Mindy Kaling's Summer Reading List Includes Murder Mysteries and Oprah Book Club Picks

glamour.com:

and Max’s has been itching for some work. “I’m less busy now because of the strike,” she says from her home in Los Angeles. “I like to seem busy, so this interview is very welcome.”Luckily, Kaling has plenty to focus on as the founder of Mindy’s Book Studio, a book imprint with Amazon Publishing that she developed last year.

With Mindy’s Book Studio, Kaling selects gripping works written by women authors of color to publish. The cherry on top? She’ll also have the first option to adapt the books into films. “At this point in my career, I don’t have a ton of time, so whenever I choose to do anything, I want to make sure that it’s giving a platform to new and underrepresented voices,” says the mother of two, who counts authors like Zadie Smith and Jhumpa Lahiri as formative in discovering her own voice. “That’s one of the overall goals of my film and TV company, Kaling International, and I really wanted to do that in the publishing world.” And she has.

Kaling already has published two must-read novels with Mindy’s Book Studio: by Sonali Dev, and I. “Reading has always been my first love—even before beading and working at video stores,” she says. (More on that later.) When Kaling first read , by comedy duo Alli Frank and Asha Youmans, she immediately picked it up again for a re-read.

The Better Half, out now, is the third novel to be published under the imprint. And two of the novels from Mindy’s Book Studio, The Vibrant Years, and , which will be on sale October 1, have already been optioned for feature films. “Each book represents years of work and sacrifice for a writer.