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Awards & Summer Reading

Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin (Catapult; an LJ Best Book) wins the Dylan Thomas Prize; The Guardian has coverage.

Carys Davies’s Clear (Scribner) wins the Ondaatje Prize, The Guardian reports.

Paul Reitter wins the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his translation of Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 by Karl Marx (Princeton Univ.; LJ starred review).

The Atlantic publishes its 2025 summer reading guide.

Page to Screen

May 16

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, inspired by the work of Jane Austen. Sony Pictures Classics. Reviews | Trailer

The Old Woman with the Knife, based on the novel by Gu Byeong-mo. Well Go USA. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

NYT reviews Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee (Scribner): “There are a few Chinese misspellings and miscues—the surname Wang is not, in fact, pronounced quite as ‘Wong.’ And it would have been nice to have gotten more perspectives of Chinese people. But these are quibbles with an otherwise persuasive exposé of the trillion-dollar company’s uncomfortably close relationship with the global power”; and Who Knew by Barry Diller (S. & S.): “Detail and discretion (or maybe the limits of memory) do a funny kind of battle in Who Knew. It’s a tell-some, garnished with a few management bromides like ‘never compromise’ and ‘if you like the idea, get on with it.’”

Washington Post reviews Mark Twain by Ron Chernow (Penguin Pr.; LJ starred review): “For all its length and detail, Chernow’s book is deeply absorbing throughout and likely to succeed the excellent earlier lives by Justin Kaplan and Ron Powers as the standard biography”; and Speak to Me of Home by Jeanine Cummins (Holt): “Especially in this anti-immigrant era, the empathy with which Cummins envisions her characters is a poignant reminder that it is actual human beings who approach our borders, each with a singular story to tell.”

LA Times reviews Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies by Bruce Handy (Avid Reader/S. & S.; LJ starred review): “Tracing the genre from the days of Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy, the aw-shucks, girl-crazy hero of an enormously popular movie series that started in 1937, to the dystopian adventures of Katniss Everdeen in the ‘Hunger Games’ franchise, Handy (class of 1976) looks at the juvenile delinquents and the beach kids, the nerds and the mean girls.”

LitHub gathers the best-reviewed books of the week.

Briefly Noted

This week’s issue of Time features a cover profile of Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of Atmosphere: A Love Story (Ballantine; LJ starred review).

Tessa Hulls, whose graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts (MCD; an LJ Best Book) just won a Pulitzer Prize, says that will be her last book, Kirkus reports.

LitHub has a conversation about self-translation with Andreas Roman, author and translator of The Greatest Game of All (Flare), and Hannes Barnard, author and translator of Halley’s Comet (Catalyst).

NYT has “6 New Books We Recommend This Week.”

Publishers Weekly selects “7 Books About Music for a New Nostalgic Generation.”

CrimeReads identifies “The Best Campy and Humorous Thriller Series,” “7 Novels Built On The Weight of a Shared Secret,” and the best psychological thrillers of May 2025.

Reactor gathers five novels about time travel and bureaucracy.

Authors on Air

Today, Michael Symon, coauthor of Symon’s Dinners Cooking Out: 100 Recipes That Redefine Outdoor Cooking (Clarkson Potter), visits the Today Show, as does Bonnie Hammer, author of 15 Lies Women Are Told at Work:…And the Truth We Need To Succeed (Simon Element).

There’s a new episode of The LitHub Podcast, featuring discussion of Abrams’s unionization drive and the 100th anniversary of Mrs. Dalloway.

Netflix is adapting S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron; an LJ Best Book) as a series, Kirkus reports.

Film studio Somesuch joins the ranks of A24 and Mubi in launching its own book imprint, Publishers Weekly reports.

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