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News, Awards & Buzzy Books

The September Loanstars list is out, featuring #1 pick: Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Dr. Kit Heyam (Seal Press). Other recommendations include The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell (Knopf), A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt (Norton), Something in the Heir by Suzanne Enoch (St. Martin's Griffin), and more. 

The 2022 Varuna & Scribe Fellowship recipients are announced.

USA Today compiles the juicy parts of this year’s tell-all memoirs.

The Washington Post has a snapshot of its paperback bestsellers. 

NYT highlights new thrillers, and notable new books publishing this week.

CrimeReads shares August’s best psychological thrillers.

Publishers Weekly recaps coverage from the PRH/DOJ trial. 

Reviews

LA Times reviews The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings (Amistad: HarperCollins): “If this all feels like raw material for a binge-worthy television show, it is not because this novel needs adapting but because it feels flexible, transcending familiar forms. And yet it succeeds exquisitely as what it is.” NYT also reviews: “It can be tempting to read The Women Could Fly, which comes in the shadow of the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and call the book timely. But the relationship at the heart of this novel — between Jo and her mercurial mother — is much closer to timeless.”

NYT reviews Retail Gangster: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie by Gary Weiss (Hachette): “Subcutaneously, Retail Gangster is a tender requiem for a time, pre-streaming, when people tended to be tuned into the same things: movies in theaters, programs on television, Casey Kasem’s ‘American Top 40’.” And, Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure by Rinker Buck (Avid Reader Pr./ S. & S.): “His heightened perch is the perfect vantage both for admiring the landscape of conservation forest punctuated by Rust Belt blight, and for contemplating the economic winds that have lately roiled our politics.” Also, Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe by David Maraniss (S. & S.): “Given the precision with which Maraniss measures the almost unbearable weight of the odds against Thorpe, the reader begins to question if the qualifiers were actually unnecessary, and if Thorpe isn’t simply the greatest athlete — full stop.”

NPR has paired reviews of The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party by Dana Milbank (Doubleday), and Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s by Nicole Hemmer (Basic Books).

Entertainment Weekly reviews Heat 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner (Morrow; LJ starred review): “Mann's long relationship with his central protagonists, and fondness for research, are evident on almost every page of this propulsive universe-expansion.” The Washington Post also reviews: “That Heat is plotted as tightly as a Swiss watch makes the shapelessness of this follow-up all the harder to forgive.”

The Washington Post reviews Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes (Knopf): “It isn’t so much a story as a late-night hagiography drunk on distilled irony. Indeed, the only motion through most of these pages is generated by Barnes aggressively winking at us.”

USA Today lists the best books of 2022 that got 3.5 and 4-star reviews.

Briefly Noted

LibraryReads and LJ offer read-likes for The Family Remains, by Lisa Jewell (Atria), the top holds title of the week.

LJ’s Barbara Hoffert has new Prepub alerts for Contemporary Fiction, Art & Fashion, Historical Fiction, and SF/Fantasy/Fairy Tales.

Poets & Writers has a Q&A with Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly (Amistad: HarperCollins). 

ElectricLit interviews Belinda Huijuan Tang  about her book, A Map for the Missing (Penguin Pr.), and "the impermanence and unreliability of memory." 

Shondaland talks with Iman Hariri-Kia about her anticipated debut, A Hundred Other Girls (Sourcebooks Landmark), about "representation, burnout, and more." Plus, a discussion with "author to watch" Tess Gunty about her debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch (Knopf; LJ starred review).

Elle talks with Nona Willis Aronowitz about her new book, Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution (Plume; LJ starred review), and the “radical nature of seeking sexual happiness in a post-Roe v. Wade world.”

People shares details from the forthcoming book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 by Peter Baker, and Susan Glasser (Doubleday), including an scathing, unsent resignation letter from Gen. Mark Milley.

The Atlantic highlights 8 books featuring difficult childhoods. 

ElectricLit suggests "8 Books About Fraught Mother-Daughter Relationships."

Vulture has a feature on Heat 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner (Morrow; LJ starred review). Meg Gardiner writes about her experience writing with Mann for CrimeReads.

NYT shares an excerpt from Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green (Farrar).

"Snowman author Raymond Briggs dies aged 88.” The Guardian has an obituary, as does NYT. 

Authors On Air

NPR’s Fresh Air speaks with Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank about her new book, The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party (Doubleday).

Jennette McCurdy talks with Good Morning America about her new memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (S. & S.), and how it helped her heal.

PBS Canvas has an interview with Mohsin Hamid about the inspiration behind his new book, The Last White Man (Riverhead; LJ starred review).

Sports biography, 4th and Goal: One Man's Quest to Recapture His Dream by Monte Burke (Grand Central), will get a feature adaptation. Deadline reports.

PopSugar previews Amazon's forthcoming Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which premieres September 2nd.

The Golden Globes show is set to return in 2023. THR reports.

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