How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter Named 2026 National Indie Excellence Awards Finalist

How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter, the debut memoir by Luke Stoffel, is a Finalist in the 2026 National Indie Excellence Awards, honored in the Regional Non-Fiction: Midwest category of the 20th annual competition. The recognition arrives just weeks after the memoir won a 2026 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award, giving the openly AI-assisted book two national honors in a single season.

What Are the National Indie Excellence Awards?

Now in their 20th year, the National Indie Excellence Awards (NIEA) honor excellence in independent publishing across the United States, recognizing indie, university, and small-press books in more than 100 categories. The complete list of 2026 National Indie Excellence Awards winners and finalists is published at indieexcellence.com/20th-annual-finalists.

Two National Book Honors in One Season

The NIEA finalist recognition follows the memoir's win at the 38th Annual IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards, presented by the Independent Book Publishers Association in Portland this May in the Neurodivergent Communities category, from a field of more than 2,000 entries. Two award juries, two independent organizations, one season, the same book.

An Openly AI-Assisted Book, Read on Its Merits

Stoffel, who is dyslexic, disclosed his AI use inside the book itself: a line-editing and accessibility tool, not a ghostwriter. The honors land in a year when publishing is fighting over exactly this question, with AI-detection software flagging authors and prize committees scrambling to write disclosure policies.

"I put the disclosure in the book because I figured someone would burn me at the stake for it," Stoffel says. "Instead, the judges read the book. That's all any writer wants, dyslexic or otherwise. To be read, not scanned."

About the Memoir

How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter is a picaresque ride through Reagan-era America, exploring failure, ambition, and the cost of chasing success. Publishers Weekly BookLife scored it 9.5 out of 10. Kirkus Reviews called it "an exuberant life story written with humor, panache, and heart." Midwest Book Review named it a Reviewer's Choice.

The Warboy Chronicles

The memoir opens The Warboy Chronicles. The series' newest titles, The Third Person and Boy, Refracted, launched June 1; Publishers Weekly BookLife calls Boy, Refracted a "truly singular book."

Did AI Write the Book?

No. Stoffel used AI as a line-editing and accessibility tool, working with his dyslexia, and disclosed it inside the book. The stories, the voice, and the structure are his. Two independent award juries judged the finished work and honored it.

Luke Stoffel National Indie Excellence Awards Finalist

Official finalist list: indieexcellence.com/20th-annual-finalists

Unlocking the Mysteries of the Giza Plateau: A Journey Beyond the Pyramids

Cairo, Egypt

Photography by Lucas Stoffel can be licensed on Shutterstock and Getty Images

Photography by Lucas Stoffel Fine art prints available on Etsy.

A vast stretch of desert, echoing the tales of pharaohs and ancient civilization, awaits your exploration on the Giza Plateau Pyramids. This land, peppered with monumental structures and archeological wonders, is a canvas where history, mystery, and exploration intertwine, inviting travelers to unearth its multifaceted gems. While the iconic pyramids stand as the stalwart sentinels of time, the plateau unveils a plethora of experiences that go beyond these majestic structures.

Marveling at the Timeless Giza Plateau Pyramids:

Your journey begins at the foot of the towering Pyramids of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure. As you stand, dwarfed by their colossal stature, imagine the civilization that constructed these architectural marvels without the technologies available today. Visiting the inner chambers, with their stark, silent, and dimly-lit passages, you're invited to step into a space where royalty once envisioned their journey to the afterlife.

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The Giza Plateau by Lucas Stoffel

Decrypting the Sphinx's Enigma:

Gaze into the eyes of the Sphinx, an emblem of mystery and unanswered questions. This mythical creature with the body of a lion and the head of a king or god has silently observed the passage of time and countless visitors, keeping its secrets securely veiled. The Sphinx, in its tranquil yet formidable presence, offers photogenic views during sunset, where it’s bathed in a warm, golden hue, amplifying its enigmatic aura.

Experience a Sunset Camel Ride:

Imagine yourself embarking on a camel ride, swaying gently with the creature’s strides, as you navigate through the desert with the pyramids as your backdrop. As the sun sets, casting long shadows on the sand and enveloping the pyramids in a soft, golden glow, you're transported to a realm where the ancient and the present coalesce in a picturesque tableau.

The Great Pyramids of Egypt by Lucas Stoffel

The Giza Plateau, with its timeless structures and the silent sands that have witnessed the ebb and flow of history, invites you to explore, ponder, and step into narratives that have been carved and whispered through millennia. So, let the desert winds guide you through an adventure where every grain of sand holds a story, every monument a secret, and every horizon a timeless mystery.

Order Fine Art Prints on Etsy

Circe Book Review: The Witch Who Refused to Be a Footnote

Rating: ★★★★★

"Circe" Book Review:

Circe is the daughter of Helios, a Titan. She's born into a family that measures worth by power, radiance, the ability to make mortals tremble. And she has none of it. Her voice is too thin. Her face is too mortal. Her family openly despises her. So she does what any self-respecting outcast would do: she discovers witchcraft and terrifies everyone who underestimated her.

Madeline Miller is a classicist who taught Latin and Greek for years before she ever published fiction. Her first novel, The Song of Achilles, reimagined the Trojan War through the lens of Achilles and Patroclus's love story and won the Orange Prize. With Circe, she does something equally ambitious but structurally different. Where Achilles was a tragedy hurtling toward a known ending, Circe is a slow unfolding. A woman exiled to an island, living through centuries, encountering the myths we already know — Odysseus, Daedalus, the Minotaur, Scylla — and finding her own story woven between them.

What Miller does better than almost anyone writing mythological fiction is make you feel the weight of immortality. Circe lives for thousands of years, and that's not glamorous here. It's lonely. It's watching everyone you love age and die while you stay the same. It's having centuries of solitude to figure out who you are when no one's watching. Miller writes that loneliness with such empathy that you forget you're reading about a goddess. Circe feels deeply, stubbornly human.

Perdita Weeks narrates the audiobook with exactly the right combination of otherworldly and grounded. Her voice has this quiet authority — she sounds ancient and immediate at the same time.

The feminist reading is obvious — a woman claiming her power in a world that wants her silent — but Miller never reduces Circe to a message. She's complicated. She's sometimes cruel, sometimes naive, always growing. The book asks what kind of person you'd become if you had forever to figure it out, and the answer Miller arrives at is quietly devastating.

If you loved The Song of Achilles, this is Miller working at the same level with a very different kind of protagonist. Where Achilles was about burning bright and fast, Circe is about the slow, stubborn work of becoming yourself. Five stars. Essential.

If You Liked Circe, Try:

• The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker — The Trojan War from Briseis's perspective. Same project of reclaiming a woman's story from mythology's margins, with a harder, angrier edge.

• Ariadne by Jennifer Saint — The myth of the Minotaur told through the women who lived it. If Circe made you hungry for more feminist retellings of Greek myth, this delivers.

• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke — A completely different setting but the same feeling of one person alone in a vast, strange world, slowly piecing together who they are.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

If this book review resonated with you, check out The Warboy Chronicles — a series that shares Crichton's obsession with what happens when you create intelligence you cannot control, including a sentient AI that starts thinking for itself in ways its creator never intended. thewarboychronicles.com