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Awards & Book News

Katherine Hall Page and R.L. Stine have been named the 2024 Grand Masters by the Mystery Writers of America.

Belly Woman: Birth, Blood & Ebola—The Untold Story by Benjamin Black (Neem Tree) wins the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing, while books by Antony Loewenstein and Yeva Skalietska receive honorable mentions. The Bookseller reports.

The audiobook of Bleeding Heart Yard by Elly Griffiths wins the Listening Books Members’ Choice Award. The Bookseller has coverage. The UK edition released by Quercus is narrated by Candida Gubbins, while the U.S. edition from HarperAudio is narrated by Nina Wadia.

Sci-fi novelist Terry Bisson has died at age 81; Locus has an obituary.

New Title Best Sellers

Links for the week: NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers | NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers | USA Today Best-Selling Books

Fiction

First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston (Pamela Dorman Bks.) wins No. 5 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Upside Down by Danielle Steel (Delacorte) flips over No. 7 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Nonfiction

Female Force: Taylor Swift by Eric M. Esquivel (text) & Ramon Salas (illus.) (TidalWave Comics) sings at No. 8 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Reviews

Washington Post reviews Poor Deer by Claire Oshetsky (Ecco): “In Poor Deer we are in fairy-tale territory, but in that fraught space between the Disney version and the Grimm, and Margaret’s story attempts to reconcile the two—to put the terrors and unfairness of her little life into a bearable perspective, as fairy tales do.”

NPR reviews The Fetishist by Katherine Min (Putnam): “In many ways, Min’s novel feels of-the-moment, coming amid a push for more Asian American representation and after both the COVID-fueled surge of anti-Asian hate crimes and the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that forced a reckoning with the sexual stereotyping of Asian women. But Min actually finished The Fetishist a decade ago—five years before her death of breast cancer at age 60.”

The Guardian reviews How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology by Philip Ball (Univ. of Chicago): “There’s a wealth of well-researched information in here, some details that are a bit chewy for the lay reader, and I question the utility of black-and-white illustrations of proteins that are unrevealingly complex and thus unenlightening. But other than that, the book serves as an essential primer on our never-ending quest to understand life”; and Israelis and Palestinians: From the Cycle of Violence to the Conversation of Mankind by Jonathan Glover (Polity: Wiley): “Glover wrote the bulk of his study before the recent horrors, though it is published with a foreword addressing them. Not surprisingly, it is still deeply relevant.”

The Millions reviews Shimmering Details: A Memoir, Volumes I and II by Péter Nádas, tr. by Judith Sollosy (Farrar): “[A] massive, difficult memoir: two volumes aggregating nearly 1,100 pages of shifting narrative perspective, obscure digressions, political history, and crushing personal and familial loss.”

Briefly Noted

Rapper-actor Common, author of And Then We Rise: A Guide to Loving and Taking Care of Self (HarperOne), answers NYT’s “By the Book” questionnaire.

NYT’s “Inside the Best-Seller List” investigates the best-seller-list longevity of the 1971 self-help book How To Be Your Own Best Friend.

NYT interviews Álvaro Enrigue, author of You Dreamed of Empires (Riverhead; LJ starred review).

LA Times has a feature on Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California (MCD).

The Millions talks to poet Kaveh Akbar about Martyr! (Knopf), his soon-to-be-released debut novel.

Vulture speaks with novelist/memoirist Jami Attenberg about her new book of advice for writers, 1000 Words: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round (S. & S./Simon Element).

TikTok star Madeline Pendleton discusses her memoir, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt (Doubleday), with Kirkus.

James Grippando, author of Goodbye Girl (Harper), reflects on his three decades of writing Florida legal thrillers, in CrimeReads.

LitHub has a reading list of novels set in hotels and “Ten Great American Poems (and a Whole Book of Poetry) About Fire.”

CrimeReads recommends “mysteries set in and around the rainy wonderland that is the Pacific Northwest” and cozy mysteries that star reporters.

People shares comedian Paul Scheer’s announcement of his memoir, Joyful Recollections of Trauma, to be published in May by HarperOne.

Thanks to several successful streaming adaptations, “the future of Archie Comics has never been brighter,” Publishers Weekly writes.

HarperCollins UK’s LGBTQ+ network launches an Instagram account, @PrideatHC, The Bookseller reports.

Authors on Air

NPR’s Short Wave interviews Eve Herold, the author of Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to Our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots (St. Martin’s).

Novelist Lauren Groff discusses opening a Florida bookstore on LitHub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast.

The Hollywood Reporter has a feature on the Critics Choice Award–nominated Italian series The Good Mothers, which is based on the book by Alex Perry.

Kirkus reviews the new Netflix miniseries Boy Swallows Universe, based on the novel by Trent Dalton, an LJ Best Book of 2019.

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