changes was a big influence on Enlightenment writers John Locke and Montesquieu, whose work in turn inspired the framers of the United States Constitution.

Where things get really interesting is the introduction to his Histories. There Polybius says he’s going to cover only the events that happened during his own life, because “accounts of the remote past amount to hearsay, and do not allow for safe judgments and assertions regarding the course of events.” Even eyewitnesses, he explains, can be contradictory. As a result, Polybius says, “the historian must examine the data, apply reason, and pass judgement.”

Sounds like the person who named the legendary video game “Polybius” was trying to tell us something.

(Or maybe they called it “Polybius” for the simple reason that the real Polybius was from a place in Greece called…Arcadia. Womp womp.)

It’s easy to see now why the myth of the mind-bending Polybius arcade game was so easy to believe. Photosensitive epilepsy affects 3% of people with epilepsy, so millions of kids playing video games in the early 80s meant that a few of them were bound to have seizures triggered by the flashing, strobing lights in the arcades. Atari and other video game makers were known to slip unfinished game consoles into arcades as beta tests and secretly monitor player reactions. And of course, the CIA really did illegally experiment with behavior-altering drugs on people without their consent in a twenty year project called MKUltra, which was revealed to the public in 1975.

Even more than that, faith in the US government dropped from a high of 73% in 1958 to under 30% by the late 1970s as a series of government scandals and misinformation campaigns came to light. That trend has continued to the present day, where only 17% of Americans trust our elected officials in Washington to “do what is right.” We’ve gotten to a point where most of us don’t believe half of what our politicians tell us.

It’s no surprise then that actual belief in conspiracy theories is on the rise. As Karl says in my novel War Games, “When every other thing the government tells you is a lie, no one knows what’s real. And when you can’t tell fantasy from reality anymore, you’ll believe anything.”

Polybius remains one of my favorite conspiracy theories, in part because I’m a child of those early 80s arcades, and in part because I now live in Portland, the mythical testing ground of Polybius. And I’m not the only one who loves it. It’s widely cited as the inspiration for 1984’s The Last Starfighter, a movie I love, about a teenager who is recruited to be a fighter pilot in an interstellar war when he breaks the record on an arcade game that is secretly a real spaceship battle simulator.

It has also made appearances on The Simpsons (which, by the way, also has many character names based on street names in Matt Groening’s home town of Portland, Oregon):

(Love the “PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT” stamped on the bottom!)

A home version appears in the 1980s time traveling show Paper Girls:

And Polybius gets a now infamous background shout-out in the Marvel TV show Loki:

If you want to read more about the entertaining myth of Polybius, I highly recommend Brian Dunning’s podcast and article about it on Skeptoid, as well as Cat DeSpira’s update on her 2012 Retrocade Magazine article. And if “BuzzFeed Unsolved”-like videos is more your speed, check out the YouTube video “Polybius - The Video Game That Doesn’t Exist” by Ahoy.

One last virtual school visit of the year!

The school year is almost over, which means I have only one more free, live, virtual school visit coming up before the summer. And it’s just a week away!

Please join me online Tuesday, May 19 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT. As always, I’ll talk about the inspirations for some of my books, and then answer viewer questions live. Bring one reader, a whole class of readers, or a whole school of readers—there’s no limit on how many people can join me.

The event is free, but you have to register in advance to be there!

Click here to register

Can’t make it next Tuesday? Don’t worry—the event will be recorded and up for the rest of the summer. And I’ll see you again online in September!

What I’m reading

Until last month, the only book I had ever read by Charles Dickens was The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which was assigned reading in the Mystery and Detective Fiction class I took as an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee. And, well, if I’m being really honest, I cannot claim to have read the whole thing, as I’m pretty sure I bailed on it part way through. (And I’m not the only one. Dickens also didn’t finish it—but in his case, it was because he died first.)

I’ve always felt I should get around to reading something else by Dickens. (I mean really reading it, not just pretending to read it.) So when my mom suggested that she and I and my wife and daughter form a little Gratz Family Book Club to read classics that few or none of us have read before, I immediately suggested A Tale of Two Cities. Only one of us—Wendi—had read it before, and she was happy to give it another go.

This one appealed because it was historical fiction with social justice themes. Which…is kind of the way I describe my own books. To be clear, I am not saying I’m, like, the twenty-first century Dickens, or anything so presumptuous. We’re certainly very different stylists. And you could fit four of my books into any one of his. But I admire his humanist goals, his cliffhangery chapters, his wit, and his deliberately popular appeal. So let’s say I’ve always aspired to be Dickens. (Even though I hadn’t read any of his books. Ahem.)

We finished A Tale of Two Cities last month, and I really enjoyed it. It’s not always the easiest prose to understand, and Dickens never says anything in 100 words that he can say in 1,000 words. (He did, after all, publish the book in 31 installments of his self-published literary periodical All the Year Round, and something had to fill those pages every month.) But the story is a proper pot-boiler while also being historical fiction (which I love), and the interconnectedness of the characters is delicious.

I also appreciated what the introduction to our edition had to say about it, which was that in many ways, Tale is Dickens’ most concise novel. For one, it’s among his shortest novels. Not counting his novellas and the unfinished Edwin Drood, it’s his second-shortest novel, clocking in at a still hefty 145,000 words. (For comparison’s sake, my books average around 70,000 words each—and I’m shooting for much shorter lately.)

But it is also “concise” in that Dickens is trying to tell the story of the French Revolution through the far more personal stories of his characters. Thus the lives of Charles Darnay, Lucie Manette, Dr. Alexandre Manette, Sydney Carton, and Monsieur and Madame Defarge, in their ways, are parallels of the larger historical event.

And that, after all, is what I’m often trying to do in my own books, whether I succeed as famously as Charles Dickens or not.

That’s it for this month! If you liked this newsletter, please share it online, or with anyone you think would be interested:

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Until next time, don’t play any psychotropic video games without me!

Say hello to the cover of my new novella, Flight, which debuts September 1, 2026!

Here’s the official summary of the story:

Daniela López is on a life-or-death journey.

Forced to flee her beloved home in Honduras, Dani and her family were headed north in search of safety–until a treacherous mistake ripped Dani’s parents away. Now Dani and her younger brother Carlos are on their own, and have no choice but to keep going in the desperate hope of finding their parents at the Mexico-United States border.

But to get there, they will have to ride on top of a roaring freight train known as “The Beast.”

Rickety and deadly, The Beast makes hairpin turns at terrifying speeds, shoots through dark tunnels, and stops for nothing. And there is the constant danger of being caught by gangs and kidnappers along the way.

Surrounded by hundreds of fellow refugees, Daniela will have to figure out who she can and cannot trust–and fast. Otherwise, she and Carlos don’t stand a chance of surviving…

Here’s the unofficial back story:

When I was researching and plotting my 2022 novel Two Degrees, I found a lot of stories I wanted to tell about people adversely affected by human caused climate change. In fact, my original pitch to my editor was for a book of twenty-seven short stories, featuring people from many countries and continents, all over the world. (I really wanted to show the global in “global warming.”)

My editor wrote back and said, “I think you maybe need fewer characters and stories in this book.” Okay, I said, how many fewer? She said, “Four?” Great! I said. I can cut four stories from the twenty-seven.

“No,” my editor said. “I think you need a maximum of four.”

Ouch.

Dreams die hard in publishing.

But it was healthy reality check. Twenty-seven stories was going to be a lot, and it was going to be hard—nay, impossible—to draw any connections between so many characters in so many parts of the world. Twenty-seven stories isn’t a novel; it’s an anthology.

So I went back to my ideas, and picked four in wholly different parts of the world. I chose one in the Arctic, one in the United States, one in Africa, and another in India. But again, that felt like too much, as I was not only having to establish the climate change parts of the stories, but also the different cultures, histories, and geographies of each tale.

So I went back to the well, and picked four new stories. I would do two boys escaping polar bears in Manitoba, Canada, a girl and her horse escaping wildfires in California, a girl and her dog escaping a hurricane in Florida, and a girl and her little brother fleeing food scarcity in Honduras. Different cultures and histories, yes, but all North American, so there was a built-in familiarity with all of them. Perfect! Done.

Yeah, so, if you’ve read Two Degrees you know one of those four stories wouldn’t make it into the novel. I just didn’t know it back then.

I researched and plotted each of the four stories, and then dove into the writing. The way Two Degrees is set up, you read a chunk of one story, then a chunk of another, then a chunk of another, and so on. It doesn’t alternate chapters like, say, Refugee, or Ground Zero.

By the time I had written the first two chunks of the first two stories, I knew there was no way this novel could have four stories in it. Not and be less than 400 pages. Which would have been way too long. So I made the heartbreaking decision to cut one of the four stories—the one about the girl leaving Honduras and traveling up through Mexico with her brother to the US.

As a bit of an in-joke, I wove references to most of the other original twenty-four stories that hadn’t made the cut into the finale of Two Degrees—including the journey of the girl and her brother fleeing Honduras. But that story in particular stayed with me, long after the book was out. I felt as though I hadn’t done them justice, especially after doing all that research into their lives. But there also wasn’t enough there for an entire novel.

So I was very excited when my Allies-adjacent novella Resist did so well, opening the door for more novellas connected to my books. I immediately knew the Honduran girl’s story was the one I wanted to tell next, and I’m thrilled that the full story of Dani and her family’s trek north through Mexico riding on top of The Beast will finally be told in Flight.

The book debuts September 1, 2026, but you can preorder your copy today!

Pre-order FLIGHT on Amazon

Pre-order FLIGHT on B&N

Pre-order FLIGHT on Bookshop.org

Pre-order FLIGHT from Green Bean Books!

And just a reminder, books ordered from my local bookshop Green Bean Books here in Portland, Oregon come signed and personalized!

Recent(ish) interviews

I was talking with my friend and fellow thriller writer April Henry recently about podcast interviews, and I realized I’ve done a few lately that I haven’t told people about.

Last year, I joined my friend and fellow middle grade thriller writer James Ponti on The Sherlock Sessions, his limited-edition writing workshop podcast, to talk all things plot…

I talked about War Games, and what historical fiction can tell us about the present, with Justin Hofstetter for YALSA’s The Hub…

And just recently I spoke with Mercedes and Anastasia Korngut for their Hack Your Happiness podcast, where we discussed how reading about history offers hope for the future. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify:

Check them all out, give them a like, and share them with young readers or educators in your life!

The virtual events keep on keeping on

Want to hear me answer questions live? This is your reminder that I do free, live, virtual events each month that anyone can attend. This month’s virtual event is Thursday, April 23rd at 11am ET/10am CT/9am MT/8am PT. Register here. If you’ve been putting off joining me, get on it—there’s only one more virtual event this school year after this one!

Another giveaway!

Boy, I have been giving books away like crazy lately. So why not let the insanity continue?

I have a weird one for you this month. It’s two different paperback editions of Ban This Book. And they’re both in English. But they are the Australian editions of Ban This Book! So they will read almost exactly the same, except for a few cultural differences.

For example, in Australian English elevators are “lifts,” the trunk of a car is the “boot,” cookies are “biscuits,” and “thongs” are sandals, not what we call thongs. Though, come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I never mention any of those things in Ban This Book. So I have no idea what’s different about these books! Maybe nothing??? Crikey.

Just imagine you’re watching Bluey, only it’s not as cute and doesn’t make you cry.

I have enough of these to give away one class set of each edition. So this is a giveaway for the educators out there only. If you don’t work at a school, please don’t put your name in the drawing. There’s nothing I can do to stop you, of course. I’m just asking on your honor to leave these sets for a classroom or library to win. Thanks!

Oh, and despite the fact that these are Australian editions, I’m afraid the contest is open to US residents only. Sorry—the price of shipping books outside the country is prohibitive for a one-man operation like me!

The deadline to enter is the end of the day on Sunday, April 26, 2026. Good luck!

Enter to win Ban This Book

What I’m Reading

Play the Fool by Lina Chern is a terrific mystery I picked up in February at Left Coast Crime. The main character, Katie True, is a cynical, twenty-something tarot-reader who has never lived up to all the “potential” her family and her teachers saw in her. Though Katie feels the pressure to do something with her life, nothing yet has pushed her to leave her dead-end retail job in a dying mall in the Chicago suburbs. Until her friend from the shop across the hall turns up dead. Good thing Katie’s got all that experience “reading” people with her tarot cards. She’ll need that, and the help of a handsome young police detective with regrets of his own, to get to the bottom of things—and perhaps find her True calling in life. (See what I did there?) Tons of fun, even for a skeptic like me. A sequel, Tricks of Fortune, came out last July, and I’ve already got it on order.

And I’ve been reading the individual comics on the Marvel Unlimited app, but two graphic novels—Get Back Up and Through the Gates of Hell—collect the first ten or so issues of the excellent recent run by writer Joe Kelly on The Amazing Spider-Man. As the new series begins, Peter Parker’s got a good job, his love life isn’t a total mess, and he’s kicking butt as Spider-Man. He’s doing okay for once! Until an interstellar badass named Hellgate shows up to “learn” from Spidey, and in the process opens a portal and punches Peter Parker into space. It sounds bonkers, and it is (what comics aren’t bonkers?), but it leads to some terrific storytelling. In space, Peter’s confidence is wrecked, and he weighs physically modifying himself to become strong enough to defeat Hellgate—at the risk of losing who he is inside. Meanwhile on Earth, in my absolute favorite take on the character ever, Peter’s old adversary-turned-ally Norman Osborne (the erstwhile Green Goblin) puts on the Spidey costume in Peter’s absence and plays Spider-Man—with decidedly mixed results. The two storylines, illustrated alternately by Pepe Larraz and John Romita, Jr., are, dare I say it, amazing. (See what I did there?)

That’s it for this month! If you liked this newsletter, please share it online, or with anyone you think would be interested:

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In the summer of 2020, protestors across the United States expressed their righteous anger over the murder of George Floyd in many ways—including pulling down or defacing the statues of people associated with America’s legacy of racial injustice. A lot of attention was focused on statues of former Confederates, but others, like Christopher Columbus (above), got the same treatment.

What many people don’t realize is that Americans have a long history of pulling down statues of people they have decided they don’t like anymore—beginning with the very first public statue in Colonial America.

Like the Revolutionary War novel I’m writing, the story of America’s first rescinded statue begins with the Stamp Act. In 1765, the British government had a cash flow problem. They had just fought the successful yet expensive French and Indian War in North America, (part of the larger Seven Years’ War overseas,) and they wanted the American colonists to pay for their side of things. So parliament instituted the Stamp Act, which said that all paper documents in the American colonies—from contracts to marriage licenses to newspapers to playing cards—could only be printed on paper that bore an official stamp from the British government. That stamp cost money, of course, and the paper it was printed on could only come from England.

The American colonists were not amused. (As evidenced by the political cartoon/Stamp Act substitute seal above, often printed in the corner of “illegal” Patriot newspapers in lieu of the official stamp.) The American colonists hadn’t felt like the French were any real threat in North America to begin with, and they were mad that the treaties England had signed with its Native American allies meant the colonists couldn’t snatch up Indian land to the west. (Not that anybody would abide by those treaties for long.)

When the ships with Stamp Act paper arrived in New York in 1765, thousands of people gathered in protest on Bowling Green, near Battery Park, at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. (Right outside the fort where the British governor of New York had run to hide.) There they burned effigies of the governor and clashed with the British soldiers who were called out to quell them. The riot lasted for days, and similar scenes played out in major colonial cities from Boston to Charleston.

The rioters’ rally cry was “no taxation without representation,” as the colonies were not allowed to elect members of parliament, and thus had no vote in how or if they should be taxed. But while the colonists weren’t officially represented in parliament, they did have their advocates there. Perhaps the greatest of these was William Pitt the Elder, a populist member of parliament (and namesake of Pittsburgh), who would a year later (briefly) become prime minister of England. He convinced his colleagues to repeal the Stamp Act, averting an American revolution. (At least for the moment.)

The people of New York City were so grateful to Pitt (above) that they asked the New York legislature to erect a statue to him. The legislature, which was all Tory loyalists, was like, “Well, sure, he’s great. But there’s good people on both sides. And we can’t spend money for a statue of ANYBODY before we put one up of King George III!” Then they probably put their hands up in front of their mouths and snickered right in front of everybody.

So the New York legislature commissioned two statues from a London sculptor—one of William Pitt, and the other of King George III.

Five years later, in the summer of 1770, the statues were finished and shipped to America. The William Pitt one was life-sized and respectful, and depicting him in a toga like a Roman senator of old.

The King George statue was Romanesque too, but ostentatious and enormous:

The King George in the statue was about a third larger than he was in real life, and wore a laurel wreath instead of a crown. He was also mounted on a horse, deliberately mimicking a similar statue of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. (Notably the last of the “Five Good Emperors” of Rome, and the last emperor of the Pax Romana, two hundred years of peace and prosperity for the Roman Empire.) The statue was made of lead gilded with gold, and weighed 4,000 pounds.

The New York legislature put the William Pitt statue on a small pedestal in the middle of the sidewalk between Wall Street and Williams Street.

They put the statue of King George on an 18-foot tall stone pedestal right in the middle of Bowling Green, where the mob had gathered for days to protest the Stamp Act.

The New York legislature was probably tee-heeing again. But the political climate in the colonies had gotten much worse in the five years between the commissioning and the delivery of the statues. The Sons of Liberty—a loosely organized, clandestine, sometimes violent group of American Patriots—had been born from the Stamp Act riots, and were making trouble. In Rhode Island, the Sons of Liberty burned a British navy ship to the waterline. In Boston, they threw tea into the harbor rather than pay parliament’s new tax on tea. In New York, the Sons of Liberty burned effigies of Loyalist administrators and clashed with the British army almost every night.

Now they got a kick out of piling trash at the bottom of the King George III statue in Bowling Green, and painting vulgar messages on the pedestal.

To keep out the troublemakers, the city erected an iron fence around Bowling Green. They also passed a law that made the punishment for vandalism a year in jail or a $500 fine—the equivalent of more than $20,000 today.

The vandals just jumped the fence, ignored the penalties, and kept desecrating the statue.

Cut to July 1776. The revolution had officially begun at the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April. After enduring a lengthy siege in Boston, the British army had escaped to Halifax, and was now headed for New York, bringing an invasion force of 130 warships and 32,000 soldiers—six times the remaining population of New York.

At almost the same time, messengers were arriving in New York from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia with the newly written Declaration of Independence. The document listed the many grievances the colonists had with the British government, and made their goal of independence official.

On July 9, 1776, copies of the Declaration of Independence were read throughout the city, causing a frenzy of Patriotic fervor. Ecstatic mobs tore through New York, destroying anything and everything that had to do with the monarchy.

Including, of course, that enormous statue of King George III in Bowling Green.

The rioters threw rocks at the statue. Then they threw ropes over it, and pulled it down. It was a singularly symbolic act of defiance—something that would have been unheard of just a year earlier, despite the Patriots’ growing conflicts with the crown. So sacrosanct was the image of the king that, until that moment, no one had ever vandalized the statue itself—just the pedestal.

It must have been simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.

The story gets even better. With a war on, the Patriots couldn’t let 4,000 pounds of lead go to waste. So, after removing the king’s head and mounting it on a pike outside a tavern in what is now Washington Heights, they sent the statue off to Litchfield, Connecticut, where the ladies of the Walcott family melted it down and turned it into musket balls! 42,088 musket balls to be exact. (They kept track.) “The king of England’s statue has been pulled down to make musket balls of,” a colonist named Ebenezer Hazzard wrote later that month. “So his troops will probably have his majesty fired at them.”

Of the original monument, only the iron fence they put up to protect it remains on Bowling Green. King George’s head—the lead one, at least—was rumored to have ended up back in England, but has never been seen again. Strangely, the only part of the statue left is the horse’s tail, which is now on display at the New York Historical Society:

Critics argue that removing statues amounts to “erasing history.” But as The Bowery Boys podcast says in their excellent episode about the statue, “A monument itself is not a history lesson, but a time capsule of the culture who created it.” Pulling down statues of people our ancestors once regarded highly enough to build statues to them isn’t erasing those people. It’s re-evaluating them.

Online and in-person events!

A reminder that my free, virtual school visits continue this month on Tuesday, March 24th at 1pm ET/10pm PT. Click here for the full schedule. And I just got back from the North Texas Teen Book Festival in Irving, Texas—thanks to everyone who came out to see me!—and will be back in Texas on June 9th to speak at the Dallas Holocaust Museum. Click here to see my event listings on my web site.

Book giveaway!

Your reward for reading this far (besides the A-plus 250-year-old statue content) is that I’m having another book giveaway! This time it’s for hardcover copies of my climate change novel Two Degrees.

Each entry will be assigned a number, and winners will be selected using a random number generator. So that everyone has an equal chance to win, please enter only once. Thanks! And sorry, due to the number of submissions I expect to get, only the giveaway winners will be notified of the results. But that means if you hear from me, it’ll be good news!

The deadline to enter is the end of the day on Sunday, March 22, 2026. Thanks, and good luck!

Enter to win a copy of Two Degrees

What I’m Reading

Two books for you this month. Both for adults, but one fiction and the other non-fiction.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman is a hoot. I’m very late to the game on this one, as there seven books in the series already, with an eighth to come in May. The premise is bonkers: alien conglomerates seed worlds like ours with humanoids, wait until we’re moderately advanced, then swoop in, kill 99% of the population, and throw the rest into a world-spanning reality show that’s a cross between Dungeons & Dragons, Fortnite, and The Hunger Games. Carl is dropped into the dungeon wearing nothing but a leather jacket, t-shirt, and boxers with hearts on them. Along with him is his ex-girlfriend’s prize-winning show cat Princess Donut, who can now talk thanks to the wacky set-up of the game.

Dungeon Crawler Carl belongs to a very niche sub-genre called LitRPG, where a person from the real world is somehow transported to a place with all the rules and conventions of modern video games, and has to survive. If that strange combination of elements sounds fun to you (as it does to me), you’ll love Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s a fun, funny, action-packed, and often surprisingly pathos-infused fantasy novel. (That is definitely for adults.)

From the silly to the serious, my next recommendation is John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis. This one, which has a long waiting list at the library, popped up on an “It’s Your Lucky Day!” shelf in my local branch, and I snatched it up. John became obsessed with tuberculosis (perhaps, by his own admission, a little unhealthily so) after meeting a young man named Henry with the disease at a clinic in Sierra Leone. Henry’s story provides the framework for John’s exploration of the history of tuberculosis, from evidence of its existence in ancient times, through the Victorian “consumption” epidemic, to the tuberculosis sanatoriums of the 1920s and 30s, and eventually to its modern-day cure.

John writes that he talked about tuberculosis so much around his family that his wife told him, “Everything is tuberculosis to you.” He agreed—and that conversely, “tuberculosis is everything.” One of my favorite chapters is where he pushes the boundaries of that idea, suggesting that, for example, World War I, the cowboy hat, and the state of New Mexico all owe their origins to tuberculosis. He readily admits there were a lot of other factors that caused each of those things (particularly World War I,) but he makes a compelling argument that tuberculosis, which is the deadliest infectious disease in the world and has been for most of human existence, has played a major part in our cultural, political, and societal development. The biggest question John asks though is why a million people still die of tuberculosis every year when we’ve had a cure for the disease since the 1950s. (And he has some very compelling answers.) Everything is Tuberculosis is deadly serious and laugh out loud funny, infuriating and inspiring, informative and heart-wrenching, all at the same time. Read it.

That’s it for this month! If you liked this newsletter, please share it online, or with anyone you think would be interested:

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No more kings!

Jesse Owens winning four gold medals. The first Olympic torch relay. The Hindenburg flying overhead. Jewish athlete Helene Mayer giving a Nazi salute on the medal stand. Adolf Hitler watching over everything from his private box in the Olympiastadion.

I wrote about all of these legendary images—both famous and infamous—in War Games, my novel of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. But they’re only part of the story.

The 1936 Winter Olympics were also held in Germany—in a little Alpine town in Bavaria called Garmisch-Partenkirchen, six months before the far more notorious Summer Olympics. Back then, Olympic host nations put on both Olympics, usually in different places. That was soon to change though.

Japan was set to host the 1940 Summer and Winter Olympics, in Tokyo and Sapporo respectively, but those Olympics were cancelled when they and everybody else were busy fighting in World War II. The Olympics didn’t return until 1948, when London, England hosted the Summer Games and St. Moritz, Switzerland hosted the Winter Games. The Summer and Winter Olympics were never again hosted by the same country, and in 1992 the Summer Olympic Games and the Winter Olympic Games began alternating on separate four-year cycles in even-numbered years, the way they do today.

But back in 1936, the Winter Olympics preceded the Summer Olympics in Germany. Afraid of boycott threats, the Nazis removed all the antisemitic signs from Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and allowed a single Jewish athlete, Rudi Ball, to compete for the German hockey team. (Part of the reason they let Ball compete was because a non-Jewish friend on the team, Gustav Jaenecke, refused to play unless Ball was included. The other part was because the Nazis knew their hockey team didn’t stand a chance without Jaenecke and Ball.) The Nazis also delayed plans to send troops into the hotly contested Rhineland region between Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.

Nobody boycotted the Games, and a then-record 49 countries participated. Alpine skiing made its first Olympic appearance. Great Britain’s hockey team scored an upset gold medal win against defending champs Canada. Norwegian Ivar Ballangrud won three medals in speed skating, and his fellow countrywoman Sonja Henie (who went on to translate her Olympic success into a series of box-office hits in Hollywood!) won her third consecutive gold medal in women’s singles figure skating. In the end, the 1936 Winter Olympics happened without much fanfare or controversy.

Then, twelve days after the Winter Olympics closed, Hitler and the Nazis marched into the Rhineland, taking Germany’s first step toward World War II.

Today, as we watch the 2026 Winter Olympics from Milano Cortina and see American athletes criticize their government, a Ukrainian athlete disqualified for wearing the images of friends who have died in the Russian invasion, and the (two-person!) Haitian team forced to remove the portrait of revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture from their Opening Ceremony outfits, we should remember that the Olympic Games have always been political, no matter how much we wish they didn’t have to be.

February’s Free Virtual School Visit is next week!

Yes friends, it’s that time again! Once a month during the school year I hop online for an hour to talk about my books, my background, and my writing process. I give a presentation for the first half hour, and then spend the next thirty minutes answering live questions from attendees. Whether you’re watching from home, a classroom, or an auditorium, there’s no fee to attend, and no limit on how many people can watch. And February’s free, live event is just a week away!

Here’s the schedule for this spring. Click the links below to register!

Tuesday, February 24 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT

Tuesday, March 24 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

Thursday, April 23 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT

Tuesday, May 19 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

Can’t join me live? Each virtual event is recorded, and is available for at least a month afterward to anyone with the link. (I usually just take the old one down as soon as a new recording is available.) You can even sign up and view a presentation after the fact! Regardless of how or when you watch, I hope you’ll tune in.

What I’m Reading

As you might suspect, I’m watching a lot of Olympics right now. (Chock and Bates were robbed!) But I always make time for books. I’ve been reading American Revolution books to prepare for the new novel I’m writing, and, as always, reading lots of other stuff just for fun.

If you’re looking for terrific historical non-fiction, look no further than Kate Messner’s History Smashers series. Each book tells the true story of a time, place, and/or historical event, with a special focus on busting any myths that persist today. Did you know that Paul Revere wasn’t the only “midnight rider” in 1775? (There were almost 40 others delivering the news!) And that he and the others never cried, “The British are coming!”? (Even though most of the colonists favored independence from England, they still considered themselves British at the time. So they wouldn’t have said “The British are coming!” They were already there! It’s more likely they would have said “The Regulars are coming!” or “The Redcoats are coming!” meaning the British army.) You’ll learn all that and more (as I did) in History Smashers: The American Revolution.

And what a treat it was to discover The Return of Moriarty by Jack Anderson. I love Sherlock Holmes stories, and this one delivers on all the cleverness and Victorian atmosphere of Arthur Conan Doyle’s work. The premise is a fun one: when Holmes and Moriarty go over the Reichenbach Falls together, only Moriarty survives. Worried this might be the outcome, Holmes left a letter behind with a last challenge to his old nemesis—solve a mystery that hasn’t happened yet. (But, Holmes has figured out, soon will.) His crime syndicate dismantled by Holmes and his name and face on every police department’s “Most Wanted” list in Europe, Moriarty assumes a false identity and takes up the challenge, traveling to a mysterious castle in the Bavarian Alps (a second Bavaria reference in the same newsletter!) and immersing himself in the lives of a declining noble family with lots of buried (and re-buried) secrets. The most delicious part of it all is, knowing that Moriarty is a villain, will he see justice done when he solves the crime, or take advantage of the situation for himself? There’s some indication at the end that this may become a series. If so, I’ll be the first in line to buy book two.

That’s it for this month! If you liked this newsletter, please share it online, or with anyone you think would be interested:

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Hello friends, and happy new year!

My family and I spent the holidays among the timeless mountains and islands off the coast of British Columbia. We took a lot of ferries…

Saw lots of bald eagles…

(That one is young, and its head and tail feathers haven’t turned white yet.)

Hung out with the hilarious harbor seals who sunned themselves on the swimming dock near our house…

Went on hikes, played board games, watched movies, and read books.

It was an incredibly restorative vacation, and we all returned rested, refreshed, and ready for the new year. I hope your holidays were similarly re-energizing!

New year, new virtual events!

My free, live, virtual school events are back this spring! Once a month in January, February, March, April, and May, I’ll be hopping online for an hour to talk about my books, my background, and my writing process. I give a presentation for the first half hour, and then spend the next thirty minutes answering live questions from attendees. Whether you’re watching from home, a classroom, or an auditorium, there’s no fee to attend, and no limit on how many people can watch.

Here’s the schedule for this spring. Click the links below to register!

Thursday, January 22 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

Tuesday, February 24 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT

Tuesday, March 24 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

Thursday, April 23 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT

Tuesday, May 19 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

Can’t join me live? Want to replay an event for readers who missed it? Each virtual event is recorded, and is available for at least a month afterward to anyone with the link. (I usually just take the old one down as soon as a new recording is available.) You can even sign up and view a presentation after the fact! Regardless of how or when you watch, I hope you’ll tune in.

I’m not doing in-person school visits anymore, and rarely do paid virtual visits, but if you’ve got a larger event you’d like to invite me to, check out my Speaker Profile at Authors Unbound. Thanks!

War Games Goodies

War Games has been on the New York Times bestseller list all thirteen weeks it’s been out, which is incredible! Thank you to everyone who’s bought a copy between now and then. I hope you loved reading it as much as I loved writing it!

I have a few fun War Games things to share with you. First up, I’ve posted my War Games virtual launch event on YouTube! If you missed it back in October, you can now watch my presentation online, any time.

If you haven’t seen it yet, the official book trailer Scholastic created for War Games is pretty cool. It’s so much like a real movie trailer, people keep asking me when the movie is coming out! (There’s no movie really in the works at present. Sorry.)

Scholastic has posted an excerpt from the audiobook version of War Games, which you can listen to here. When you go to the site, it may hit you with a pop up that asks you to sign in or sign up for a Soundcloud account. You don’t need to do either one. If it asks, just click the X in the top right corner to get rid of the pop up, and then you can listen to the excerpt.

You can read the first two chapters of War Games online here.

And Scholastic has created a Book Guide for War Games! It includes a short summary of the book, reading group questions, and an author Q&A with yours truly. I talk about my inspiration, my research, the real people who appear in the story, and all the themes I touch on in the book—despite coming around in the end to the same theme I always come around to in my books! To find out what that is, you’ll have to read the Book Guide…

An eccellente book giveaway!

Just look at that gorgeous Italian coastal town. Wouldn’t you like to go to there?

You can, in a figurative way, when you read Proibito Leggere, the Italian edition of Ban This Book! * I’ve got a dozen or so copies of Proibito Leggere in hardcover, and now you can enter to win a free book.

Each entry will be assigned a number, and winners will be selected using a random number generator. So that everyone has an equal chance to win, please enter only once. Thanks! And sorry, due to the number of submissions I expect to get, only the giveaway winners will be notified of the results. But that means if you hear from me, it’ll be good news!

The deadline to enter is the end of the day on Sunday, January 25, 2026. Thanks, and buona fortuna!

Enter to win Proibito Leggere

* I cannot guarantee you’ll actually see any towns like that in the Italian edition of Ban This Book, figuratively or literally, as I can’t speak or read Italian.

What I’m Reading

Talk about two books with very different vibes!

The first, for kids, is my friend John Claude Bemis’s new graphic novel, Rodeo Hawkins and the Daughters of Mayhem. Listen, if you put “mayhem” in the title, you gotta deliver—and John and illustrator Nicole Miles certainly do. Thanks to a prophecy that a kid named “Sidney Poblocki” will destroy all of existence, interdimensional assassins are picking off every last Sidney Poblocki in the multiverse. Enter Rodeo Hawkins and her Daughters of Mayhem, to save the last Sidney Poblocki in existence—and the entire multiverse too! It’s a rip-roaring adventure from the word go, and the dynamic, stylish art is a perfect compliment to the manic story. Ten out of ten—would travel the multiverse with Rodeo Hawkins again.

And then, have you ever chanced to pick up a book you’ve never heard of before that quickly became an all-time favorite? I happened on The Curve of Time by M. Wylie “Capi” Blanchet in a little shop on the island where we were staying in Canada, and read it throughout our vacation. (You can see me sitting with it, meditatively, in the last holiday photo above.) The book is the absolutely charming account of a thirty-five year old widow who packed her five young children into a 25-foot motor boat over a series of summers in the 1920s and 30s, and cruised up and down the coast of British Columbia with them, exploring inlets and islands and having adventures.

The title comes from a popular philosophy of the 1920s and 30s known as “Serialism,” which suggested that our experience of time is multidirectional, but that our perception of it is limited by our consciousness. It is in our dreams, the philosophy contends, that we can “travel to” or see moments from our personal pasts and futures. Capi Blanchet wasn’t a true adherent of Serialism, but she was a reader, and a thinker, and The Curve of Time is, in a way, a perfect example of serialism in literature—a nostalgic tale of the past, told in its “present,” with the knowledge of what was to come in the future, when the book was written in 1961. It’s a cozy adventure story, an account of a long-lost place and people, and a meditative treatise on life, all rolled into one. And one of my new favorites too.

That’s it for this month! If you liked this newsletter, please share it online, or with anyone you think would be interested:

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And if you aren’t already a subscriber and you’d like to be, you can sign up here:

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In the meantime, a salute to my fellow time travelers out there:

There is, in upstate New York, a monument to Benedict Arnold’s leg.

Benedict Arnold is infamous now as a traitor to the American cause during the Revolutionary War. Before he defected, however, he was considered one of the best and most successful soldiers in the Continental Army.

Arnold was something of an unhappy camper throughout his life. During the war, he complained that he was constantly being passed over for promotion, and that other officers were often given credit for his accomplishments. Before and after the revolution, he was an unpopular businessman, even outside the US.

Arnold’s unhappiness reached its peak during the two Battles of Saratoga. Arnold fought well as a field commander during the first battle, but he and Major General Horatio Gates, who was in charge, argued so much they ended up screaming at each other. Gates relieved Arnold of command, but Arnold ignored him. In the second battle, he disobeyed Gates’s orders and led more attacks on the British.

Here’s where his leg comes in. During that second engagement, Benedict Arnold was shot in his left leg. His left leg had already been wounded twice before while fighting for independence, first during the invasion of Quebec in 1775, and again at the Battle of Ridgefield in 1777. To make matters worse, Arnold’s horse was shot and fell over on him at Saratoga, crushing Arnold’s already re-wounded left leg.

Arnold chose to have his leg reset rather than amputated, but it wasn’t set right. Adding insult to injury, General Gates was so mad at Arnold for disobeying him that he left Benedict Arnold entirely out of his battle report to the Continental Congress, robbing Arnold of his glory.

Arnold was bitter about his accumulated leg injuries, and his long recuperation gave him time to dwell on all the ways his revolutionary peers had slighted him—whether real or not. It also gave his loyalist wife Peggy Shippen a chance to finally convince him to turn traitor and work for the British. Through her connections, British General Henry Clinton offered Benedict Arnold £20,000—the equivalent today of more than three million dollars—for the capture of the American fort at West Point.

Arnold requested command of West Point from his friend George Washington, and then proceeded to weaken its defenses in preparation for a British attack. When a British spy was captured with a letter from Benedict Arnold detailing how the British could take the fort, the jig was up. Arnold fled to British occupied New York City, officially flipped sides, and was given a commission in the British Army. He spent the rest of the war fighting against the Continental Army, leading successful raids in Richmond, Virginia, and New London, Connecticut. (Talk about holding a grudge!)

Years later, a four-sided obelisk was erected as a monument to the soldiers who fought at the Battles of Saratoga. Three of the sides feature niches with statues of the patriots who led the battle—General Philip Schuyler, Colonel Daniel Morgan, and General Horatio Gates. The fourth niche in the monument, which represents Benedict Arnold’s contributions in the battle, was intentionally left empty. “Signifying,” the National Park Service says, “General Benedict Arnold’s heroism in 1777, overshadowed by his late treachery.”

Local historians still wanted to honor Arnold’s deeds at the Battles of Saratoga without honoring the man himself. But how?

For inspiration, they looked to a famous story about Benedict Arnold after the war. While he was living in London, England, Arnold ran into a fellow American. Arnold asked the man: what do Americans think of me now, seeing as I once was one of the fiercest fighters for American independence? The man told him that America would happily make a monument out of Arnold’s wounded leg, and hang the rest of his body in effigy. (Ha! Looks like grudges work both ways, Benedict.)

That random American’s words eventually became a reality. “The leg was the only part of Arnold not to later turn traitor,” the Saratoga Monument Association decided when conceiving the nameless memorial in 1887, “and since it was sacrificed in winning the Battle of Saratoga, it should be commemorated.”

That is why there is a statute of Benedict Arnold’s boot—and not Benedict Arnold himself—in Saratoga, New York.

I don’t think Benedict Arnold or his boot are going to make it into the book I’m writing about the American Revolution, so I had to share that amazing story here!

Don’t miss my last virtual school visit of 2025

Once a month during the school year I hop online to talk for an hour about my books, my background, and my writing process. I give a presentation for the first half hour, and then spend the next thirty minutes answering questions from attendees. Whether you’re watching from home, a classroom, or an auditorium, there’s no fee to attend, and no limit on how many people can watch.

There is only one more virtual school visit left in 2025! Click the link below to register:

Tuesday, December 16, 2024 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

Each virtual event is recorded, and will be available for at least a month afterward to anyone with the link. You can even sign up and view a presentation after the fact! Regardless of how or when you watch, I hope you’ll tune in.

If you can’t make it this time, fear not—I’ll be back with more virtual school visits in the spring.

Last chance to order signed books for the holidays!

You’re also running out of time to get signed books delivered by the holidays. If you’re interested, Green Bean Books here in Portland, Oregon is the place to go. Visit the special Alan Gratz page on their web site, or give them a call. You can even ask for me to personalize the books. (Like, “To Benedict,” or “To Arnold.” You know, just as examples.) But don’t delay! You know how the postal system gets this time of year…

Shop Alan Gratz books at Green Bean

What I’m reading

Is it any surprise that I’m reading books about the American Revolution right now? Here are two I love. The first, written for kids, is Steve Sheinkin’s The Notorious Benedict Arnold. The second, written for adults, is Nathaniel Philbrick’s Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution. If my story of Benedict Arnold’s boot has you itching for more revolutionary tales, pick these up. You won’t be disappointed!

That’s it for this month! If you liked this newsletter, please share it online, or with anyone you think would be interested:

Share

And if you aren’t already a subscriber and you’d like to be, you can sign up here:

Subscribe now

I’ll leave you with this historically accurate reenactment of George Washington confronting Benedict Arnold after he learns of his betrayal:

Happy holidays, and happy new year!

I did lots of big public events…

I signed a lot of books…

I visited lots of schools…

Where I had a lot of great welcomes…

Saw a lot of great fans…

And ran into a lot of friends!

Me and Syd Fini, the illustrator of Refugee the Graphic Novel, at Books of Wonder in New York City.

Me and Karina Yan Glaser taking in a Gotham FC soccer match in Harrison, New Jersey.

Camille Andros, Stacy McAnulty, and me in Winston-Salem, NC.

Me and Kirby Larson at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Washington.

And me and fellow Tennessee grad Chris Grabenstein at Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, Illinois!

It was a weird, wild, wonderful tour in which I visited 11 cities, 14 bookstores, and 24 schools, over 26 days. (I know. I’m tired just writing that.)

Did you miss me on tour?

Fear not—my War Games book talk and Refugee the Graphic Novel book talk are now both available to watch on YouTube! I’ve got lots more book talks and trailers on my YouTube channel, and I’m adding more all the time. Check it out!

Check out Alan's YouTube channel

And I’ve got two more free virtual school visits this year!

You know the drill: Once a month during the school year I hop online to talk for an hour about my books, my background, and my writing process. I give a presentation for the first half hour, and then spend the next thirty minutes answering questions from attendees. Whether you’re watching from home, a classroom, or an auditorium, there’s no fee to attend, and no limit on how many people can watch.

I’ve got two more on the schedule for this calendar year. Click the links below to register:

Thursday, November 20, 2024 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT

Tuesday, December 16, 2024 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

Each virtual event is recorded, and will be available for at least a month afterward to anyone with the link. You can even sign up and view a presentation after the fact! Regardless of how or when you watch, I hope you’ll tune in.

Oh, and don’t forget…

Now’s the time to order signed books for the holidays!

Looking to give one of my signed books to a fan this holiday season? Green Bean Books here in Portland, Oregon is the place to go. Visit the special Alan Gratz page on their web site, or give them a call.

You can even ask for me to personalize the books. (Like, “To Beyoncé,” or “To Taylor.” You know, just as examples.) Remember, the earlier you order, the best chance you have for it to be there in time for the holidays!

Shop Alan Gratz books at Green Bean

That’s it for this month! If you liked this newsletter, please share it online, or with anyone you think would be interested:

Share

And if you aren’t already a subscriber and you’d like to be, you can sign up here:

Subscribe now

In the meantime, wake me up when it’s time for me to write again.

Happy book birthday to War Games and Refugee: The Graphic Novel! Both are officially on sale today. If you pre-ordered copies, or plan to pick one up at a bookstore or library in the near future—thank you! I hope you love reading these two books as much as I loved writing them.

Here are those links again, if you haven’t ordered one and would still like to:

Order Alan's books from Amazon

Order Alan's books from B&N

Order Alan's books from Bookshop.org

Order signed books from Green Bean!

Just a reminder—if you order my books from my hometown indie Green Bean Books, they’ll come signed and personalized. But any orders placed after September 30th that need personalizing will have to wait for me to return from my tour.

Because, as you read this, I am already on tour for both books. (I know—I’m time traveling!) Want to see me in person? Check out my tour dates:

Most of these events are ticketed, which means you need to sign up with the host bookstore in advance to reserve your place. For times and ticketing information, check out the Events page on my website:

Go to Alan's Events page

Click on the event you’re interested in to read more information, and to find the link to the host bookstore’s event page where you can reserve your ticket.

Can’t join me in person?

Don’t forget that this month’s free virtual school visit on October 28th will be a special online launch party for both new books! That’s my first full day home post-tour, where I’ll have just finished giving the same speech about 26 times. So I can guarantee you’ll get a great presentation! 😂

Click here to register:

Tuesday, October 28, 2024 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

That’s it for this month! Thanks!

Wait, really?

Yes! I have a thousand things to do before I leave on tour the day after tomorrow, and I haven’t even packed. I’ll be more verbose in November, I promise!

You don’t even have a funny GIF for us?

If you liked this newsletter, please share it online, or with anyone you think would be interested:

Share

And if you aren’t already a subscriber and you’d like to be, you can sign up here:

Subscribe now

So when our daughter Jo came along, we naturally initiated her into the Star Trek fan club, beginning with The Next Generation.

(That’s me and Jo, Rikering in Acadia National Park.)

I was very lucky to be a stay-at-home dad with Jo for the first few years of her life, but by the time she was old enough to go to school, my writing career was taking off. I was on the road a lot after that, visiting schools across the country to talk about my books. In my heyday, I was visiting a hundred schools a year—while also doing conferences and festivals. To say that I missed a lot of nights at home with the family during that time is an understatement.

To stay connected while I was gone, Jo and I watched Star Trek episodes together online in the evenings when I got back to my hotel room. Netflix Party was new then, and it let us watch the same episode simultaneously no matter where I was in the world. We would start the episode, put both our phones on speaker, and analyze and talk and joke about the episodes in real time.

One of the episodes we liked to joke about is Identity Crisis, a Season Four episode in which the Enterprise’s chief engineer Geordi LaForge transforms into an invisible alien who only shows up under blacklight:

It took four make-up artists six hours to apply all the make-up and prosthetics that turned poor LeVar Burton into a glow-in-the-dark Tarchannen. According to TNG make-up supervisor Michael Westmore, it was the longest ever make-up job done for an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Which is saying something.)

Jo was even more excited to learn that I own an action figure of Geordi as a Tarchannen III alien. Because of course I do!

The next time I was getting ready to leave home to go on a school visit trip, I hid Geordi under Jo’s pillow, so she’d find him after I’d gone. She was delighted—and returned the prank by hiding him in the cookie jar when I returned. Thus began a tradition of the two of us hiding Geordi for each other when we had to be away for a while. I even took a chance that I’d never see him again and hid Geordi in Jo’s suitcase when she went off to college. Luckily Geordi was one of the few objects that returned intact from Jo’s foray into higher education, and he lives on in the Gratz household today.

I had to be away for a month recently, and when I returned, I opened a box of tea to find this:

Nice.

This October, I’ll be leaving home again to go on tour for three+ weeks. I still haven’t decided where I’m going to hide Geordi this time. I only have two weeks to figure it out, because here’s my travel schedule!

Join me at one of my War Games and Refugee: The Graphic Novel launch events, and I’ll tell you where I hid him! (Unless you’re Jo.)

Please note: most of these events are ticketed, which means you need to sign up with the host bookstore in advance to reserve your place. For times and ticketing information, check out the Events page on my website:

Go to Alan's Events page

Click on the event you’re interested in to read more information, and to find the link to the host bookstore’s event page, where you can reserve your ticket.

Can’t join me in person, but want signed books?

Preorder War Games, Refugee: The Graphic Novel, and any of my other books from my hometown bookstore Green Bean Books by September 30th, and I’ll sign them before I hit the road! Green Bean Books will mail them out after I’m gone, as soon as they officially go on sale:

Order signed books from Green Bean!

You can also order my books from these other fine booksellers, but they won’t come signed:

Order Alan's books from Amazon

Order Alan's books from B&N

Order Alan's books from Bookshop.org

And don’t forget…

Free virtual school visits return next week!

Yes, my free, live, virtual school events are back! Once a month in September, October, November, and December, I’ll be hopping online to talk for an hour about my books, my background, and my writing process. (I have one next week, in fact!)

In my virtual school visits, I give a presentation for the first half hour, and then spend the next thirty minutes answering questions from attendees. Whether you’re watching from home, a classroom, or an auditorium, there’s no fee to attend, and no limit on how many people can watch.

And as a special treat, my October virtual school visit will be a virtual launch party for War Games and Refugee: The Graphic Novel, where you’ll hear the same presentation I’ll be giving during my in-person tour!

Here’s the schedule for this fall. Click the links below to register:

Thursday, September 25, 2025 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT

Tuesday, October 28, 2024 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT
(Virtual launch party for War Games and Refugee: The Graphic Novel)

Thursday, November 20, 2024 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT

Tuesday, December 16, 2024 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

Can’t join me live, or want to replay an event for readers who missed it? Each virtual event is recorded, and will be available for at least a month afterward to anyone with the link. (I usually just take the old one down as soon as a new recording is available.) You can even sign up and view a presentation after the fact! Regardless of how or when you watch, I hope you’ll tune in.

Great. Got anything new?

I’m glad you asked! I spent all day adding goodies to my web site. Now you can find audiobook excerpts from War Games and Refugee, PDF excerpts from War Games and Refugee: The Graphic Novel, a War Games discussion guide, and over on my Alan Gratz Books playlist on YouTube, I’ve added a cool new War Games trailer and a twenty-five minute Two Degrees Book Talk! Go check out my web site and click around. You never know what you’ll find. I sure don’t!

If you liked this newsletter, please share it online, or with anyone you think would be interested:

Share

And if you aren’t already a subscriber and you’d like to be, you can sign up here:

Subscribe now

Listen, friends. I’m not gonna lie. It’s hot out there. Which is why I like to stay right here, at my desk, writing books. Inside. But every now and then I have a new book come out, and they make me leave my house to go on tour. How mean is that!?

I kid. I’m very lucky to have a publisher eager to send me on tour, and even luckier to have readers who want to come out to see me. And I love visiting bookstores all over the country—especially in the fall, when it isn’t so dang hot!

This October, I’ll be visiting eleven bookstores across the United States for the double launch of War Games and Refugee: The Graphic Novel. Will I be at a bookstore near you? Check out my tour dates and locations below!

Please note: most of these events are ticketed, which means you need to sign up with the host bookstore in advance to reserve your place. For times and ticketing information, check out the Events page on my website:

Go to Alan's Events page

Click on the event you’re interested in to read more information, and to find the link to the host bookstore’s event page, where you can reserve your ticket.

I hope to see you in person this fall! But if you don’t live close to one of the bookstores I’ll be visiting, don’t panic…

Free virtual school visits are back!

My free, live, virtual school events are back this fall! Once a month in September, October, November, and December, I’ll be hopping online to talk for an hour about my books, my background, and my writing process. I give a presentation for the first half hour, and then spend the next thirty minutes answering questions from attendees. Whether you’re watching from home, a classroom, or an auditorium, there’s no fee to attend, and no limit on how many people can watch.

And as a special treat, my October virtual school visit will be a virtual launch party for War Games and Refugee: The Graphic Novel, where you’ll hear the same presentation I’ll be giving during my in-person tour!

Here’s the schedule for this fall. Click the links below to register:

Thursday, September 25, 2025 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT

Tuesday, October 28, 2024 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT
(Virtual launch party for War Games and Refugee: The Graphic Novel)

Thursday, November 20, 2024 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT

Tuesday, December 16, 2024 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

Can’t join me live, or want to replay an event for readers who missed it? Each virtual event is recorded, and will be available for at least a month afterward to anyone with the link. (I usually just take the old one down as soon as a new recording is available.) You can even sign up and view a presentation after the fact! Regardless of how or when you watch, I hope you’ll tune in.

I’m not doing in-person school visits anymore, and rarely do paid virtual visits, but if you’ve got a larger event you’d like to invite me to, check out my Speaker Profile at Authors Unbound. Thanks!

What I’m Reading

For kids: The Teacher of Nomad Land by Daniel Nayeri

Daniel Nayeri is one of my favorite kids book writers working today. His 2020 autobiographical novel Everything Sad is Untrue, which bounces back and forth between his childhood in Oklahoma and his family’s former life in Iran, absolutely wrecked me, and prompted me to write him a long, gushing fan letter. (It also won the Printz Award and was a Walter Dean Myers Award honoree, but I’m sure it’s my fan letter he treasures most.)

In The Teacher of Nomad Land, Nayeri tells the story of a brother and sister navigating a complicated and dangerous Iran during World War II. Technically neutral, Iran was invaded by England and Russia to keep its valuable oil fields from Germany. Babak and his little sister Sana, who lost both their parents in the invasion, set out to escape Iran with the nomadic tribe whose children their father used to teach. A city boy, Babak doesn’t have much in the way of survival skills—except his father’s knack for learning and teaching many languages. Can he save himself and his sister, and help the people of Iran, England, and Russia find a common language before they kill each other? Find out in this terrific book about an often-overlooked piece of World War II history.

For adults: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

From Nayeri to Nayler!

In real life, octopuses freak me out. They have way too many arms, and they are way too squooshy. They’re also highly intelligent, as many non-fiction books and documentaries have explained lately, with a central brain in their head and eight smaller brains in their arms. (Seriously!) They’re essentially aliens on earth. Just about the only thing holding them back from developing more sophisticated societies is their incredibly short life spans—the various octopus species live from half a year to four years at most.

Ray Nayler’s science fiction novel The Mountain in the Sea explores a near-future in which human-caused climate change forces an evolutionary leap forward in the lifespan of one species of octopus, who use all that extra time to develop their own language and culture. Marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen travels to the remote island where the octopuses live to study them, accompanied by a battle-scarred security agent and the world’s first (and possibly last) android. They’re not the only interested parties though, and soon other forces descend on the little bay. But no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. Or what they might do about it.

What follows is a compulsively readable novel that explores the nature of consciousness, and humankind’s complicated legacy and future on Earth. If you like a healthy dose of philosophy and real-world science in your thrillers, and you’re not too weirded out by octopuses, wrap your tentacles around The Mountain in the Sea.

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Thanks! Stay cool out there.

I survived the Columbus Children’s Book Festival in Georgia:

(That’s a lot of bad stuff happening all at once…)

At the annual American Library Association conference in Philadelphia, I got to celebrate the upcoming release of two new books:

And while I was in Philly, I paid visits to the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall:

I also spent a day touring the excellent Museum of the American Revolution, where I took lots of notes and pictures. Because you never know when stuff like that is going to come in handy. (Or maybe I DO. Dun dun dun.)

Stars and hypes

Linda Lowen of Publishers Weekly recently wrote a very flattering article about me, my career, and the new books I have coming out. It was a thrill to be featured in PW! Perhaps the most profound thing I said was, “If I’d had my own books back in middle school, maybe I would have come around to knowing who I am earlier.” Woo. Deep, Alan! Here’s the whole thing, if you’d like to read it:

Read "Alan Gratz is Going for the Gold"

Publishers Weekly also gave War Games, my new book about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a starred review! They call it “a smartly plotted page-turner,” and go on to say, “Well-researched historical facts add tooth to this cinematic novel’s shocking twists and turns.” Thanks, PW! You can read the whole review here:

Read the PW starred review of War Games

And hey, remember blogs? Fun fact: Newbery Award-winning author Avi still has one, and every summer he invites thirteen “admired authors” to write a brief article for his blog on a topic of his choice. This year’s question is “What’s your favorite strategy for encouraging young people to read?” and I was one of the authors he asked to write something. (Along with folks like Dan Gutman, Karen Cushman, Gary Schmidt, Padma Venkatraman, and Pam Muñoz Ryan. Sheesh! That’s good company.) You can read my essay answering Avi’s question here:

Read my essay on Avi's blog

And how wild is this? Ban This Book has just been published in Persian in Iran! The publisher is Peydayesh, and the translator is Shouka Karimi. I don’t have physical copies of this one to giveaway, but it was too cool not to share.

Oh, did I mention a War Games galley giveaway?

Yeah, yeah. I know that’s why you’re really still reading this newsletter. But I wasn’t lying—I have a limited number of signed War Games galleys to mail out to lucky winners!

A galley, or an “advance reader copy,” is an uncorrected proof a publisher puts out so that people can read a new book ahead of time. Mostly these are printed so booksellers and librarians can decide if they want to add the book to their shelves when it comes out. They’re also sent to reviewers, in the hope that the reviewer will read it and write about it. (Which isn’t always a guarantee.) The galleys are printed on cheaper paper, have paperback and not hardback covers, and often don’t have all the bells and whistles the finished book will have, like maps, illustrations, or author notes. They’re given out for free, and even though you occasionally find them at used bookstores, they’re not supposed to be sold or resold. (And say so all over the cover.)

Want to win a free galley of War Games? Click here:

Enter the War Games galley giveaway!

Each entry will be assigned a number, and winners will be selected using a random number generator. So that everyone has an equal chance to win, please enter only once. Thanks! And sorry, due to the number of submissions I expect to get, only the giveaway winners will be notified of the results. But that means if you hear from me, it’ll be good news!

The last day to enter is Sunday, August 3rd, which is the same day that Jesse Owens won the 100 meter dash at the 1936 Berlin Olympics!

What I’m reading

Two novels for adults this time!

Red Square by Martin Cruz Smith

Author Martin Cruz Smith died earlier this month at the age of 82. Smith’s long-running series of novels featuring Russian detective Arkady Renko began with 1981’s Gorky Park, which was a huge bestseller, and was made into a popular movie a couple of years later starring William Hurt. Incredibly, the latest Renko novel, Hotel Ukraine, came out this year (!), and takes place during the current Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I’d read two of these books already—Gorky Park and Polar Star—and had the third, Red Square, on my shelf to read. With Smith’s passing, I moved Red Square to the top of my To Be Read pile, and boy did it deliver. It takes place in 1991, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The mystery, as always, is great, but the ground-up picture Smith paints of Russia in the brief era of glasnost and perestroika—and the moment when the Soviet Union finally collapses and dissolves—is striking.

If you haven’t read any Martin Cruz Smith, I highly recommend him. These books are so good. Fantastic mysteries full of twists and turns, real history, and complex, sympathetic characters.

Reading an obituary of Smith, I was struck by some of the things his daughter, Luisa Smith, had to say about him. "Before Gorky Park, there were westerns and pulp thrillers, written under various pseudonyms, a cloak of anonymity that let him hone his craft without the burden of expectation,” she wrote. “But once Renko entered the scene, everything changed. Gorky Park was both a commercial and critical success: a crime novel that slipped through the Iron Curtain and returned with secrets. A single book that changed our lives, moving us from New York to California, and allowing him to take greater chances with his writing."

I feel somewhat the same about my career, pre-Refugee and post-Refugee. Refugee was book number thirteen for me. Before it, I wasn’t exactly writing books in anonymity, like Smith. But I wasn’t a bestseller. In the twelve novels that came before Refugee, I was still trying out different genres, subjects, and themes, and developing my voice and style as a writer. And I was lucky enough to be paid to do it. Then, when I got the idea for Refugee, I was actually able to turn that vision into a reality. I know there’s no way I could have done that at the beginning of my career—or probably any time between books one through twelve. I needed all that previous practice and experience to make it happen.

The obituary for Martin Cruz Smith in Shelf Awareness is illuminating, and worth a read. His daughter Luisa Smith is now the editor-in-chief of Mysterious Press, but I got to meet her a few years ago when she was a book buyer at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California. I hope I get to run into her again soon to tell her how sad I was to hear that her father died, and to tell her how much I love his books.

The Wizard of Island Home by G.A. Bunch

And I’m very excited to tell you about the first book from my long-time friend Greg Bunch! Greg and I grew up right down the street from one another in Knoxville, Tennessee, and though my family moved away when I was young, our parents stayed in touch. Greg and I later reconnected when we both found ourselves working at the same movie theater in high school. (Cinemark Dollar Theater represent!) We ended up becoming roommates in college, and have been good friends ever since.

I got to read The Wizard of Island Home in the draft stage, and it’s awesome. Set in present-day Knoxville, Tennessee, it’s the story of Aubrey Cockcroft, a small-time P.I. and reluctant wizard who sets out to solve the murder of his wizard uncle. Helping him on his journey are Arbuckle, an inter-dimensional cat harboring his murdered uncle’s soul, and the ghost of Emily Dickinson, who may or may not have actually visited her real-life cousins in Knoxville at some point during her life. Together, the unlikely crew travel around the US in a magic VW van, trying to catch a murderer and save the remaining members of a once-proud magical order—and their cats.

Think of it like The Dresden Files with cats. Or Philip Marlowe with magic. Greg’s probably laughing as he reads this. Neither comparison is exactly right, of course, because his book is a true original, like Greg himself.

You can read about Greg’s path to publication on his Substack, buy the book directly from Greg here, or buy it online from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or IngramSpark. Give it a read, and if you like it, help spread the word!

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Thanks! You’re awesome. And remember—

If you’ve read any of my historical novels (or even some of my contemporary novels!) you’ve probably noticed that I like to drop real people into my fictional stories. Notorious Nazi concentration camp commander Amon Göth is a character in Prisoner B-3087. Michael is on hand for a speech Adolf Hitler gives to his Hitler Youth group in Projekt 1065, while Amy Anne has a far happier experience when kids book author Dav Pilkey (above) speaks to her class during an author visit in Ban This Book.

I figured my all-time record would be The Brooklyn Nine, which features a veritable parade of real people. It’s got cameos from Alexander Cartwright, Abner Doubleday, King Kelly, Cyclone Joe Williams, John Kieran, Pepper Paire, Connie Wisniewski—not to mention more Major League players than you can shake a baseball bat at. But it turns out I put even more real people into my historical fantasy novels! The kid heroes in The League of Seven series run into Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Luis Senarens, Madame Blavatsky, George Armstrong Custer, Marie Laveau, Jean Lafitte, Robert E. Lee, Jesse James, Black Kettle, and the Dog Soldiers, just to name a few.

I don’t quite top that in my new book War Games, but it does have a few real people in it. Hitler shows up again, as do notorious German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, US Olympic Chairman Avery Brundage, track star Jesse Owens (above), and a few other members of that year’s American Olympic team.

I’m writing fiction, so I get a certain amount of latitude when writing real people into my books. But I always try to be careful not to stray too far from what a person really did or said. Jesse Owens has to win his four gold medals, for example, and he has to do it exactly the way he did it in 1936. But I don’t worry too much about what days he wins those medals, or even if I’ve put them in the right order. (Except for the last, which was significant for other reasons.)

As for what my real life characters say, I try to use actual quotes where I can. Like the speech Adolf Hitler gives to Michael’s Hitler Youth group in Projekt 1065. It isn’t a real speech he ever gave, but every single line in that talk was something Germany’s führer said or wrote somewhere else. (I figured Hitler said enough awful things in his life that I didn’t need to make anything up for him.)

When I don’t really know what a real person in one of my books might have thought about a particular situation, I try to use similar sentiments that person expressed in other situations.

For example, there’s a moment at the beginning of War Games where the American athletes are about to enter the Olympic stadium for the first time. Originally, I had Jesse Owens (third from the left in the foreground, above) telling his fellow athletes, “Let’s go show this Hitler guy who’s boss.”

But in interview after interview once the Olympics were over, Owens and most of the other athletes said that while they were in Germany, they mostly weren’t thinking about Hitler, or international politics, or the rumors of Nazi crimes. They were just focused on competing as athletes. So a few drafts in, I changed that line. Now Owens tells his teammates, “Let’s go make history.” Which I think is far more aligned with what he (and most of the other athletes) were actually thinking and feeling in that moment.

I always have to be careful not to put my own thoughts into real people’s mouths—or write their dialogue with too much of a wink and nod to what I know is going to happen. The fun of it though is that I get to lend my stories a sense of verisimilitude by having real people show up to interact with my fictional characters!

You can preorder War Games today from any of these fine booksellers:

Preorder War Games from Amazon

Preorder War Games from Barnes & Noble

Preorder War Games from Bookshop.org

Preorder War Games from Green Bean Books

Remember, all copies of my books ordered from my local indie Green Bean Books come signed!

Llibres gratuïts!

That’s Catalan for “Free books!” At least that’s what Google translate tells me. I wouldn’t know—I don’t speak Catalan! Which, if you don’t know, is the official language of Andorra, and three autonomous communities in eastern Spain: Catalonia (home to Barcelona), the Balearic Islands (home to Mallorca), and the Valencian Community (home to Valencia). (Boy, Wikipedia is getting a real workout from me today!)

The Catalan translation of Ban this Book—or Amy and the Secret Library, as they call it—has been very popular in Spain, and was in fact a finalist in the 2022-23 Atrapallibres book awards given by the Consell Català del Llibre Infantil i Juvenil (CLIJCAT). I didn’t win, but as they say in Barcelona, “va ser un honor ser nominat.”

I have a few author copies of Amy and the Secret Library in Catalan to give away to good casas, so now you can win a free copy! Once again, I’m asking that you enter to win one only if you or someone you know reads Catalan, or is trying to learn. I’d love for these books to reach people who can really use them! I have no way of knowing, of course, so you’re on your honor.

Oh, and I’m sorry for any readers checking in from outside North America—it’s far too expensive for me to send freebies to you. I apologize! If you’re interested, I hope you’ll support independent bookstores in your region by buying one locally instead. In the meantime, North American entrants only, please.

The deadline to enter is July 6, 2025. Click the link below to enter. Bona sort!

Enter to win Ban This Book in Catalan

What I’m Reading

For the past month and a half, I have read pretty much nothing but Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. Jo and I signed up for a six-week class with Portland’s Literary Arts, taught by a retired professor from Portland State University. Each week we’d read a hundred or so pages of Moby-Dick, then meet for two hours on Saturday morning to talk about it.

I’d never read Moby-Dick before. Well, not the unabridged version. I did read an Illustrated Classics Edition of Moby-Dick as a kid—and I still have it! I put the unabridged edition we used in class against the abridged version I read as a kid in the pic above, for reference. And not to start a Moby-Dick measuring contest, but you really need to see a side-by-side comparison to understand the difference:

Let’s just say that I don’t think I was getting the total “Moby-Dick experience” as a kid.

I never had to read Moby-Dick for a class, and though I’ve had a full-length edition on my bookshelf for years, I was always a little scared to try it. For one thing, I am a slow reader, and a six hundred page book is a commitment for me. But the novel also had a reputation for being as dense in a literary sense as it was in a physical-mass sense. All I ever heard was how the whaling chapters were super-detailed, and never-ending.

But Jo and I decided to sign up and have fun with it, and it turns out…Moby-Dick was kind of amazing? It’s thoughtful, and prescient, and philosophical, and challenging (intellectually), and intentionally contradictory, and has great characters and dialogue, and action and adventure, and is also really funny. Like, laugh out loud funny at times. On purpose! And yes, there are a lot of chapters about whaling. But as our teacher told us the first day of class, the whaling chapters are the point, not the plot-driven chapters. And she’s right! Those chapters were the best chapters. At least until Ahab goes all Wrath of Khan at the end in his final confrontation with Moby-Dick:

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.

Honestly, I never thought I would have this much fun reading a 600+ page novel about whaling written a decade before the American Civil War. But I am a convert. I’m even thinking about re-reading it (something I almost never do, with any book) and blogging about each chapter as I go. Moby-Dick isn’t for everyone, for sure. I find that most people who’ve had any experience with it either love it or hate it. You can now count me among the former.

Oh, and besides the Illustrated Classics edition I read when I was young, Moby-Dick has lived rent free in my head because of this television commercial I saw over and over again as a kid:

The opening line of this ad is a guy with a raspy voice yelling, “Thar she blows! A hump like a snow-hill. It is Moby Dick!” I can still, forty years later, recite these lines word for word, in the exact intonation as the actor in the commercial. And you can believe I did, every chance I got, for the entire month and a half that Jo and I were reading this book together. I know she appreciated it, because every time I did it she said, “OH MY GOD.” So I count myself a pretty good dad in that respect.

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I leave you with the super-abridged version of Moby-Dick:

Yes, by popular demand, I give you the first of my prose novels to be adapted into a graphic novel!

Like the book, Refugee: The Graphic Novel is the story of three different kids, in three different time periods, in three different parts of the world, all driven from their homes by violence.

But this time around, you will see Josef startled awake at night as Nazis break down his door.

You will see Isabel searching for Papi and Lito as Havana riots.

You will see Mahmoud and his little brother trying to stay invisible in Damascus.

And, you will see Josef and his family board the MS St. Louis, bound for freedom and safety in Cuba.

You will see Isabel’s family flee Cuba on a raft, headed for freedom and safety in Florida.

And you will see Mahmoud and his family travel by car, by train, by ferry, and on foot, as they journey toward freedom and safety in Germany.

It’s the story of Refugee you know and love, adapted by me, and brought to life with stunning illustrations by artist Syd Fini.

I’m not sure I can adequately express how moved I am every time I open this book up and pore over Syd’s art. Seeing characters that I’ve only been able to picture in my head come to life in Syd’s brilliant illustrations is an amazing experience, and I think young readers who love Refugee will be equally mesmerized.

Refugee: The Graphic Novel comes out the same day as my new prose novel War Games—October 7, 2025. I’ll be touring for both at the same time, so stay tuned for dates and locations!

And just like with War Games, you can pre-order a copy now from your local indie, or any of these fine booksellers:

Pre-order the REFUGEE GN from Amazon

Pre-order the REFUGEE GN from B&N

Pre-order the REFUGEE GN from Bookshop

Pre-order the REFUGEE GN from Green Bean

As usual, pre-orders (and orders for books that are already out!) from Green Bean Books in my new hometown of Portland, Oregon come signed!

Refugee giveaway!

What’s this? A giveaway hidden in the middle of this email? Darn right, Betty White!

I don’t have copies of the new Refugee graphic novel to give away, alas. But I do have 18 paperback copies of the OG Refugee prose novel to give away this month!

I’m going to give these books away as a class set. That means there will be only one winner this time. AND, I’m asking that only teachers enter. Sorry, kids! (I’ll have a lot more giveaways coming up that you can apply for.)

To make sure I’m giving this class set away to a teacher, and not a kid, I’m requiring that the shipping address you provide be a school this time, and not a home address. Home shipping addresses are automatically disqualified!

If you’re a teacher who could use a free set of 18 signed paperback copies of the Refugee prose novel in your classroom, click below to enter:

Enter to win a classroom set of Refugee

The last day to enter is Sunday, May 18th, 2025. Good luck!

My last free virtual visit of the school year

If you’ve been waiting to tune in to one of my free, live, hour-long virtual school events, you have just one more chance this school year! Click here to sign up:

Tuesday, May 20 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

In my free virtual school events, I talk about my books, background, and writing process, and then answer questions from attendees. Whether you’re watching from home, a classroom, or an auditorium, there’s no fee to attend, and no limit on how many people can watch. Click the link or image above to register!

Join me in person too!

What’s this? A rare in-person Alan Gratz event out in the real world!? It’s true! I’ll be speaking and signing books at the Columbus Children’s Book Festival, in Columbus, Georgia on Saturday, May 17, 2025 from 10am to 3pm. You know who else is going to be there? Sherri Duskey Rinker (Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site), Yesenia Moises (The Adventures of Qai Qai), and my pal Lauren Tarshis (I Survived)! Better yet, Bluey is going to be there! (Which means I’m going to cry, because every time I catch even five minutes of that dang TV show I get teary.) The whole festival is FREE, so if you live close by, please join me way down yonder on the Chattahoochee!

Shoot. No room for What I’m Reading this month—too many pics from the graphic novel! I’ll just have to wait ’til next time to tell you about the Moby Dick class Jo and I are taking at the local literary arts center!

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But I am a writer of books for boys and girls. And I know this, because I get a ton of great fan mail from girls! Like the letter I got just last week from 5th graders Lexi and Ain from North Dakota. Ain says:

Sure. That’s a good part.

Lexi redrew the cover of Heroes for me:

You can tell it’s her fav book, because it says so right there on the drawing. She also wants to hook me up with her mom?

Maybe Lexi was just hoping I’d call, and then her mom would give her phone to Lexi so she could talk with me?

(I appreciate the sentiment either way, but my phone number is for friends and family only, Lexi. Sorry.)

It’s true, a lot of my main characters are boys. But I get a bunch of girls in on the historical action too! I’ve got Frankie and Kat in The Brooklyn Nine, Hachi, Kitsune, and Martine in The League of Seven series, Isabel in Refugee, Amy Anne in Ban This Book, Samira, Monique, and Dorothy in Allies, Reshmina in Ground Zero, Akira and Natalie in Two Degrees, and Samira again in Resist.

And now, making her cover girl debut in War Games, welcome Evie Harris!

Evie Harris can't believe her luck: She's competing in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, along with fellow American athletes like Jesse Owens. True, there's something creepy about Germany's leader, Adolf Hitler, who watches over the games with his Nazi henchmen. But Evie's not interested in politics. She’s just here to win a gold medal in gymnastics.

Until she discovers a horrible secret.

Behind all the Olympic fanfare, the Nazis have Berlin in an iron grip of terror and violence—and war is brewing. Soon Evie becomes embroiled in a mysterious plot to help steal Nazi gold, and must navigate the city's darkest corners and hidden passageways without knowing who she can trust…

Dun-dun-dun!

War Games comes out October 7, 2025, but you can pre-order a copy now from your local indie, or any of these fine booksellers:

Pre-order WAR GAMES from Amazon

Pre-order WAR GAMES from Barnes & Noble

Pre-order WAR GAMES from Bookshop.org

Pre-order WAR GAMES from Green Bean

As usual, pre-orders (and orders for books that are already out!) from Green Bean Books in my new hometown of Portland, Oregon come signed!

The War Games cover was designed by Christopher Stengel, from an illustration by hitandrun creative studio.

More free virtual visits

Last month, my live virtual visit had viewers from 35 US states, 4 Canadian provinces, the Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand! Awesome! If you were there, thanks for joining me.

If you weren’t there, you have two more chances to join me this school year:

Thursday, April 17 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT

Tuesday, May 20 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

In my free, live, hour-long virtual school events, I talk about my books, background, and writing process, and then answer questions from attendees. Whether you’re watching from home, a classroom, or an auditorium, there’s no fee to attend, and no limit on how many people can watch. Click the links above to register!

What I’m reading

On the kidlit front, I just finished an advance reader copy of Karina Yan Glaser’s The Nine Moons of Han Yu and Luli. It’s the story of two brave kids—one in 731 China, the other in 1931 Chinatown—who set out on perilous journeys to save their families. You may know Karina as the author of the New York Times bestselling Vanderbeekers series, and I can attest that this book is just as delightful. The blurb I wrote for it kind of says it all: “To make The Nine Moons of Han Yu and Luli: Knead two family heroes, a scrap of silk, and a pinch of magic tiger in a bowl. Cut the tension with a knife, then roll into chapters. Place a heaping teaspoon of friendship, poetry, and adventure in the center, and pleat into a bao. Put characters over hot water and steam for nine months, then serve and read immediately.” Nine Moons pubs on September 16, 2025!

And wow wow wow did I love The Wager by David Grann. I’m a sucker for anything set during the Age of Sail, and this story was as riveting as any fiction by my literary mancrush Patrick O’Brian. In 1740, an expeditionary force of six British warships left England bound for the Pacific Ocean, by way of the incredibly dangerous Drake Passage around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America. Their mission: seek out and capture a Spanish galleon filled with millions of dollars worth of South American plunder. Things go wrong almost immediately, and all but one of the ships is lost rounding the Horn. One of those lost ships, the Wager, shipwrecks on a desolate island thousands of miles from the nearest European outpost. What follows is two years of survival, mutiny, and murder that rivals The Lord of the Flies. An absolute page-turner. I may even reread it—and I hardly ever reread books!

That’s it for this month. If you liked it, please share this newsletter online, or with anyone you think would be interested:

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I also write books for giant, flying, prehistoric, gymnastics-curious turtles, but nobody ever talks about that.

Hello friends! Today is the official on-sale date for my novella Resist. Yay! The book has been around for a while, but is now finally available to buy in print. If you’ve been following my newsletter for a while, you’ve heard me talk about this novella—and its strange path to publication—a few times.

The recap: In 2019, I published Allies, a novel about D-Day. In that book, Samira Zidane and her mother are members of the French Resistance. It’s their job to tell the rest of the resistance in Normandy that today, June 6, 1944, is the day the Allies are invading. When her mother is captured by the Nazis, it’s up to Samira to complete the dangerous mission on her own.

I tell the story of how Samira goes back to rescue her mother in Resist, a novella that was given away for free that year to teachers who subscribe to Scholastic’s Book Clubs. Resist is short—just 59 pages—and that edition was never meant to be sold. But soon some of those free copies began appearing in used book stores for exorbitant prices, all because the freebie editions were the only print versions in existence, and were rare!

Scholastic made Resist available as an ebook, and then an audiobook, but today is the first time you can officially buy a print copy—at a reasonable price, at least! 😄

And after complaining last month that they took the cute dog off the cover, I do want to point out that Cyrano is featured on the back cover:

(And this is a good time to remind everyone that nothing bad happens to the dog!)

Resist can be read independently, or before or after reading Allies. It’s also a perfect entry to my books for readers making the transition from chapter books to full-length novels. Buy one for the young reader in your life today:

Buy RESIST from Amazon

Buy RESIST from Barnes & Noble

Buy RESIST from Bookshop.org

Buy RESIST from Green Bean Books

All of my books ordered from Green Bean Books come signed!

Free Virtual Visits

I have three more free, live, hour-long virtual school events coming up this school year! Join me as I talk about my books, background, and writing process, and then answer questions from attendees. Whether you’re watching from home, a classroom, or an auditorium, there’s no fee to attend, and no limit on how many people can watch.

Here’s my upcoming schedule. Click the links to register!

Tuesday, March 18 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

Thursday, April 17 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT

Tuesday, May 20 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

Can’t join me live? Want to replay an event for readers who missed it? Each virtual event is recorded, and is available for at least a month afterward to anyone with the link. (I usually just take the old one down as soon as a new recording is available.) You can even sign up and view a presentation after the fact! Regardless of how or when you watch, I hope you’ll tune in.

Spinning Toward the Sun

Finally, I wanted to alert you to a book I contributed to called Spinning Toward the Sun.

Billed as a guidebook for writers, Spinning Toward the Sun offers inspiration, insight, and practical advice from an array of nationally-acclaimed authors (including yours truly). The anthology is a call to action too, as 100% of the proceeds from the book will go to the recovery efforts in Western North Carolina communities devastated by Hurricane Helene.

My contribution is an essay on how and why I’ve come to think of my books as “social thrillers.” More than 30 other authors have contributed essays on writing, resilience, and the creative life too, including two-time Newbery winner Erin Entrada Kelly, and Coretta Scott King and Newbery winner Alicia D. Williams. You’ll also find essays by my friends William Alexander, Linda-Marie Barrett, Chris Barton, Nora Shalaway Carpenter, Cinda Williams Chima, David Macinnis Gill, Shannon Hitchcock, Constance Lombardo, Beth Revis, Megan Shepherd, Padma Venkatraman, and Allan Wolf.

Spinning Toward the Sun comes out March 18, 2025. I hope you’ll help me support relief efforts in Western North Carolina by buying a copy when it’s available. You can learn more about the anthology here:

Learn more about SPINNING TOWARD THE SUN

That’s it for this month! If you liked it, please share this newsletter online, or with anyone you think would be interested:

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Thanks! And remember, resistance is NOT futile, no matter what the Borg say.

Say hello to the new cover for RESIST, the companion novella to my D-Day novel ALLIES!

Wait, I hear you saying, doesn’t that look exactly like the old cover for RESIST? Well, it’s very similar, but there are a few changes. Let’s play Check…and Double Check, the old spot the differences game from those Highlights magazines that were always sitting around the doctor’s office!

Can you spot the differences? The new cover has more planes and parachutes, and lots of boomy explosions. The Scholastic logo is gone, and there’s a wall of sandbags in the foreground. The book has a nifty new tagline too: “A world at war. A young spy. Her most dangerous mission yet.”

But the most glaring difference is…no dog! Where’s the dog!?

I asked, but I never got a good answer. I thought putting a dog on the cover of a middle grade book if you could was a no-brainer, but shows you what I know! My only guess is that Scholastic worried that the increased sense of danger—the aforementioned planes and parachutes and boomy explosions—would make people worry about the safety of the dog in the story, so they took him off.

Just to be clear, no dogs are hurt in this book. No dogs are hurt in any of my books, and never will be. My favorite writing teacher ever, the late, great Jon Manchip White, said many wise things to me and the others students in his classes at the University of Tennessee. But perhaps the most important writing rule he ever gave us was: Don’t kill the dog. “You can kill as many humans as you want in your stories, in as many horrible ways as you like,” he told us. “But you can never kill the dog.”

(Fun fact: I created Professor White’s Wikipedia page. I also did significant early work on the Wikipedia page of Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, but he never gave me any writing advice.)

Samira’s dog is named Cyrano—a reference to one of my favorite stories, Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. (I had nothing to do with that Wikipedia page, but it’s a good one.) Cyrano accompanies Samira on a daring mission through the French countryside to rescue her mother, who’s been captured by the Nazis. But it also happens to be D-Day, and there are lots of planes and parachutes and boomy explosions to avoid.

Ebook and audiobook editions of RESIST already exist in the world, but this is the first time you’ll be able to buy an official hardcover print version. So I guess taking the dog off the cover does help in one way—if you see a copy of RESIST for sale with Cyrano on it, buyer beware: it’s one of the old, used, limited print-run paperback editions, and Scholastic and I have no control over the price!

The new hardcover edition of RESIST debuts on March 4, 2025. You can preorder a copy from your favorite local indie, or by clicking any of the links below:

Pre-order RESIST from Amazon

Pre-order RESIST from Barnes & Noble

Pre-order RESIST from Bookshop.org

Pre-order RESIST from Green Bean Books

Pre-orders from Green Bean Books will come signed!

More Free Virtual Visits

I had a great January event with fans from fourteen US states and two Canadian provinces, and I hope to see even more of you online this winter and spring! In my free, live, hour-long virtual school events, I talk about my books, background, and writing process, and then answer questions from attendees. Whether you’re watching from home, a classroom, or an auditorium, there’s no fee to attend, and no limit on how many people can watch. Here’s my upcoming schedule. Click the links to register!

Thursday, February 13 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT

Tuesday, March 18 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

Thursday, April 17 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT

Tuesday, May 20 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

Can’t join me live? Want to replay an event for readers who missed it? Each virtual event is recorded, and is available for at least a month afterward to anyone with the link. (I usually just take the old one down as soon as a new recording is available.) You can even sign up and view a presentation after the fact! Regardless of how or when you watch, I hope you’ll tune in.

And finally, if you’ve hung with me through Highlights, Fernando Valenzuela, and Cyrano de Bergerac, your reward is…

Kostenlose Bücher!

That’s German for “Free books!” (At least according to Google Translate.)

I love collecting the foreign editions of my books. I have sixteen different versions of REFUGEE alone! (Many of which you can see if you click that link and scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.) The other book I have a lot of foreign editions of is BAN THIS BOOK. Some of the foreign editions look very different, and all of them are super cool. The German editions above are titled The Sea Before Us and Amy and the Secret Library, respectively.

I’m supposed to get a couple of free copies of every foreign edition that’s published, but it’s always a little hit and miss. Sometimes I get two, sometimes I get none. And sometimes, I get a whole box full.

I do not need a whole box full.

Which is good news for you, because I am giving away GERMAN LANGUAGE editions of both REFUGEE and BAN THIS BOOK! If you win, you will win only one book—either REFUGEE or BAN THIS BOOK—and there's no way to choose. Sorry. Also, I have a lot more German language editions of BAN THIS BOOK to give away than German language editions of REFUGEE, so if you win, you'll most likely get BAN THIS BOOK.

So that everyone has an equal chance to win, please enter only once. Due to the number of submissions I expect to get, only the giveaway winners will be notified of the results. The last day to enter is Sunday, February 9th, 2025.

Enter to win a German Edition!

Viel Glück!

(If you don't know what that means, you probably shouldn't be entering this contest.)

That’s it for this month! If you liked it, please share this newsletter online, or with anyone you think would be interested:

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And if you aren’t already a subscriber and you’d like to be, you can sign up here:

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Danke schön.

Help me and Kidlit for Los Angeles raise money for LA wildfire relief by bidding on an hour-long virtual visit with yours truly. I’ll give a prepared talk for thirty minutes that goes behind the scenes of some of my latest books, then I’ll spend the rest of the time answering your audience's questions LIVE.

Hurry—the auction ends Sunday, January 26th at midnight ET/9pm PT.

Click here to bid!

Kidlit for Los Angeles isn’t taking money directly. Instead, if you’re the winning bidder of an auction item, you will have until February 9th at midnight ET/9pm PT to upload a screenshot of proof of donation to one of the following charities:

California Community Foundation - Wildfire Relief Fund: www.calfund.org

Los Angeles Regional Food Bank: www.lafoodbank.org

Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation: www.supportlafd.org/

Animal Wellness Foundation Fire Relief Fund: www.animalwellnessfoundation.org/

The Kidlit For Los Angeles team will then review the receipts and connect winners with the donors of their items within 30 days. If receipts/proof of donations are not provided by the end of the day on February 9th, items will go to the next highest bidder.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know that charity auctions like this are about the only way to get me to do virtual events with individual schools anymore. (I’m still doing one big, free virtual visit per month during the school year that anyone can attend, of course—my next free, live virtual event is Thursday, February 13th.) If you’ve been hoping to get me one-on-one with your audience though, now’s your chance!

There are lots of great things up for auction from other kidlit authors and illustrators too, including art prints, virtual visits, manuscript critiques, gift cards, book bundles, in-person school visits (including one with Jason Reynolds!!!!!) and more. Help families in LA, and score some great goodies for you and your young readers by bidding early and often!

Here's the link again!

Thanks. You’re awesome.

In that spirit, (if you’ll forgive the quick flip from very serious to very silly), I want to highlight the truly heroic work of one John McClane in the 80s action thriller Die Hard. Funhouse Lounge here in Portland celebrates this Christmas classic every holiday season with Die Hard: The Musical Parody, and folks, it is even better than the original. (And coming from me, that’s saying a lot.)

The actors who play McClane and Hans Gruber (husband and wife in real life) chew up every scene they’re in, alone or together, as only Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman could. The small cast highlights every one of the secondary characters too, from songs about the glass ceiling from John’s wife Holly, to dreams of a post-crime dance career from German brothers Karl and Tony, to Sergeant Al Powell’s love affair with Twinkies. Along the way, a digital counter keeps track of the 46 references to other Bruce Willis movies, songs, and TV shows. The first act ends with other 80s action heroes giving John advice on how to craft a memorable catchphrase, and the second act ends with Hans taking his epic (and prolonged) fall from the top of Nakatomi tower.

Definitely one of the highlights of 2024 for me and the family. On to 2025!

The return of free virtual visits!

My free, live, virtual school events are back this spring! Once a month in January, February, March, April, and May, I’ll be hopping online for an hour to talk about my books, my background, and my writing process. I give a presentation for the first half hour, and then spend the next thirty minutes answering questions live from attendees. Whether you’re watching from home, a classroom, or an auditorium, there’s no fee to attend, and no limit on how many people can watch. Here’s the schedule for this spring. Click the links to register!

Tuesday, January 21 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

Thursday, February 13 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT

Tuesday, March 18 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

Thursday, April 17 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT

Tuesday, May 20 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

Can’t join me live? Want to replay an event for readers who missed it? Each virtual event is recorded, and is available for at least a month afterward to anyone with the link. (I usually just take the old one down as soon as a new recording is available.) You can even sign up and view a presentation after the fact! Regardless of how or when you watch, I hope you’ll tune in.

I’m not doing in-person school visits anymore, and rarely do paid virtual visits, but if you’ve got a larger event you’d like to invite me to, check out my Speaker Profile at Authors Unbound. Thanks!

What I’m Reading

On the kidlit front, I just read an Advance Reader Copy of Ruchira Gupta’s The Freedom Seeker. It’s the story of twelve-year-old Simi Singh, whose inter-faith family is driven from India by nativists. Her father applies for asylum in the United States first, but by the time the rest of his family has applied, US policies have become stricter, and his petition to have Simi and her mother join him is denied. Desperate to be reunited, Simi and her mother make the dangerous—and now all too common—”dry foot” path into the United States by trying to cross the Arizona desert. If you’re looking for a brief, compelling companion book to read with Refugee that highlights the current effects of American policies on refugee asylum and immigration—or to talk about what is sure to soon be an even more difficult path to freedom for these folks in the next four years—preorder The Freedom Seeker, which debuts in August.

And for adults, (and sticking with this month’s theme of following up tough stuff with unicorn chasers,) I heartily recommend my friend Beth Revis’s Full Speed to a Crash Landing. The first novella in the Chaotic Orbits series, Full Speed is a delightful, romantic, interstellar romp. Ada Lamarr may have gotten to a spaceship wreck first, but looter’s rights won’t get her far when she’s got a hole in the side of her ship and her spacesuit is almost out of air. Fortunately for her, help arrives in the form of a government salvage crew—led by devastatingly handsome government agent Rian White. Sparks fly as the two work together to finish the job, but Ada has a lot more up her space suit sleeve than she’s letting on…

And again on the adult front, and continuing my holiday sci-fi kick, I loved All Systems Red by Martha Wells. Another novella (I’m totally into the quick reads lately) that kicks off a longer series, this one is about a corporate stooge cyborg that has become self aware and hacked its own governor module. It still does its job—as much as it takes to get by, at least—and refers to itself as “Murderbot” thanks to some of the uses it’s been put to. It doesn’t much like humans, but it’s happy to co-exist with them as long as it still has time to sit around and watch TV. Murderbot is a perfect mix between Marvin the Paranoid Android and the Terminator, which sort of sums up my current mood right now.

Alan, is Die Hard really a Christmas movie?

Yes.

That’s it for this month! If you liked it, please share this newsletter online, or with anyone you think would be interested:

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And if you aren’t already a subscriber and you’d like to be, you can sign up here:

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Welcome to the party, pal!

I’m thankful for a lot of things right now. I’m thankful for the love and support of my family. I’m thankful for my terrific friends. I’m thankful for my beautiful home. I’m thankful to all the great authors who wrote the books I’ve read and enjoyed this year. I’m thankful for all the good dogs I’ve meet on my walks. I’m thankful for a career where I get to write books that lots of kids read. I’m thankful for the amazing kidlit writing community. And I’m thankful for you, for reading my books and sharing them with the young people in your life.

I’m also very thankful to everyone who answered the Gratz family call to donate money to the Red Cross to help the people of Western North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Helene. My wife Wendi and I both asked our newsletter subscribers to give, and offered to match all donations up to $5,000. Within hours, our collective friends and followers blew past that number, ultimately raising $7,135—plus our $5,000 matching contribution—for a total of $12,135 in hurricane relief. Thank you. We’ve kept in touch with our friends there, and know that some of them just got drinkable water back in their taps. A full recovery will take time, but your donations went a long way toward helping those most in need right now.

Free Virtual School Visit in December

I’ve done three free, live, virtual school visits already this school year, and I have one more coming before the winter holiday break. Join me online Thursday, December 19th at 11am ET/10am CT/9am MT/8am PT for an hour-long event where I talk about my books, my background, and my writing process. I’ll speak for the first half hour, and then spend the next thirty minutes answering questions from attendees. Whether you’re watching from home, a classroom, or an auditorium, there’s no fee to attend, and no limit on how many people can watch.

Register for my December virtual visit

Can’t make it? A recording of each month’s event is viewable until my next virtual school visit for anyone with the link. And watch this space for more live dates in January, February, March, and April 2025.

You can finally buy a copy of Resist in print!

In 2019, to help promote my novel ALLIES, I wrote a novella-length story about the further adventures of one of the main characters, Samira Zidane. That novella was called RESIST, and it was only available as a free giveaway for Scholastic Book Club subscribers. That print edition was never meant to be sold, and wasn’t officially on sale anywhere. But copies of the free novella started popping up in places where used books are sold—like Amazon—and sometimes, due to its rarity, at completely wild prices. That led to a lot of confusion and frustration.

Scholastic eventually made the novella available as both an ebook and audiobook, but it was never commercially available in print—until now! A hardcover print edition is in the works for March 4, 2025. You can preorder a copy from your favorite local indie, or by clicking any of the links below:

Preorder RESIST from Amazon

Preorder RESIST from Barnes & Noble

Preorder RESIST from Bookshop.org

Preorder RESIST from Green Bean Books

Preorders from Green Bean Books will come signed!

Speaking of signed copies of my books…

It’s holiday season, which means it’s time to order signed copies of my books for those Alan Gratz super-fans in your life! Green Bean Books in Portland, Oregon is the new home for my signed and personalized books. Order soon for timely holiday gift delivery!

Order signed books from Green Bean Books

Giveaway time

And, as promised, I have free books to give away!

In honor of RESIST, I’m giving away signed copies of the book that spawned the novella—ALLIES, my novel of D-Day!

Each entry will be assigned a number, and winners will be selected using a random number generator. So that everyone has an equal chance to win, please enter only once. Thanks! And sorry, due to the number of submissions I expect to get, only the giveaway winners will be notified of the results. But that means if you hear from me, it’ll be good news!

The last day to enter is Sunday, December 8, 2024. Thanks, and good luck!

Enter to win a signed copy of Allies

What I’m jamming to

My daughter Jo and I have been rewatching our way through all three seasons of Star Trek: The Original Series, en route to eventually rewatching every Star Trek series and movie. (Listen, it rains a lot in Portland in the winter.)

Rewatching the series reminds me of two very entertaining YouTube videos of Star Trek clips edited to match the lyrics of pop songs. The OG Star Trek musical clip video is this amazing version of Ke$ha’s “TikTok.” Even better though is this video of Star Trek clips cut to match “Common People” by Ben Folds, featuring Joe Jackson and William Shatner. Watch both to boldly go where no one has gone before…

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I guess not. Here’s a couple more:

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Thanks! Live long and prosper.

The damage is catastrophic. Here is the River Arts District in Asheville, where we loved to see movies at the Grail and used to walk by the river nearly every day:

This is the area just outside the Biltmore Estate, known as Biltmore Village:

This is the town of Marshall, where friends of ours owned an inn, and an art studio. The buildings at the top left used to be on an island.

And here is Lower Street, in Spruce Pine, NC, where Jo and I went out to lunch twice a week for close to ten years:

It’s heartbreaking to see these images, and it feels even worse to be so far away now, and to feel so helpless—knowing at the same time that even if we were there, we’d be among those needing help ourselves.

For a while, we were told that there was no way in and out of Asheville—a city of close to 100,000 people—by road. One half of Interstate 40, Asheville’s primary link to Tennessee and beyond, has washed away, and will take months, if not years, to repair:

Hundreds of thousands of people are without water and electricity. One friend told us that his area isn’t expected to get the power back on for four to six weeks, and that as soon as they can get out, he and his wife will be traveling to the Midwest to stay with family there. Most of the cell service—already tenuous in the mountains—has been out, and we have only sporadically been able to get in touch with some friends as they sit in the parking lot of a rural Wal-Mart, or on the sidewalk outside the Asheville convention center, which opened its doors as a shelter.

It’s going to take years to rebuild Western North Carolina, but the people of the region need emergency relief help RIGHT NOW.

My wife Wendi and I have set up a Red Cross donation page, and we’re asking our friends, fans, and followers to give money, if you can. Wendi and I will join you, matching all donations up to $5,000. Here’s the link:

Donate to Red Cross NC Relief Efforts

Friends in the region have told us that the Red Cross responded immediately, distributing food and water to residents they could reach by car, and helicoptering supplies in to areas isolated by road outages. They’re also operating shelters for people who’ve lost their homes. Anything you can afford to give will go a long way toward keeping these relief efforts going. If you can’t give money, donating blood is always helpful in a crisis like this.

There are lots of other ways to donate to help the region too. You can find an actively updated list here. Local organizations are asking people NOT to send physical supplies, however, as they’re not equipped to receive help like that right now. They are also asking people to NOT come to the area to help. (Unless you own a helicopter, I guess.) Even locals are being asked to stay off the roads, so they can be used by relief and repair trucks.

I often joke that the theme of every book I write boils down to, “We’re stronger when we work together.” We see it again and again when crises arise—at D-Day, during the Attack on Pearl Harbor, in the aftermath of 9/11, and many more. I hope for a day when everybody, everywhere, is already working together for the benefit of all humankind, and we can prevent all but the most unexpected of tragedies. In the meantime, I can at least rest reassured that when disaster strikes, there are always good people ready to step up and help. Thank you.

With love,

Alan ❤️