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Award & Buzzy Book News

The 2021 Governor General’s Literary Awards finalists are announced.

The 2021 Richell Prize for Emerging Writers shortlist is announced.

Also announced, the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist.

Phoebe Robinson, Please Don't Sit On My Bed In Your Outside Clothes (Tiny Reparations: Random House; LJ starred review), will host the 2021 National Book Awards. Lit Hub has more.

Gary Paulsen, author of Hatchet (S. & S.), has died at the age of 82. NYT has more.

Pantheon and Schocken Books will separate from Alfred A. Knopf to operate as an independent imprint. Publishers Weekly has details. Also, Penguin Classics will publish “special editions” of Marvel Comics. 

Page to Screen

October 15:

The Last Duel, based on the book by Eric Jager. 20th Century Studios. Reviews | Trailer

Needle in a Timestack, based on the short story by Robert Silverberg. Lionsgate. Reviews | Trailer

Monster Family 2: Nobody is Perfect, based on the book Happy Family by David Safier. Viva Pictures. No reviews | Trailer

Held for Ransom, based on the book by Puk Damsgaard. Samuel Goldwyn Films. Reviews | Trailer

The Blazing World, based on prose by Margaret Cavendish. Vertical Entertainment. Reviews | Trailer

I Know What You Did Last Summer, based on the book by Lois Duncan. PrimeVideo. No reviews | Trailer

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, based on the book series by Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond. Prime Video. No reviews | Trailer

You, based on the book by Caroline Kepnes. Netflix. Reviews | Trailer

October 17:

Fear the Walking Dead, based on the comic book by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard. AMC. Reviews | Trailer

October 19:

After We Fell, based on the book by Anna Todd. Vertical Entertainment. VOD. Reviews | Trailer

Games People Play, based on the book Games Divas Play by Angela Burt-Murray. BET. No reviews | Trailer

In for a Murder (W jak morderstwo), based on the book by Katarzyna Gacek. Netflix. No reviews | No trailer

October 21: 

Komi Can’t Communicate, based on the manga series by Tomohito Oda. Netflix. No reviews | Trailer

Reviews

The Washington Post reviews 1979 by Val McDermid (Atlantic: Ingram): ““1979” is as much a female bildungsroman as it is a suspense story — and that’s not meant to be a backhanded compliment. McDermid vividly summons up that young adult state of confusion (that many of her longtime female readers may recall) when brazenness alternates with bewilderment; when you insist that the world see you and simultaneously tell you who you are.”

NYT reviews Life Sciences by Joy Sorman (Restless: Ingram): “Joy Sorman’s “Life Sciences” takes an overtly political premise — the medical establishment’s inability or perhaps refusal to take seriously the physical struggles of women — and transforms it into a surreal and knife-deep work of fiction that asks: What pain can we abide, and what pain must we fight back against, even if the fight hurts more than the disease itself?” Also, Look At Us by T. L. Toma (Bellevue: Consortium): “The novel gestures at social satire but never really cracks a smile, falling into an uneasy spot between arch realism and allegory that may occasionally leave readers wondering whether a stereotype is being critiqued or simply reinforced.”

NPR reviews When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky by Margaret Verble (Mariner: HarperCollins): “When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky isn't without its flaws, but it's a compelling novel from an author who writes with sensitivity and compassion. For readers with an interest in 20th-century American history, it's certainly a ride worth taking.”

The Los Angeles Times reviews Oscar Wilde: A Life by Matthew Sturgis (Knopf): “While Sturgis doesn’t approach his subject with Ellmann’s critical intensity, he includes much new material, especially recovered testimonies from Wilde’s reputation-ending trials in 1895. The first two-thirds is as bright and entertaining as an evening with its subject; the final third describes one of the saddest stories ever told.”

Book Marks lists “The Best Reviewed Books of the Week.”

Briefly Noted

Doma Mahmoud, author of Cairo Circles (Unnamed Press: Ingram), talks to Electric Lit about “Egyptian millennials navigating a social hierarchy in the country’s changing society.” Datebook chats with Fritjof Capra, Patterns of Connection (High Road), about charting “50 years of science and philosophy.”

Katie Couric explains how she “lost a lot of sleep” over an interview with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2016 in her memoir Going There (Little, Brown, & Co.). People has the story with added commentary to this story by The Los Angeles Times. NYT features Couric’s memoir in Book of the Times, which “includes family skeletons, busting into the Boy’s Club and more.”

The Root Presents: It’s Lit! has a conversation with Keith Boykin, Race Against Time: The Politics of a Darkening America (Bold Type: Hachette), exploring “the race-based fear fueling our nation’s cold civil war.”

The Millions features excerpts from The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book by Gord Hill (Arsenal Pulp: Ingram).

Fox News Books announces a partnership with HarperCollins to publish six new books, starting with All American Christmas by Sean Duffy and Rachel Campos-Duffy. 

Entertainment Weekly has a first look for Ryan La Sala’s newest book The Honeys (Scholastic) that explores “the horrors of everyday life.”

Tor.com lists “Five Dark Historical Gothics to Savor This Fall.”

CrimeReads provides “Six Books About Crime and Colonialism at the U.S.-Mexico Border.”

Lit Hub gives “5 Books You May Have Missed in September.”

Book Riot has “15 of the Best Nonfiction Books in 2021.”

NYT shares “10 New Books We Recommend This Week.”

Authors on Air

Jocelyn Nicole speaks to NPR’s Code Switch podcast about “home, identity” and her book My Monticello (Henry Holt: Macmillan).

NPR’s Book of the Day highlights There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill (Mariner) as “less about Trump than it is about us.”

Terry Gross speaks to Greg Miller, author of The Apprentice: Trump, Russia And The Subversion Of American Democracy (Custom House: HarperCollins), about how “the ‘Pandora Papers’ expose the secret financial dealings of the global elite.”

Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads (Farrar; LJ starred review), chats with the Open Source podcast about “reckoning with the limits and purposes of writing novels.”

Amanda Gorman will appear on the Tamron Hall show tonight.

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