Libby Book Awards Finalists Are Announced | Book Pulse

The Libby Book Awards finalists are announced. Mac Barnett is named U.S. National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, ed. by Ada Limón, is the 2025 Seattle Reads pick. February book club picks include This Is a Love Story by Jessica Soffer (Read with Jenna and B&N), Junie by Erin Crosby Eckstine (GMA), and Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su (Amazon’s Sarah Selects). Clarkson Potter plans to reissue Martha Stewart’s 1982 book Entertaining, after it finds appeal with a new audience. Mat Youkee’s forthcoming Forty Days in the Jungle will be adapted for the big screen. Plus, authors weigh in on the pros and cons of blurbing.

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Awards, News & Book Clubs

The Libby Book Awards finalists are announcedPeople has coverage.

Mac Barnett is named U.S. National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

Sean Manning, publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint in the U.S., writes an essay in Publishers Weekly about why the imprint will no longer require blurbs for their books. Author Rebecca Makkai shares her perspective at NYTThe Guardian and LitHub also have coverage.

The Giller Prize has parted ways with its lead sponsor Scotiabank, CBC reports.

Seattle Public Library announces You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, ed. by Ada Limón (Milkweed Editions), as the 2025 Seattle Reads pickSeattle Times has the news.

The February Read with Jenna pick is This Is a Love Story by Jessica Soffer (Dutton). It is also B&N’s book club pick

GMA selects Junie by Erin Crosby Eckstine (Ballantine).

Amazon’s Sarah Selects book club is reading Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su (Harper).

Reviews

NYT reviews Gliff by Ali Smith (Pantheon): “This idea of freedom—the possibility of moving through the world unconfined by a single, determinate category, able to swap identities or shed them altogether—is both Smith’s great theme and a description of her methods”; Soft Core by Brittany Newell (Farrar): Soft Core is pacey and rich, full of verve, drama and detail”; The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor (Europa): “What emerges is not just a wartime thriller, though it is that, but a meditation on how we remember, how we resist and how, even in the darkest times, humanity endures”; and Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, tr. by Philip Roughton (Biblioasis): “Once the reader is settled into the rhythms of Stefansson’s prose, we’ll go anywhere with him.”

The Guardian reviews Three Days in June by Anne Tyler (Knopf): “It says everything about Tyler’s talents as a novelist that both outcomes are equally plausible and equally possible, until the very last word of the very last sentence of this wise, wonderful book.”

Briefly Noted

LitHub highlights 26 new books out today

Clarkson Potter plans to reissue Martha Stewart’s 1982 book Entertaining, after it finds appeal with a new audience, NYT reports. 

USA Today puts Ali Hazelwood’s books in order.

BookRiot looks at book trends according to Goodreads and suggests 14 new romance books for February.

ElectricLit suggests “9 Haunting Books About Catholicism.”

Novelist and NYT horror columnist Gabino Iglesias writes about new crime fiction for CrimeReads

People previews American Idol alum David Archuleta’s forthcoming memoir, Devout (Dey Street), due out June 10. 

LA Times talks with author Jennifer Finney Boylan about her new memoir, Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us (Celadon).

People shares an excerpt and the cover of Kit Frick’s forthcoming novel, Friends and Liars (Atria: Emily Bestler), due out in December. 

Authors on Air

Mat Youkee’s forthcoming Forty Days in the Jungle: Behind the Extraordinary Survival and Rescue of Four Children Lost in the Amazon (Scribe US), will be adapted for the big screenDeadline has the story.

Vulture shares “17 Book-to-Screen Adaptations to Add to Your 2025 Reading List”

Allegra Goodman discusses her new book, Isola (Dial), on B&N’s Poured Over podcast.

A new seven-episode podcast series, Division Street Revisited, checks in with the people interviewed for Studs Terkel’s 1967 book Division Street: America (New Pr.), which was reissued in November. Chicago Tribune has the story. 

Alton Brown, Food for Thought: Essays and Ruminations (Gallery), and Nicole Avant, Think You’ll Be Happy: Moving Through Grief with Grit, Grace, and Gratitude (HarperOne), will appear on CBS Mornings.

Frank Caprio, Compassion in the Court: Life-Changing Stories from America's Nicest Judge (BenBella), visits GMA today.

Bill Gates, Source Code: My Beginnings (Knopf), will appear on the Tonight Show.

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