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Awards & News

Kimberly Unger wins the 2023 Philip K. Dick Award for The Extractionist (Tachyon). Locus has details. 

Susan L. Shirk wins the Lionel Gelber Prize, for the book, Overreach (Oxford Univ. Pr.).

Alex Jennings wins Compton Crook Award for The Ballad of Perilous Graves (Redhook). 

Erica L. Satifka wins Endeavor Award for How to Get to Apocalypse (Fairwood Press). 

The British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards have been announced.

The Benjamin Franklin Awards finalists for 2023 are announced. 

The Rumpus celebrates National Poetry Month with new featured poems daily.

Esquire investigates how Barack Obama picks his reading lists.

BookRiot rounds up book club picks for April. Publishers Weekly also highlights this month's discussion picks. 

USA Today updates its list of banned books news.

Reviews

NYT reviews The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph (Henry Holt, & Co.): “thanks to Joseph, Sancho — in whatever rhetorical mode, at whatever age, amid whatever horrors or triumphs — is always a brimming, companionable narrator of his own story.”; Enough: Scenes from Childhood by Stephen Hough (Faber & Faber): “Hough’s writing is deeply sensual, ‘because I had such a lack of it in my childhood,’ he said.”; Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature by Sarah Hart (Flatiron): “Most novels aren’t built on a mathematical chassis, but Hart rolls out a surprisingly vast array of writers who had a taste for the discipline, and who depict math or mathematicians in their books.”; A Madman's Will: John Randolph, Four Hundred Slaves, and the Mirage of Freedom by Gregory May (Liveright): “May approaches the question of Randolph’s madness not with a modern clinical diagnosis, which he deems impossible, but from the perspective of how insanity was understood both legally and medically in the period.”; Life and Other Love Songs by Anissa Gray (Berkley): “Life and Other Love Songs is a precisely observed, often beautiful book about family, love, loss and the hidden history that shapes lives.”; The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689 by Jonathan Healey (Knopf): “This readable and informative overview evokes a lost world which, for better or worse, ‘was blazing a path toward our own’.”; Minor Notes, Volume 1: Poems by a Slave; Visions of the Dusk; and Bronze: A Book of Verse by George Moses Horton, Fenton Johnson, et. al. (Penguin Classics): “Minor Notes gives each more room, and the presentation is informal. You feel you’re meeting them on a human level. The book is slim and portable, as the best poetry books are…”

The Washington Post reviews True West: Sam Shepard's Life, Work, and Times by Robert Greenfield (Crown): “the man remains essentially inscrutable, as if we are cross-examining him from the distance of a drone — we learn where and when he went, but we have no idea why. And that is probably the way Sam Shepard would have liked it.”; Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell (Penguin Pr.): “Humanly Possible is a terrific invitation to argument, to conversation, to all the fun people make together, on their own.”

NPR reviews A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung (Ecco): “A Living Remedy is a powerful testament to the failures of our health-care system and to the limits of what most of us can do for those we love.”

LA Times reviews LeBron by Jeff Benedict (Avid Reader Press:S.& S.): “LeBron isn’t just great sportswriting, it’s also vivid narrative journalism.”

Briefly Noted

Jeannette Walls discusses her new novel, Hang the Moon (Scribner), and Prohibition-era Virginia, with Shondaland. Also, Anissa Gray “explores how to overcome generational trauma, in her new book, Life and Other Love Songs (Berkley). Anthony Chin-Quee reflects on why he had to quit medicine in I Can’t Save You: A Memoir (Riverhead). Plus, Maggie Smith talks about the inspiration behind her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Atria: One Signal; LJ starred review).

ElectricLit talks with National Book Award finalist Alejandro Varela about his book The People Who Report More Stress: Stories (Astra House), and “fallacy of American social mobility.”

LitHub shares 25 new books for the week. 

BookRiot highlights new books arriving this week, North American indigenous historical fiction, and the top ten manga releases for April.  

Ebony recommends 10 books by Black authors for April. 

CrimeReads shares “7 crime novels that use ‘different ages as a kind of framing device’.”

The Star Tribune recommends 5 great books.

ElectricLit has “7 short story collections set in American cities.”

The Chicago Tribune’s Biblioracle explores books with dark humor and gives recommendations.

LitHub has a preview and cover reveal of You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue, trans. by Natasha Wimmer (Riverhead), due out in January 2024. 

“Al Jaffee, Mad magazine's longest-running contributor, dies at 102.” Entertainment Weekly has more on his life. USA Today remembers Jaffee and others lost this year.

Authors On Air

Gillian Flynn discusses her new imprint and the new book she is working on, with Today.

Charles Frazier talks about his new book, The Trackers (Ecco), on B&N’s Poured Over podcast. 

GMA shared “5 things we learned about 'Star Wars' shows at Star Wars Celebration 2023.”

Oprah hosted an in-person discussion of Hello Beautiful (Dial) with the author Ann Napolitano and four book club members. The conversation will air on OprahDaily, Saturday, April 15, at 11 a.m. ET.

Mindy Kaling and Oprah’s Harpo Films will adapt Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto (Berkley), for television. Deadline reports.

Gallery Books: S. & S. wins a bidding war for North American publishing rights to a forthcoming memoir by Scott Andrews, "a twist-filled true story rooted in intrigue surrounding a U.S. Air Force program."  Deadline reports. 

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