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Awards News, TikTok Book Club & Buzzy Books

The August LibraryReads list is out, including top pick, Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood (Berkley).

Kenyan writer Idza Luhumyo wins the 2022 AKO Caine prize for African writing. The Guardian reports. Oprah Daily has an interview with the winning author. 

The 2022 PANZ Book Design Awards finalists are announced. Books + Publishing reports.

TikTok launches a virtual book club, starting with Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Five “BookTok Laureates” will guide the month’s activities.

Two lucrative literary awards are in danger of being discontinued: The Desmond Elliott Prize is on pause in order to seek funding and the The Sunday Times Short Story Award is also vulnerable after Audible removed its sponsorship. The Bookseller reports.

Nielsen BookData opens an awards survey to see “how industry professionals see the dynamics and value of book awards.” Publishing Perspectives reports.

Reviews

NPR reviews Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens (Scribner): “is a strange book, more intriguing than mesmerizing. Its narrator is quirkily appealing, but she does not cast a spell. Still, some of her observations resonate as she belatedly discovers that love, ever mutable, comes in multiple, sometimes surprising, forms.”

NYT reviews A Factotum in the Book Trade by Marius Kociejowski (Biblioasis): "Like the kinds of bookstores Kociejowski admires, his book has a lot of nooks and crannies. Diversions spin into subsidiary diversions. With its looped intestines, this is not a book for everyone.” And, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak And Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai (Viking; LJ starred review): "Kochai’s stories employ the fantastic. Afghanistan is rendered less as a country and more as a dreamscape.” Also, Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk (Soft Skull): “Fundamentally, it’s a book about the collision between Wilk as a writer and Wilk as a character. Like all of us. And in the end, it’s up to you to figure out whom you prefer.” Plus, The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning by Eve Fairbanks (S. & S.): “Fairbanks’s empathetic, comprehensive reporting shines when she dispenses with tangents and tells it straight, providing insight into how ordinary people build lives in the aftermath of political upheaval.”

LA Times reviews Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels by Paul Pringle (Celadon: Macmillan): “In Bad City Pringle has provided us with a book that reveals how power works in Los Angeles, a city where a new brand of film-noir corruption thrives in our tech-economy landscape. It’s a city where the privileged do everything they can to protect their friends and allies, and where small groups of insurgents work tirelessly to drag their behavior out into the light of day.”

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reviews Came the Lightening: Twenty Poems for George by Olivia Harrison (Genesis): “Though clearly her own accomplished person, her explorations of her late husband’s contributions to the world, and impact on her life, make for compelling poetic reflections. Ultimately, Came the Lightening proves to be a deeply moving story-in-verse that often finds the universal in the personal.”

Briefly Noted

Pilot and author Mark Vanhoenacker writes about his new book, Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World (Knopf), describing it as “both a memoir and a pilot’s love letter to our planet’s great metropolises,” for Time.

Entertainment Weekly announces that Bolu Babalola is working on a sequel to her romance, Honey and Spice (Morrow; LJ starred review), which is currently the Reese Witherspoon book club pick. 

People previews Jessica Willis Fisher’s forthcoming memoir, Unspeakable: Surviving My Childhood and Finding My Voice (Thomas Nelson), due out November 1.

Authors from the new anthology, Other Terrors by Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason (William Morrow Paperbacks), discuss "otherness and the creation of monstrosity talk fear, society, and ostracism" at CrimeReads. 

NYT asks: “Does poetry have any place in a war zone?”

The Guardian explores how literature is taking gaming more seriously.

Seattle Times considers how “TikTok became a bestseller machine.”

In the Chicago Tribune, the Biblioracle emplores: “Parents must stop harassing librarians who are just doing their jobs.”

The Millions highlights new books for the week.

LitHub recommends 16 newly released books.

BookRiot suggests a list of 15 recent award winning audiobooks.

ElectricLit has 7 books about climate change.

BookRiot explores thrillers and mysteries this week, including 10 cozy mysteries, why mysteries and thrillers make great beach reads, and the differences between mystery, thriller, and suspense. BookRiot also offers a science fiction primer.

Bustle shares 10 must-read books for the week, 20 dystopian books, and examines the differences between the new Persuasion adaptation and the book.

Authors On Air

NPR’s All Things Considered talks with Ingrid Rojas Contreras about her new memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds (Doubleday). They also share details from a new biography, Growing Up Getty: The Story of America's Most Unconventional Dynasty by James Reginato (Gallery; LJ starred review).

NPR’s Morning Edition highlights The Disney Revolt: The Great Labor War of Animation's Golden Age by Jake S. Friedman (Chicaco Review Pr.), which details animators' 1941 strike.

T&C rounds up details on Regency-era romance, Mr. Malcolm's List, based on the book by Suzanne Allain.

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