Bookpulse

The 2023 Audie Awards Winners, Republic of Consciousness Prize, and Whiting Award winners are announced. The best-sellers lists this week feature Countdown by James Patterson and Brendan DuBois, The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear, Smolder by Laurell K. Hamilton, Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond, The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening by Ari Shapiro, and Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross. Conversations feature interviews with authors such as Meleana Estes, Abraham Riesman, Gabrielle Zevin, Rhys Bowen, and Idra Novey. There is adaptation news for Lone Women by Victor LaValle and Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain.

The 2023 Dublin Literary Award shortlist is announced, featuring Anthony Doerr, Percival Everett, Kim Thúy, and more. Salman Rushdie, Alice Oseman, Mererid Hopwood, and Serhiy Zhadan will receive Hay Festival Medals in May. LibraryReads and LJ offer read-alikes for Loyalty by Lisa Scottoline. Interviews arrive with Clint Smith, Branson Sanderson, Dr. Arline T. Geronimus, and Colleen Oakley. Chris Chalk will play James Baldwin in Feud: Capote's Women on FX. Plus, Diane Marie Brown’s Black Candle Women will be adapted as a series.

Margo Jefferson wins 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize “Book of the Year” for her memoir Constructing a Nervous System. Scary Monsters by Michelle De Kretser wins for fiction, and Quiet: Poems by Victoria Adukwei Bulley wins for poetry. Kitty Kelley wins the 2023 BIO Award. The Imadjinn Awards finalists and British Book Awards shortlists are announced. Jhumpa Lahiri will publish a new story collection in October. Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese and based on the book by David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI), gets an October release date. Plus, ALA condemns ongoing threats against libraries. 

A U.S. Court rules against the Internet Archive in a closely watched copyright case. Dav Pilkey’s 11th Dog Man book, Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea, leads holds this week. Five LibraryReads and six Indie Next picks publish this week. Canada Reads returns for its 22nd season, featuring Ducks by Kate Beaton, Greenwood by Michael Christie, Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Stranger Things actor Millie Bobby Brown’s forthcoming debut novel, Nineteen Steps, will arrive in September. Plus, Publishers Weekly releases its 2023 Summer Reads preview. 

Beverly Gage wins the New-York Historical Society award for G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. Other awards announcements include the International Dylan Thomas Prize shortlist, National Book Critics Circle winners, and Sheikh Zayed Book Award. Multiple news outlets cover the book ban report recently released by ALA. There are many conversations with authors including Geetanjali Shree, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Robert Lopez, Jinwoo Chong, Victor LaValle, and Julia Samuel.

There is an annoucement for the Writers’ Trust of Canada new nonfiction prize: the Weston International Award. Books debuting on the best-seller lists this week are I Will Find You by Harlan Coben, Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano, Saved: A War Reporter’s Mission To Make It Home by Benjamin Hall, Paris: The Memoir by Paris Hilton, and The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike’s Elite Running Team by Kara Goucher, written with Mary Pilon. Audio interviews feature conversations with authors such as Ari Shapiro, Darren Walker, Madelaine Lucas, Kerry Howley, Natalie Koch, and John Parker.

Colson Whitehead, Amy Tan, Ann Patchett, Bryan Stevenson, and others receive National Humanities Medals. Linda Villarosa, Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation, and Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War, win 2023 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards. Questlove launches a new publishing imprint. There is adaptation news for Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo, Cesca Major’s Maybe Next Time, two titles by J. Newman, and Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These. Plus, James Patterson signs an exclusive deal with Skydance Television.

Will Sharpe will direct the movie adaptation of Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart. Today is World Poetry Day. Award winners and shortlists arrive from the Sheikh Zayed Book Awards, the Imagining Indigenous Futurisms Award, and the Yoto Carnegie Medals. Hachette v. Internet Archive has a key hearing. Biography of X by Catherine Lacey gets buzz. At LA Times Matthew Desmond discusses his new book Poverty, by America and “the ways we can move the needle on poverty.” 

The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear leads library holds this week. The April LibraryReads list is out, featuring top pick, In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune. Four Indie Next picks publish this week, including Flux by Jinwoo Chong, Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin, American Mermaid by Julia Langbein, and Beyond That, the Sea by Laura Spence-Ash. People’s book of the week is The Kingdom of Prep: The Inside Story of the Rise and (Near) Fall of J.Crew by Maggie Bullock. Author profiles and interviews arrive with Catherine Lacey, Jeannette Walls, Mona Simpson, and Matthew Desmond.