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Awards, News & Fall Booklists

Khadija Abdalla Bajaber wins the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction for The House of Rust (Graywolf).

Publishers Weekly releases its best books of 2022 list. 

Seattle Times shares five spooky books for Halloween.

Tordotcom highlights “Five Chilling Horror Novellas to Read This Fall.”

ElectricLit has “7 Books About Being Stuck in Purgatory.”

BookRiot features 20 Halloween nonfiction books, and 25 horror anthologies and collections. Plus, the best books of 2022, according to Barnes & Noble booksellers.

PEN America releases “Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing.”  Publishers Lunch has coverage. 

Actor and author of How Y’all Doing?: Misadventures and Mischief from a Life Well Lived (Morrow) Leslie B. Jordan has died at the age of 67. PBS News Hour remembers his life and career.

Reviews

NYT reviews The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits’ Improbable Crusade To Save the World from Cybercrime by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden (Farrar): “Dudley and Golden do a brilliant job of tracing the back-and-forth between attackers and defenders, like the little taunts the criminals embed in their programs after earlier versions are thwarted.”

The Washington Post reviews Inciting Joy: Essays by Ross Gay (Algonquin): “Get yourself a copy of Inciting Joy, then gift yourself the great pleasure of giving it away. The deepest joys are those we share.” And The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner): “Despite its omission of important current disputes in biology, which have roots in earlier centuries, The Song of the Cell is a lively, personal, detailed, often moving account of the cell in medical history and its promise in the present.”

LA Times reviews The White Mosque: A Memoir by Sofia Samatar (Catapult; LJ starred review): “Tracing the crossed paths of Mohammed and Menno always takes her back to herself, and one of her final chapters is a breakneck autobiography in third person, an impressionistic tour de force. Ultimately, her voice joins others crying in the wilderness, speaking for all the “outcast, detained, deported, neglected, killed.” And Ted Kennedy: A Life by John A. Farrell (Penguin Pr.): “Farrell's book is also a character study of the ways the personal and the political can overlap and conflict. Kennedy may have withstood a series of scandals, but they also undermined his effectiveness as an advocate for liberal causes.” Plus, The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop by Jonathan Abrams (Crown): “Abrams doesn’t just talk to the architects. He also gets input from the stonemasons, the contractors and the other heavy lifters. It’s the oral history hip-hop deserves as its beat goes on.”

NPR reviews The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf): “The Passenger flirts with not being a traditional novel and succeeds. Stella Maris doesn't care about not being a novel, and it shines because of it.” And The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves by Alexandra Horowitz (Viking): “Horowitz’s writing is as simultaneously buoyant and precise as Quid’s zest for catching tennis balls—over, and over, and over again. Her chapters, packed with close observations about canine cognition and behavior, are mini-mood lifters.”

OprahDaily reviews Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus by David Quammen (S. & S.): “Breathless, then, is an invaluable, vibrant contribution to that literature, arguably the single most comprehensive account of the disease and the clinicians who have labored long and hard to divine its mysteries.”

Briefly Noted

Entertainment Weekly talks to Phil Rosenthal about Somebody Feed Phil, the Book: Untold Stories, Behind-the-Scenes Photos and Favorite Recipes, written with Jenn Garbee (Simon Element; LJ starred review),over a three-course meal.

Shondaland talks with Kevin Nealon, I Exaggerate: My Brushes with Fame (Harry N. Abrams), about “creating caricature art, his friendship with Chris Farley, and turning his hobby into a career.”

The Rumpus interviews Ross Gay about his new book, Inciting Joy: Essays (Algonquin), and how poetry informs his approach to essays.

Lee Child and Andrew Child, No Plan B: A Jack Reacher Novel (Delacorte), discuss writing routine, discipline, and writing advice, at CrimeReads.

The Orwell Project will serialize the work of George Orwell on Substack. The Guardian reports.

Gizmodo explores “plus-sized representation in fantasy books.”

The Washington Post highlights nine book to screen adaptations.

Vulture recommends seven audiobooks for the month.

LitHub shares 16 new releases.

Authors On Air

NPR’s All Things Considered talks with Colleen Hoover, author of It Starts with Us (Atria), and other industry professionals about the author’s mass appeal.

NPR’s Fresh Air speaks with chef Sean Sherman, author of The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen (Univ. of Minnesota Pr.), about Native American indigenous foods and correcting the narrative of Thanksgiving.

NPR’s Morning Edition chats with Jeff Pearlman about his book The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson (Mariner; LJ starred review).

Kelly Ripa, author of Live Wire: Long-Winded Short Stories (Dey Street), visits The Talk today. 

Ralph Macchio, author of Waxing On: The Karate Kid and Me (Dutton), will be on The Daily Show tonight. 

George R. R. Martin will be on with Stephen Colbert.  

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