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Awards, Book Clubs, & News

Rabih Alameddine wins PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction for The Wrong End of the Telescope (Grove; LJ starred review).USA Today has coverage.

Audiofile announces the April 2022 Earphones Award winners.

Waterstones launches £5,000 debut fiction prize, The Bookseller reports.

Reese Witherspoon picks True Biz by Sara Novic (Random), for her April book club.

Congress will hold a hearing on "Free Speech Under Attack: Book Bans and Academic Censorship" tomorrow, April 7, 2022  at 10:00am. Watch live here. Publishers Weekly also reports. 

A key finding from Nielsen's State of Play report indicates audiences are overwhelmed by too many streaming choices. The Hollywood Reporter has coverage.  

Two of Charles Darwin’s notebooks are returned to Cambridge University library, after being missing for 20 years. PBS NewsHour reports. 

Reviews

NYT reviews Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart (Grove; LJ starred review): “The novel is precise, primarily in rendering what is visible to the eye rather than in fine-grained interiority. Characters articulate almost everything they think and feel, and what they say is what they actually mean. Irony occurs in the gap between speech and reality, rather than the interstices of speech and thought.”  Also, It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art To Fight a Pandemic by Jack Lowery (Mariner: Houghton Harcourt; LJ starred review): “it’s an important contribution to the annals of AIDS, and, in hewing close to but fanning out from a narrow cast of characters, a sturdy template for chroniclers of complex sociopolitical movements.”

NPR reviews The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (Scribner; LJ starred review): “Mapping people in relation to each other is one of the central activities of characters in these novels — anthropologists, publicists, anxious high schoolers, or employees of social media companies all seem to be asking, What makes people matter to each other? And can you predict or control it, either for love or for profit?” NYT also reviews: “The challenge of a novel whose subject is, in one sense, everything is knowing what to leave out, a dilemma that The Candy House meta-acknowledges repeatedly.”

USA Today reviews Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li (Tiny Reparations Books), giving it 2.5 out of 4 stars: “Li has the perfect set-up – returning looted art to its proper home is a winning notion. But she’s picked such a dour team to execute her plan, and surrounded them with such unbelievable circumstances, that it’s hard to feel anything but disappointed.”

The Washington Post reviews M: Son of the Century by Antonio Scurati, trans. by Anne Milano Appel (Harper): “this relentless chronicle of authoritarianism emboldened and empowered offers a painful and valuable reminder that democracy is fragile, never to be taken for granted and always in need of committed defense. M may be more interesting to think about than it is to read, but it certainly gives us a lot to think about.” And, Let's Not Do That Again by Grant Ginder (Henry Holt & Co.): "a political comedy of manners that reads like the love child of Page Six and a long episode of Veep. I mean this in the best possible way. If you like your humor dark and take guilty pleasure in imagining the messy lives of others, you will enjoy Grant Ginder’s fifth novel."

Briefly Noted

LibraryReads and Library Journal offer read-alikes for Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf), the buzziest book of the week. The Millions has an interview with Mandel. 

NYT has a feature on Molly Shannon, whose new book, Hello, Molly! ,written with Sean Wilsey (Ecco), publishes next week. Time also highlights Shannon’s "charming" memoir.

LA Times talks with Stanford medical student and author, Grace D. Li about Portrait of a Thief (Tiny Reparations Books), a heist caper she wrote during the pandemic. 

People has an exclusive feature on Bachelorette stars Kaitlyn Bristowe and Jason Tartick, whose new book, The Restart Roadmap: Rewire and Reset Your Career (HarperCollins Leadership), publishes this week.

Physician and author Thomas Fisher talks to Oprah Daily about his new book, The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER (One World; LJ starred review), and being an “ED attending in a year of crisis.” OprahDaily also shares Ta-Nehisi Coates’s forward to the book. 

LA Times talks with Shawn Levy about the pioneering women comics in her new book, In On the Joke: The Original Queens of Standup Comedy (Doubleday).

Britney Spears confirms she is writing a memoir. LA Times reports. LitHub also offers craft advice from Spears and her ghostwriter. 

iCarly alum Jennette McCurdy previews her forthcoming memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (S. & S.), due out August 9th, at Entertainment Weekly.

USA Today highlights its critics’ best-reviewed books of 2022. 

NYT shares newly published books for the week. 

Tordotcom previews new fantasy books for April.

The Guardian has the “top 10 difficult marriages in fiction.”

"Alan J. Hruska, a founder of Soho Press, dies at 88."  NYT has an obituary.

Authors On Air

NPR’s Fresh Air talks with Ocean Vuong about his grief-inspired new poetry collection, Time Is a Mother (Penguin Pr.; LJ starred review). Plus, Vuong presents his “Brief But Spectacular Take” on grief and language for the PBS NewsHour.

MGM's adaptation of Ben Mezrich's The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees (Grand Central), gets a director. Deadline reports.

A Robert Downey Jr.-backed Sherlock Holmes universe is coming to HBO Max. The Hollywood Reporter has the story. 

Rick Bleiweiss's Pignon Scorbion & The Barbershop Detectives (Blackstone) is getting adapted for television. Deadline reports.

NBA Hall of Famer Chris Webber’s forthcoming memoir, By God’s Grace (Webber Publishing Group), due out November 15th, is being adapted for television. Deadline reports.  

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