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Awards & News

ALA releases preliminary data on 2023 book challenges, showing a surge this year.

The German Book Prize announces its 2023 shortlist. Publishing Perspectives reports.

The 2023 BBC Young Writers’ Award shortlist is announced. Locus has details. 

The Mellon Foundation appoints historian and scholar Kelly Lytle Hernández as its 2023 Fellow in Residence.

Prominent novelists, including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult and Elin Hilderbrand, sue OpenAI. NYT reports. 

The September LoanStars list is out, featuring top pick The Armor of Light by Ken Follett (Viking). 

The verdict is in on the “Bad Art Friend” case. LitHub has the story. 

The AAP Stat Shot report shows “US Trade Sales Down 5.9 Percent Year Over Year.” Publishing Perspectives has details

Reviews

NYT reviews The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty by Michael Wolff (Holt): “The dirt-dishing and tea-spilling makes for queasy fun, and the clash of big personalities is diverting, but compared to the gaudy circus of Trumpworld, this show feels a little tame”; Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement by Ashley Shew (Norton): “Shew’s new book, Against Technoableism—a term she coined—is a kind of introductory seminar on the ways that our hyper-technologized age approaches disability”; Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations by Simon Schama (Ecco): “It is a thinly painted veil of a biography of one saintly and only half-remembered scientist who battled two of the most wicked of the maladies, succeeding in both cases in stopping them in their tracks by his cleverly home-brewed vaccines”; The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis by Maria Smilios (Putnam): “This is a book that deserves reading and remembering in our pandemic age, and as TB continues to kill 1.6 million of the most vulnerable people on the planet every year”; and The Lights: Poems by Ben Lerner (Farrar; LJ starred review): “Readers of Lerner’s recent novels may view The Lights as a return to poetry. Lerner might observe that he never left.”

Washington Post reviews Wellness by Nathan Hill (Knopf: LJ starred review): “Hill’s follow-up to The Nix, his acclaimed 2016 debut, is a clear-eyed look at the difficulty to live honestly in a world where authenticity may be the most challenged idea of all”; and Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories by Mike Rothschild (Melville House): “This book, dealing as it does with present-day political actors and claims, is very much of its time. But it is also quite timeless in how it elegantly untangles fact from fiction.”

NPR reviews North Woods by Daniel Mason (Random; LJ starred review): “One of the delights of North Woods is the sheer variety of Mason’s characters.”

The Guardian reviews The Young Man by Annie Ernaux, tr. by Alison Strayer (Seven Stories): “The Young Man does offer a taste of what’s so unique and astonishing about her honesty, her intelligence, the deceptive simplicity of her narratives.”

Briefly Noted

LibraryReads and Library Journal offer read-alikes for The Last Devil To Die by Richard Osman (Pamela Dorman: Viking; LJ starred review), the top holds title of the week.

Leslie Jones talks about her new memoir, Leslie F*cking Jones (Grand Central), with USA Today. Entertainment Weekly shares details from a chapter entitled “Killing Whoopi Goldberg.”

Anderson Cooper talks about his latest book, Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune, written with Katherine Howe (Harper), with Washington Post.

Aparna Nancherla discusses her new book, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome (Viking), and what scares her the most, with Parade.

Esquire interviews Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose new book is The Wolves of Eternity, tr. by Martin Aitken (Penguin Pr.), about “fiction, fame, fatherhood, the elasticity of time,” and more.

NYT revisits Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution, from The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad by Brett Martin in a 10th-anniversary edition.

Gizmodo previews Rebecca Roanhorse’s final “Between Earth and Sky” book, Mirrored Heavens, due out next summer.

LitHub has a preview and cover reveal of R.O. Kwon’s forthcoming novel, Exhibit (Riverhead), due out in May. 

NYT distills the essential J.M. Coetzee.

WSJ has five books for career changers. 

ElectricLit shares seven novels about abortion and reproductive rights. 

BookRiot explores the “bookish life of Daniel Dae Kim.”

LA Times recommends 10 books as “replacement therapy” for popular TV shows on strike.

The Root suggests books by Black authors for October. 

Autostraddle shares “13 Books About Gay Mayhem and ‘Bad’ Queers To Read After Watching Bottoms.”

Authors On Air

Aparna Nancherla shares her thoughts on her new book, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome (Viking), with NPR’s Fresh Air.

AV Club dives into the new extended trailer for Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

Mariama Diallo, director of Hulu’s The Other Black Girl, based on the book by Zakiya Dalila Harris, talks about the secrets behind the first episode, at Ebony.

The Hunger Games, based on the book by Suzanne Collins, returns to select theaters in October. Tor reports.

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