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Best Books & Looking Forward

NPR staff and critics share a curated list of highly-rated books from 2022.

NYT recommends “10 Best Books of 2022” and 8 new books for December.

CrimeReads provides “8 New Novels You Should Read in December” and “The Best International Crime Fiction of November and December.”

Lit Hub lists “free virtual literary events” for December.

Locus Magazine reports on the HarperCollins strike.

New Title Bestsellers

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

Fiction

The Choice: The Dragon Heart Legacy, Book 3, by Nora Roberts (St. Martin’s), flies to No. 1 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list and No. 2 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

A Christmas Memory, by Richard Paul Evans (Gallery), begins at No. 5 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list. 

The Whittiers, by Danielle Steel (Delacorte), gathers No. 7 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list and No. 10 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Nonfiction

The Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee Book, by Jerry Seinfeld (S. & S.), roars to No. 6 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list.

USA Today looks at the week’s best-seller list.

Reviews

NYT reviews No One Left To Come Looking for You by Sam Lipsyte (S. & S.): “Tells one small story and tells it well. But it’s also very smart and very funny, a slangy, brainy, expletive-laden, occasionally touching pleasure to read from the first page to the last.”

The Washington Post reviews A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré, edited by Tim Cornwell (Viking): “It’s glimpses of the master novelist most readers will be eager for, and they’ll find them in his letters to family and avid readers.”

Locus Magazine reviews The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit): “It’s the scenes of diverse everyday New Yorkers—scrappy, outspoken, and sometime rude—that finally lend The World We Make the rich texture of a love letter to a complicated city and the resilient spirit of its residents.”

The Los Angeles Times reviews A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley (Knopf): “Achieves the goal of all worthy historical novels: opening a window to the past, forcing comparisons to the present, raising unsettling questions about how much has really changed.”

Tor.com reviews Desert Creatures by Kay Chronister (Erewhon): “A story of both creation and apocalypse, where characters struggle with both belief and heresy. Much as the novel itself has elements of both speculative fiction and horror.”

Bookforum reviews both of Cormac McCarthy’s books, The Passenger and Stella Maris (Knopf).

NPR critic Maureen Corrigan writes 10 short reviews of “disparate reads for a hectic 2022.”

Book Marks lists “5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week.”

Briefly Noted

Lucy Ives, author of Life Is Everywhere (Graywolf), considers “the weak novel” in a piece for The Baffler. 

NYT explores excerpts from A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré, edited by Tim Cornwell (Viking).

Prue Leith, Bliss on Toast: 75 Simple Recipes (Bloomsbury), answers NYT’s “By the Book” inquiries.

Lit Hub revisits the work of Jean Stafford.

NYT's Inside the Best-Seller List delves into Patti Smith’s newest photography book, A Book of Days (Random).

Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a proponent of book bans, will publish a memoir, The Courage To Be Free, through Broadside Books, according to Lit Hub. 

Tor.com shares “Five SF Works About Sitting Out World War III.”

Lit Hub's Book Recommendations for the Troubled Soul gives books for those “looking for closure after a ‘situationship.’”

Authors on Air

NPR Fresh Air’s Dave Davies interviews Maria Ressa, author of How To Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future (Harper), about her book as a “part-memoir, part-manual for journalism in authoritative states.”

Kevin Wilson’s short story “Grand Stand-In” has been acquired by Future Shack Entertainment to be adapted into a television series. Deadline has more.

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