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Buzzy Books & News

Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan’s Lessons, his “most epic book to date,” will publish in September with a simultaneous release in the UK, the U.S., and Canada. The Guardian has the story. Jonathan Cape will publish in the UK while Knopf will publish in the U.S. and Canada. The Bookseller has details. 

NYT explores the skeptical scholarly response to the headline-grabbing new book The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation, by Rosemary Sullivan (Harper). The Guardian also covers the story.

Key findings of the NPD Book Scan’s Annual Recap indicates print book sales by volume in the United States were the highest ever recorded by NPD. Publishing Perspectives has details and trends for 2022. 

Reviews

The Washington Post reviews Last Resort by Andrew Lipstein (FSG): “This is Lipstein’s first novel, but he has somehow already acquired a bitterly accurate understanding of the tiny arena in which reviews, blurbs, book signings, Goodreads comments and puffy author profiles can coalesce to make a writer rich—or notorious.” The LA Times also reviews: “Come for the idea, stay for the plot, try to ignore the characters, savor that conclusion. And pray that, in the future, Lipstein finds a way to populate his spellbinding stories with characters who can live off the page.” The NYT also weighs in: “The coexistence of The Plot and Last Resort could be a random incident—the way that Armageddon and Deep Impact both popped up in the summer of 1998—or it could mark the advent of a whole genre that allegorizes the professional writer’s suspicion that he might be a scammer.”

NYT reviews Devil House by John Darnielle (MCD): “The thing about Darnielle’s writing, in all its forms, is this: If you’re that dorky outcast kid drawing a pentagram on the back page of your three-ring binder in algebra class, not because you want to drink anyone’s blood but because you think it’s cool, he sees you.” And, All Day Is a Long Time by David Sanchez (Harper): “This exceptional debut is not a cautionary tale about the perils of drugs, but it certainly is the story of so many people right now, and it somehow leaves us with hope. What’s more, the rare if dark gems found along its ocean floors, all sharp and brittle and made of base desire, let us glean a part of what’s at the heart of addiction itself.” And, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School by Kendra James (Grand Central): “The work of Admissions is laying down, with wit and care, the burden James assumed at 15, that she—or any Black student, or all Black students—would manage the failures of a racially illiterate community.” And, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu (Riverhead; LJ starred review): “Languages, as this book makes clear, convey worlds. The world of Chinese script, painted so vividly by Tsu, is one I’m now grateful to have glimpsed.”  Also, The Transcendentalists and Their World by Robert A. Gross (Farrar; LJ starred review): “One learns a great deal in this book—about religious history, the railroad’s influence on smaller-town living, changing theories of education, tensions between individualism and collectivism that still bedevil the country today.” Plus, paired reviews of How Civil Wars Start: And How To Stop Them by Barbara F. Walter (Crown) and The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future by Stephen Marche (Avid Reader: S. & S.): “Both books provide a sobering vision of where we may be headed, and for that reason they should be required reading for anyone invested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government.” And, Campaign of the Century: Kennedy, Nixon, and the Election of 1960 by Irwin F. Gellman (Yale Univ. Pr.): “But six decades hence—in the absence of new evidence, at a time when false claims of a stolen election pose a mounting threat to our system of self-government—historians ought to think twice before endorsing them.” Finally, The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language by Rosemary Salomone (Oxford Univ. Pr.): “It is a panoramic, endlessly fascinating and eye-opening book, with an arresting fact on nearly every page.”

Briefly Noted

LA Times interviews Jonathan M. Katz about his new book, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire (St. Martin’s), Smedley Butler, and “the power of individuals to change history and the good and bad of ‘who we are.’”

Valerie Bertinelli, Enough Already (HarperCollins), talks with Shondaland about “her long journey to self-love.”

ElectricLit speaks with Weike Wang about Joan Is Okay (Random), “gendered double standards in the sciences and in the humanities, misconceptions around the model minority myth, and the drive to feel useful.”

Refinery29 has an interview with Jessamine Chan about her novel, The School for Good Mothers (S. & S.; LJ starred review), and who gets to decide what is good motherhood. 

The Minnesota Star Tribune has a feature and interview with Sequoia Nagamatsu about his buzzy new novel, How High We Go in the Dark (Morrow; LJ starred review).

LJ has a Q&A with award-winning author Alma Katsu.  

FoxNews talks with Dave Ramsey about his latest book, Baby Steps Millionaires: How Ordinary People Built Extraordinary Wealth—and How You Can Too (Ramsey Pr.), getting out of debt, and building wealth. 

The Rumpus talks with Gwen E. Kirby, Shit Cassandra Saw (Penguin Pr.), about stubbornness, Anne Shirley, and “delicious, delicious anger.” Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch (Doubleday; LJ starred review), recommends Kirby’s book at ElectricLit.  

The Millions speaks with Jung Yun, author of O Beautiful (St. Martin’s; LJ starred review), about the themes in her writing, reading, and next projects.

Entertainment Weekly offers a first-look at David Sedaris’s forthcoming essay collection, Happy-Go-Lucky (Little, Brown), due out May 31st.

Tor has an excerpt from Bright Ruined Things by Samantha Cohoe (Wednesday Books: Macmillan), due out February 15th.

LitHub explains “that ‘book exchange’ making the rounds on Instagram.”

CrimeReads suggests YA crossover titles that crime readers will love. 

Buzzfeed recommends 23 Sci Fi/Fantasy books.

BookRiot offers a reading pathway for fans of Kate Zambreno. 

Influential fashion journalist André Leon Talley dies at 73. NPR has an obituary.

“Paul Carter Harrison, Trailblazing Playwright and Scholar, Passes Away at 85.” Ebony has an obituary.

“Ali Mitgutsch, Revered German Children’s Illustrator, Dies at 86.” NYT has an obituary.

“Iraj Pezeshkzad, celebrated Iranian satirist and author of My Uncle Napoleon, dies.” The Washington Post has an obituary.

Authors On Air

NPR’s Fresh Air talks with Brian Cox about his memoir, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat (Grand Central), career, and Succession character.

NPR’s Morning Edition talks with Marc Eliot about his new biography, The Hag: The Life, Times, and Music of Merle Haggard (Hachette).

NPR’s Book of the Day features discussion with author Sasha Issenberg about The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle over Same-Sex Marriage (Pantheon).

A stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-seller The Kite Runner (Riverhead) will make its Broadway debut in July. Entertainment Weekly has the story. NYT also has coverage. 

Don Cheadle will produce an HBO Max series adaptation of Shane White’s Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street’s First Black Millionaire (Picador). Ebony reports. 

Lindsey Vonn, Rise (Dey Street), visits Tamron Hall tomorrow. 

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