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Awards & Booklists

Wesley Morgan wins the 2022 William E. Colby Award for The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley (Random; LJ starred review). 

NPR Books Editor Petra Mayer is posthumously honored with the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award from The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. NPR reports.

The 2022 Nommo Awards shortlist is announced.

The 2022 Premios Kelvin finalists are announced.

BookRiot invites readers to take the AAPI Reading Challenge in May and beyond.

Buzzfeed lists “26 AAPI Cookbooks That Should Be On Your Shelf.”

CBC has “23 Canadian collections to read for Short Story Month.”

Seattle Times has the must-read books for summer.

Reviews

The Washington Post reviews Trust by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead): “In summary Trust sounds repellently overcomplicated, but in execution it’s an elegant, irresistible puzzle. The novel isn’t just about the way history and biography are written; it’s a demonstration of that process. By the end, the only voice I had any faith in belonged to Diaz.”

NPR reviews This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub (Riverhead): “an entertaining charmer that unleashes the magic of time travel to sweeten its exploration of potentially heavy themes like mortality, the march of time, and how little decisions can alter your life.” And, Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri (Princeton Univ. Pr.): “In her essays as in her fiction, Lahiri is a writer of great, quiet elegance; her sentences seem simple even when they're complex. Their beauty and clarity alone would be enough to wake readers up.”

NYT reviews Avalon by Nell Zink (Knopf): “There’s no fudging the rules in Avalon, which is the effulgent and clever sort of novel that replicates the experience of learning a new game: You enter its world voluntarily and add your reading effort to Zink’s writing effort with the idea that the sum of these energies will create a zone of mirth and meaning. What fun.”  Also, paired reviews of two books about Hong Kong: Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong by Louisa Lim (Riverhead; LJ starred review), and The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir by Karen Cheung (Random; LJ starred review): “Each book sheds a different light on how longstanding forces converged to foment the sustained outpouring of anger and frustration that in 2019 shook Hong Kong to its core.”  Plus, short reviews of four new books.

The Guardian reviews Either/Or by Elif Batuman (Penguin Pr.): “Batuman’s success in Either/Or is how thoroughly she exploits the gap between Selin’s scepticism about the creation and the consequences of literature and her narrator’s wonderfully idiosyncratic comic voice.”

Briefly Noted

LibraryReads and LJ offer read-alikes for Something Wilder by Christina Lauren (Gallery), the buzziest book of the week.

Valerie Bertinelli talks with USA Today about her memoir, Enough Already (HarperCollins), amid the dissolution of her second marriage.

Simu Liu talks with Entertainment Weekly about his new book, We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story (Morrow; LJ starred review), and “sharing his family’s story with the world.”

Lan Samantha Chang, author of The Family Chao (Norton), talks with ElectricLit about the “pressure faced by writers of color to write likable characters.” 

The Rumpus chats with Emma Straub about her new novel, This Time Tomorrow (Riverhead), time travel, and friendship. Also, Cleyvis Natera talks about her debut novel, Neruda on the Park (Ballantine), literary influences, and writing about community.

Porsha Williams talks with Shondaland about her memoir, The Pursuit of Porsha: How I Grew Into My Power and Purpose (Worthy Books), and the “milestones that shaped her.” The paperback comes out in September.

Slate explains why everyone's reading Dracula together. 

Vulture expands on The Believer magazine publisher saga.

Wired writes about the history of abortion rights in the U.S., and references When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 by Leslie J. Reagan (Univ. of California Pr.).

NYT profiles author Eileen Myles and previews Colin Kaepernick's forthcoming memoir, Colin Kaepernick: Change the Game,  a new YA graphic novel, due out next spring.

The Millions has a piece on the value of comics.

Crimereads gathers May’s best debut crime fiction.

LitHub suggests 19 books for the week.

Christian Science Monitor lists 10 books for May.

Bustle has 10 must-read books. 

BookRiot lists 9 books for fitness professionals. 

Authors On Air

Robert Samuel and Toluse Olorunnipa talk with NPR’s All Things Considered about their new book, His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Viking).

Vanity Fair writes "Star Wars: The Rebellion Will Be Televised," featuring the new Obi Wan Kenobi series on Disney+. 

Alan Moore’s comic series, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is getting a reboot for Hulu. The Hollywood Reporter has the story.

Julianne Moore and Sandra Oh are set to star in an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s short story "Stone Mattress." Deadline reports.

Netflix's Spiderhead, based on George Saunders’ short story Escape From Spiderhead, gets a trailer.  LitHub reports. 

Popsugar highlights a new Where the Crawdads Sing trailer. 

Ali Wentworth, Ali’s Well That Ends Well: Tales of Desperation and a Little Inspiration (Harper), will be on Drew Barrymore today and What What Happens Live tomorrow. Selma Blair, Mean Baby (Knopf), will be on The View tomorrow. Judd Apatow, Sicker in the Head: More Conversations About Life and Comedy (Random), will visit Live with Kelly and Ryan. Plus, Bethenny Frankel, Business is Personal: The Truth About What it Takes to Be Successful While Staying True to Yourself (Hachette Go), will be on Tamron Hall.

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