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Awards & Book News

LeVar Burton to host National Book Awards, Locus reports.

Winners are announced for the Forward Prizes for Poetry.

LitHub reviews highs and lows from the New York Film Festival’s literary fare.

LitHub hosts a conversation between Masha Gessen and Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (Metropolitan: Holt; LJ starred review), about “the whole story of Israel and Palestine.”

New Title Best Sellers

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

Fiction

The Mysteries by Bill Watterson and John Kascht (Andrews McMeel) takes No. 3 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Sword Catcher by Cassandra Clare (Del Rey) catches No. 4 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Blood Lines by Nelson DeMille and Alex DeMille (Scribner) soaks up No. 5 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Becoming the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar (Gallery) becomes No. 14 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Nonfiction

Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger (Penguin Pr.) builds to No. 1 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

To Rescue the Constitution: George Washington and the Fragile American Experiment by Bret Baier, with Catherine Whitney (Mariner), grabs No. 4 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list.

Lucky Me: A Memoir of Changing the Odds by Rich Paul, written with Jesse Washington (Roc Lit 101), rolls to No. 7 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list and No. 9 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

The Way Forward by Yung Pueblo (Andrews McMeel) surges to No. 12 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards (Liveright: Norton; LJ starred review) flies to No. 13 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list.

Down the Drain by Julia Fox (S. & S.) circles No. 14 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list.

The Sound of the Future: The Coming Age of Voice Technology by Karl Weber and Tobias Dengel (PublicAffairs) rings at No. 14 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Reviews

Washington Post reviews Vengeance Is Mine by Marie NDiaye, tr. by Jordan Stump (Knopf): “In one light, it’s a scathing look at the simmering desperation provoked by France’s rigid structures of authority and power. But it’s also an uber-feminist rewriting of a plot…in which oppression, writ large, drives a woman to horrifying violence against the children in her care”; Naked: On Sex, Work, and Other Burlesques by Fancy Feast (Algonquin; LJ starred review): “Humor is harder to pull off on the page than pathos, but Feast is consistently funny while delivering the facts”; The Exchange by John Grisham (Doubleday): “The geographical leap in plot is part of the reason that The Exchange reads like a stand-alone. This time, the drama is not legal but financial”; How To Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks by Adam Nicolson (Farrar): “Despite the book’s New Agey title and a halfhearted conclusion, which attempts to reframe the preceding chapters as nuggets of lifestyle advice…, in truth Nicolson’s book has little to do with the self-help genre.”

NYT reviews Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country by Patricia Evangelista (Random): “Evangelista makes us feel the fear and grief that she felt as she chronicled what Duterte was doing to her country. But appealing to our emotions is only part of it; what makes this book so striking is that she wants us to think about what happened, too”; The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA by Liza Mundy (Crown): “With its emphasis on women-led reforms and incursions, The Sisterhood can breeze past some of the C.I.A.’s most alarming misdeeds—or, by implication, chalk them up to the relative absence of women”; Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the Marriage That Shook Europe by John Guy and Julia Fox (Harper): “It is also hard to believe there is scope for yet another doorstop biography of Anne of a thousand books, but Hunting the Falcon is a fierce, scholarly tour de force.”

NPR reviews The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (Bloomsbury): “I was struck by Tan’s audaciousness in manipulating Maugham’s stories in the interests of literature in much the same way that Maugham himself had fed his fiction by manipulating the stories people told him during his travels.”

LA Times reviews Wavewalker: A Memoir of Breaking Free by Suzanne Heywood (William Collins): “The book’s strength lies in the material more than in the prose, which is serviceable and clear, if occasionally awkward…. The narrative is too long, continuing past its natural ending with both an aftermath and an epilogue.”

LitHub identifies “5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week.”

Briefly Noted

Serena Williams signs a two-book deal with Random House, starting with an intimate memoir that does not yet have a release date, Hollywood Reporter says. The Guardian also has the news.

Erik Larson is writing a new book, The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War, to be published by Crown in April 2024, Kirkus reports.

EW shares an excerpt from The Paradise Problem by Christina Lauren, due out in May 2024 from Gallery.

People reveals the cover for Crystal Hefner’s memoir Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself (Grand Central) and for West Side Story star Russ Tamblyn’s memoir Dancing on the Edge: A Journey of Living, Loving, and Tumbling Through Hollywood (Blackstone).

LA Times reports that Nicole Avant, former U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas and wife of Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, is opening up about her mother’s murder in her new memoir, Think You’ll Be Happy: Moving Through Grief with Grit, Grace, and Gratitude (HarperOne).

Rapper Common will release a health and wellness book, And Then We Rise: A Guide to Loving and Taking Care of Self (HarperOne), in January 2024, People reports.

LA Times has a Q&A with novelist Estella González, author of Huizache Women (Arte Público Pr.).

NYT interviews novelist Marie NDiaye, author of Vengeance Is Mine, tr. by Jordan Stump (Knopf).

Washington Post catches up with Lee and Andrew Child as Andrew takes over his brother’s Jack Reacher series.

NYT’s “Inside the Best-Seller List” speaks with N.K. Jemisin about her participation in Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, ed. by Jordan Peele & John Joseph Adams (Random; LJ starred review).

Helen Garner, author of The Children’s Bach and This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (both Pantheon), answers NYT’s “By the Book” questionnaire.

Kirkus profiles New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, author of I Must Be Dreaming (Bloomsbury; LJ starred review).

Laurence Leamer talks to FoxNews about Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession (Putnam).

In People, John Stamos talks about being a survivor of child sexual abuse, as revealed in his new memoir If You Would Have Told Me (Holt).

In an interview with filmmakers Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker, the subjects of Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! (St. Martin’s), Washington Post explains how Airplane! became a first-class spoof.

LA Times reports on revelations from Adversity for Sale: Ya Gotta Believe by Jeezy (HarperCollins Leadership).

Tor.com rounds up “Five Classic Retrospective Anthologies Worth Tracking Down” and “Five Books Where Curses Are Magically Inherited.”

The Guardian identifies the 10 best allegories in fiction or nonfiction.

CrimeReads recommends “5 historical mysteries featuring unforgettable, unconventional women” and “six books about women working together.”

Stephen Rubin, “quintessential hitmaker” of the book world who published many of the most popular books of recent decades, including The Da Vinci Code, dies at 81; NYT has an obituary.

Authors on Air

Curtis Chin, author of Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant: A Memoir (Little, Brown), speaks to NPR’s All Things Considered. 

NPR’s Morning Edition speaks with Amy Kurzweil, author of Artificial: A Love Story (Catapult; LJ starred review).

Shelf Awareness rounds up the slate for Book TV on C-SPAN 2 this weekend.

Johnny Compton, The Spite House (Tor Nightfire), is interviewed on LitHub’s Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre podcast, while Vincent Bevins, author of If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (PublicAffairs), is interviewed on Keen On.

Deadline shares the trailer for The Boys in the Boat, based on Daniel James Brown’s no. 1 New York Times nonfiction best seller.

Hollywood Reporter has the trailer for A24’s Holocaust film Zone of Interest, adapted from a Martin Amis novel.

David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon returns to top of best-seller lists ahead of the Martin Scorsese adaptation hitting theaters this weekend; Variety has the news.

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