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Book Clubs & Buzzy Books

Happiness Falls by Angie Kim (Hogarth) is the new GMA Book Club pick for September. LA Times interviews Kim about her inspiration behind the novel

The 2023 Dream Foundry Contest winners are announced. Locus has details.

AARP shares its “Big Fall 2023 Book Preview.”

CBC shares “46 works of Canadian nonfiction to read in fall 2023.”

Parade previews fall’s must-read celebrity book releases. 

NYT previews “16 Books to Read in September.”

Reviews

NYT reviews The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton (Pantheon): “This is a book about the tiniest of things—the position of an electron, an instant of change. It is also about the biggest of things—the cosmos, infinity, the possibility of free will.”

Washington Post reviews Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter (Ecco): “This slender volume, which comes in at just under 200 pages, keeps cozy, heart-wrenching company with the philosophical fiction of Emily St. John Mandel and the rigorous, fantastical imagination of Ted Chiang”; Up Home: One Girl’s Journey by Ruth J. Simmons (Random): “In writing a memoir with such an acute focus on the life she left behind, Simmons provides an instructive guide for those who straddle this line between a difficult past and an exultant present”; Landlines: The Remarkable Story of a Thousand-Mile Journey by Raynor Winn (Pegasus): “Landlines is both an inspiring testament to fortitude and a plea to save a burning planet”; and Live To See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty by Nikhil Goyal (Metropolitan: Holt): “Goyal deftly keeps the reader aware that, for most of the book, Ryan, Corem and Giancarlos are children. And while data and deep academic research serve as the book’s bones, these children’s stories are the meat.”

The Guardian reviews Normal Rules Don’t Apply: Stories by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday): “The stories here are linked and layered in ways that range from the illuminating to the compulsive.”

Briefly Noted

LibraryReads and Library Journal offer read-alikes for The Breakaway by Jennifer Weiner (Atria), the top holds title of the week.

Shamara Ray discusses her new novel, The Referral Program (Strebor Bks.), with Shondaland. Jesse Q. Sutanto, author of I’m Not Done with You Yet (Berkley), talks about “internalized misogyny, the process of coming up with a title, and more.”

FoxNews shares details from Patty Lin’s new book, End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood (Zibby).

ElectricLit talks with translators Eric Abrahamsen and Jeremy Tiang about Xu Zechen’s new collection, Beijing Sprawl (Two Lines Pr.). 

Esquire has a feature profile of author Chuck Palahniuk. Also, Esquire explores the “long tale (tail?)” of dogs in fiction. 

HipLatina talks with Dani Trujillo about her self-published Lizards Hold the Sun (Sin Verguenzas), which “centers Indigenous Mexican romance.”

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare (Bloomsbury), answers 10 questions at Poets&Writers. 

USA Today charts “J.D. Netto’s Rise in the Fantasy Genre.”

Entertainment Weekly shares 5 facts from Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s by Sean Howe (Hachette).

The Takeout highlights Company: The Radically Casual Art of Cooking For Others by Amy Thielen (Norton), and shares a recipe from the book.

BookRiot highlights new releases for the week and suggests 9 historical romances.

LitHub pairs “10 Books for Taylor Swift’s 10 Eras.”

NYT reports on a Georgia school district’s controversial cancellation of an author event. 

Ibram X. Kendi celebrates cancer-free milestone. LA Times has coverage.

Authors on Air

NPR’s All Things Considered chats with Jennifer Weiner about her new book, The Breakaway (Atria). 

NPR’s Morning Edition talks with Ifeoma Ajunwa, author of The Quantified Worker (Cambridge Univ. Pr.), and how U.S. employers use AI to reduce workforce.

Author Brandon Taylor appears on Into It: A Vulture Podcast with Sam Sanders, and discusses a return to gatekeeping in book criticism.

Amazon and Netflix are reportedly duking it out for rights to Crime 101, based on a novella by Don Winslow. Deadline has the story.

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