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Awards, Adaptation News & World Poetry Day

Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart (Knopf) is headed to the movies. Will Sharpe will direct. Entertainment Weekly reports. People also has coverage.

NPR’s Morning Edition celebrates World Poetry Day. UK poet laureate Simon Armitage pays homage to spring in a new poem for the occasion. The Guardian has coverage. 

The Sheikh Zayed Book Awards announces shortlists. Publishing Perspectives has details. 

The 2023 Imagining Indigenous Futurisms winner is announced.

The 2023 Yoto Carnegie Medals shortlists are announced.

Publishers Weekly compiles its coverage of the Hachette v. Internet Archive copyright case. Gizmodo also has coverage, as does Publishers Lunch. 

There is news that "Co-Author Loberg Accepts Blame, As More Plagiarism Is Found In Agus’s Three Earlier Books," Publishers Lunch reports. An LA Times report uncovered the plagiarism. 

Reviews

NYT reviews Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family by Rachel Jamison Webster (Henry Holt & Co.): “The materials Webster has to work with, scant as they are, are potent and disturbing.” NPR also reviews the book: “This book, and our responses to it, serves as a reminder of the extent to which ‘history — even well-researched history — is subjective and alive. It's always being seen through the lens of the present’." The Washington Post also weighs in: “The result sits at a fine point between fact and sensitively considered fiction based on the minimal records available, oral histories, and the thoughts and hunches of descendants.”

NYT also reviews Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship that Saved Yosemite by Dean King (Scribner): “We see through this book the immense power of language to sway, the ability for selectively chosen words to convey awe and power, resentment and raw anger, to change the minds of lawmakers and tourists alike.”; The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet (Norton): “Sharlet’s authenticity and urgency as an essayist stems from his spooked, vulnerable persona, which confers on him a moral credibility that an ostensibly neutral writer would lack.”; Flux by Jinwoo Chong (Melville House): “happily offers a moving appraisal of lives buffeted by personal and systemic traumas; a deep dive into the good, the bad and the ugly of self-serving corporate culture; and no shortage of ‘wait, what the heck just happened?’ thrills.”; Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities by David B. Auerbach (Public Affairs): “About the competing concept of the metaverse, the vision of an imminent, investable digital world that has been on everyone but especially Mark Zuckerberg’s lips, Auerbach is a little hand-wavy, calling it ‘terribly vague’.”; Walk the Walk: How Three Police Chiefs Defied the Odds and Changed Cop Culture by Neil Gross (Metropolitan Books; LJ starred review): “At a moment when the country is indeed, well, a powder keg waiting to explode, Gross’s optimism about police reform offers an antidote to the cynicism and gloom that pervade most such discussions. His book is replete with both empathy and pragmatism.”

The Washington Post reviews Biography of X by Catherine Lacey (Farrar; LJ starred review): “The book is a marvelous centrifuge, in which political and cultural histories of the American 20th century collapse.” LA Times also reviews: “in its boldness of premise and execution, Biography of X goes above and beyond, under the river and through the woods. It flaunts world-building skills that the writers of HBO’s Game of Thrones wish they’d had.”

Datebook reviews Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles (Abrams): “As Knowles’ title makes clear, this book is a jeremiad. He argues that while the prevailing and deep-seated belief is that cars equal freedom, the truth is that they have made cities uglier and more dangerous at an overwhelming cost to health, equity, climate and pocketbook.”

NPR reviews The Teachers: A Year Inside America's Most Vulnerable, Important Profession by Alexandra Robbins (Dutton): “The Teachers accomplishes many things — bringing readers into classrooms, showing how politics affect teachers, exposing how awful things like book banning have gotten — but two of its biggest triumphs are eviscerating popular misconceptions about the profession and showing the colossal passion that keeps teachers going.”; The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington (Penguin Pr.): “Beyond their periodic scandals and a questionable track record, Mazzucato and Collington argue, consultants — and the overreliance on them — create systemic problems for both businesses and the government.”

Briefly Noted

Matthew Desmond discusses his new book, Poverty, by America (Crown), and “the ways we can move the needle on poverty,” in an interview with LA Times. 

Rachel Jamison Webster, Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family (Henry Holt & Co.), discusses the "ethics of writing about race as a white woman," at LitHub. 

Slate talks with Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology (Scribner), about “how Moore’s Law changed everything we know about the chip-making business.”

Matthew Salesses talks with Salon about shooting hoops and K-dramas in his book, The Sense of Wonder (Little, Brown).

BBC explores the forthcoming book, The Norse Myths That Shape the Way We Think by Carolyne Larrington (Thames & Hudson), and how the Norse myths influence today’s culture.

LitHub shares 20 books for the week. 

T&C shares read-alikes for Daisy Jones & the Six. 

The Atlantic recommends eight setting-centric books. 

Former CIA spy and author Brittany Butler, The Syndicate Spy (Greenleaf), recommends espionage books at CrimeReads. 

Authors On Air

Ebony explores the evolution of Janelle Monáe, with a look at her creative exploits, and more. 

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