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Awards & Book News

The winners of the Windham-Campbell Prize are announced.

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad (Grove) wins the Aspen Words Literary Prize.

Sid Marty wins the inaugural Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize for his collection Oldman’s River: New and Collected Poems (NeWest); CBC has coverage.

The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association has announced the ballot for the 2024 Aurora Awards.

“Booker Prize urged to consider name change over slavery link,” The Guardian reports.

Page to Screen

May 2

The Idea of You, based on the novel by Robinne Lee. Prime Video. Reviews | Trailer

The Tattooist of Auschwitz, based on the novel by Heather Morris. Peacock. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

Washington Post reviews Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show by Tommy Tomlinson (Avid Reader/S. & S.): “No cheap shots at loopy humans and their similarly vapid canine beauty queens. Only poignant celebrations of a cross-species romance that has defied not only full understanding but the march of centuries”; Says Who?: A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words by Anne Curzan (Crown; LJ starred review): “Curzan tries hard to downplay any soupçon of the didactic by adopting an up-to-date, friendly cheeriness. For my taste, she goes too far. She loads on the maple syrup, tacitly assuming that no one will pay attention to her linguistic points without a lot of sweetening”; Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide by Samir Chopra (Princeton Univ.): “Though he includes several moving accounts of his own traumas and perturbations, his slim volume is for the most part dedicated to staging a whirlwind tour of the intellectual history of an unjustly reviled emotion”; and The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson: “Black Americans are almost always treated as an unnamed, undifferentiated mass of passive victims: Although Larson unmasks the cruelty and hypocrisy of wealthy White enslavers, Frederick Douglass appears just once in the book’s 500 pages. Other Black activists, authors and strategists never do. Abolitionists…are hardly mentioned…. In this sense, The Demon of Unrest sometimes reads more like a product of the 1920s than of the 2020s.”

NYT reviews the audiobook of Prima Facie by Suzie Miller, narr. by Jodie Comer (Macmillan Audio): “In the nine-hour-plus audiobook, Comer gets to go deeper with the role; this isn’t a replication of her intrepid stage turn, but a continuation of it.”

NPR’s Fresh Air reviews The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Cristanne Miller & Domhnall Mitchell (Belknap: Harvard Univ.): “They’ve added some 300 previously uncollected letters to this volume for a grand total of 1,304 letters. The result is that The Letters of Emily Dickinson reads like the closest thing we'll probably ever have to an intimate autobiography of the poet.”

LitHub highlights “5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week” and the best-reviewed books of the week; CrimeReads rounds up the best-reviewed crime fiction of the month.

Briefly Noted

In The Millions, memoirists Shze-Hui Tjoa, author of The Story Game (Tin House), and David Martinez, author of Bones Worth Breaking (MCD; LJ starred review), reflect on what the form means to them.

Caleb Azumah Nelson, Small Worlds (Grove; LJ starred review), answers The Guardian’s “The Books of My Life” questionnaire.

NYT interviews historian and sociologist Beth Linker, author of Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America (Princeton Univ.).

Washington Post interviews Nicholson Baker, author of Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art (Penguin Pr.).

NYT has an appraisal of the career of the late poetry critic Helen Vendler, who “believed poetry matters.”

New full-cast Harry Potter audiobooks are set for a 2025 launch on Audible, Deadline reports.

Kirkus explores fiction about true crime.

Electric Lit gathers “8 Novels About Returning to the Places We Leave Behind.”

CrimeReads lists the five best novels about hauntings and investigates “what makes Australia such perfect terrain for thrillers.”

Authors on Air

Susan Page, author of The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters (S. & S.), is interviewed on PBS News Hour.

Karen Conti, author of Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy: Defending America’s Most Evil Serial Killer on Death Row (Black Lyon), talks to Fox News.

Paris Hilton is bringing Sarah Ditum’s Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s (Abrams) to the small screen as a docuseries; Kirkus has the news.

Sam Raimi and the writers of 10 Cloverfield Lane will adapt Graveweaver’s I’m the Grim Reaper webtoon as a TV series, Reactor reports.

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