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Awards & Book News

The shortlist is announced for the An Post Irish Book Awards. Irish Times has coverage.

No Country for Girls by Emma Styles (Sphere: Hachette) wins the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize.

Wanda Nanibush and Georgiana Uhlyarik win the Toronto Book Award for Moving the Museum: Indigenous + Canadian Art at the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario). CBC has coverage.

European publishing trade bodies call for action on generative AI, The Guardian says. LA Times reports on U.S. authors’ lawsuits against OpenAI. Vanity Fair goes “Inside the Legal Tussle Between Authors and AI.”

“Tension Over the Israel-Hamas War Casts a Pall Over Frankfurt Book Fair,” NYT reports. 

Page to Screen

October 20

Nyad, based on the autobiography Find a Way: The Inspiring Story of One Woman’s Pursuit of a Lifelong Dream by Diana Nyad. Netflix. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

NYT reviews Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner; LJ starred review): “While fiction writers do not owe us facts, it should be noted that Dahomey’s wealth was largely based in the slave trade, making this romantic tale of forbidden love feel a bit like sanitized history, an odd choice in a novel that purports to descend into the horrific depths of slavery”; and The Woman in Me (Gallery) by Britney Spears: “Details on the actual salient process of music-making, though, are scant”; Washington Post also reviews: “The harrowing details of Spears’s conservatorship…are well-known by now. But the details revealed in The Woman in Me disturb even more deeply as Spears illustrates the adolescent-surrounded-by-sinister-adults dynamic.” NYT reviews Romney: A Reckoning by McKay Coppins (Scribner): “In many ways a straightforward biography, but it has the intimacy of a small subgenre of political confessions”; Washington Post also reviews: “Romney’s prodigious and at times cloying self-awareness is very much on display in this book, which feels more like a ghostwritten autobiography than a biography of record”; as does LA Times: “The story of his career is an especially clear window onto the forces that over the last decade have transformed the GOP, once a business-friendly bastion of conservatism, into a cauldron of anger, fear-mongering and demagoguery that has no place for Republicans like Romney.”

Washington Post reviews MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards (Liveright: Norton; LJ starred review): “Overall, MCU contains little in the way of reckoning with what Marvel’s influence and ubiquity mean for film as an art form and much in the way of remarkably rigorous reporting”; and Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary J. Bass (Knopf): “Bass provides fascinating evidence confirming Hirohito’s culpability in the war, noting that if the emperor had been prosecuted, as some of the judges and many others wanted, a strong case could have been made against him.”

LA Times reviews Julia by Sandra Newman (Mariner): “Newman hasn’t proved herself a worthy successor to Orwell; she’s outclassed him, both in knowledge of human nature and in character development. Julia should be the new required text on those high-school curricula.”

NPR reviews Organs of Little Importance by Adrienne Chung (Penguin Bks.): “Borrowing its title from a Charles Darwin line, Organs is a panoramic exploration of the curious ephemera that fill our minds—the obsessions, memories and peccadilloes that never quite fade.”

Vulture reviews Tremor by Teju Cole (Random; LJ starred review): “This is a far weaker book than Open City, trading the dark complexities of character for po-faced lectures and moral self-regard.” The Guardian also reviews: “It has a hypnotic, transportive quality, an intellectual agility more akin to muscle memory than free association.”

LitHub rounds up the best-reviewed books of the week.

Briefly Noted

Knopf will publish Nobel Prize–winning author Gabriel García Márquez’s “lost” novel, Until August, in March 2024. It will be translated by Anne McLean. The Bookseller has the news.

Pod Save America hosts Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor will publish their first book, Democracy or Else: How To Save America in 10 Easy Steps, with their Zando imprint Crooked Media Reads in June 2024, Publishers Weekly reports.

HipLatina talks to journalist Paula Ramón about her book Motherland: A Memoir (Amazon Crossing), tr. by Jennifer Shyue and Julia Sanches.

With Ebony, Drumma Boy talks about his journey as a hit-making producer and now author of Behind the Hits (Wahida Clark Presents).

PBS Canvas interviews Werner Herzog about his new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir, tr. by Michael Hofmann (Penguin Pr.).

In Washington Post, critic Michael Dirda praises the value of the personal essay, in particular the works of Arthur Krystal, Phillip Lopate, and Mary Butts.

Natalie Haynes, Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth (Harper), answers The Guardian’s “The Books of My Life” questionnaire.

NYT lists “9 New Books We Recommend This Week” and seven new paperbacks to read this week.

The Atlantic recommends “Nine Books That Push Against the Status Quo.”

Electric Lit suggest “8 Short Story Collections About the Flipside of Living in a Postcard Destination.”

Tor.com lists “Five Books for Fans of Something Is Killing the Children.”

CrimeReads selects “8 cozy mysteries featuring BFFs and women supporting women” and “6 thrilling reads that blend folklore and horror.”

Shondaland rounds up “9 Fictional Books on Environmental Doom.”

Variety notes “10 Book-to-Screen Adaptations We’re Excited to See.”

Vincent Patrick, chronicler of hustlers and mobsters in The Pope of Greenwich Village and Family Business, dies at 88. NYT has an obituary.

Authors on Air

Today, NPR’s Fresh Air will host David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (Vintage).

Tomorrow, Good Morning America will have on Gabrielle Lyon, author of Forever Strong: A New, Science-Based Strategy for Aging Well (Atria).

Jeremy Eichler, author of Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (Knopf; LJ starred review), is interviewed on LitHub’s Just the Right Book podcast, while Justin Torres, author of Blackouts (Farrar), is interviewed on The Maris Review podcast, and Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, authors of American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 (Farrar), appear on the Keen On podcast.

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