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Awards, News & Oprah’s Book Club

Oprah picks Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain (Crown) as her new book club selection. Winfrey will interview the author on March 9 in a virtual book-club meeting on OprahDaily.com. 

The 2023 Southern Book Prize winners are announced. 

The 2023 Compton Crook Award finalists are announced. Locus reports. 

The Guardian reports that a new forensic study finds Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was poisoned.

Paramount has restarted the sales process for Simon & Schuster. Publishers Lunch reports. 

Catapult will shutter its online magazine and writing classes to “center our efforts on our foundational business.”  Publishers Weekly has the story. 

Tor Publishing Group launches Bramble, a new romantic imprint. 

Skyhorse launches a new business imprint, Peakpoint Press.

Reviews

NYT reviews Dangerous Love by Ben Okri (Other Pr.): “Like an alchemist, Okri has channeled the ‘ancient, unyielding’ forces through a reordering of ‘familiar images,’ creating something universal at a time when the idea of the universal has long been thought impossible”; and The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms That Sustain Life by Johan Eklöf, tr. by Elizabeth DeNoma (Scribner): “Yet alone among the major crises confronting the planet today—climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics—the pollution caused by artificial lighting has a relatively easy solution: You can just turn the light off.”

The Washington Post reviews a pair of books featuring Alison, the Wife of Bath: The Wife of Willesden by Zadie Smith (Penguin Pr.; LJ starred review), “an exuberant, modern-day play,” and The Wife of Bath by Marion Turner (Princeton Univ.), “an illuminating analysis.” They also review Reckoning by V (formerly Eve Ensler) (Bloomsbury): “This book comes across as more of a historical documentation of action than a solutions-based pathway to making change”; and The Critic’s Daughter: A Memoir by Priscilla Gilman (Norton): “An account of a love that’s neither takeoff strip nor landing pad, a child’s confounding adoration for her parent that’s neither ever really resolved nor extinguished.”

NPR reviews On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required To Endure the Life of a Writer by Stephen Marche (Biblioasis): “Not your standard meditation on the art and nobility of writing as a profession; but while Marche's outlook is as bleak as one of Fitzgerald’s legendary hangovers, his writing style is buoyant and funny.”

LA Times reviews Hourglass by Keiran Goddard (Europa): “The charms of Hourglass, like those of the narrator himself, are insidious. This is a sad book that is somehow wickedly fun to read.”

Briefly Noted

LibraryReads and Library Journal offer read-alikes for 3 Days To Live by James Patterson (Grand Central), the top library holds title of the week. 

LJ’s Barbara Hoffert has new prepub alerts for literary fiction debuts, contemporary fiction, and SF/fantasy/horror. 

FoxNews shares details from Sex, Drugs and Pilot Season: Confessions of a Casting Director by Joel Thurm (BearManor Media). 

Seattle Times has an interview with Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry (Doubleday), about her journey to success.  

USA Today has a feature on José Olivarez and his new poetry collection, Promises of Gold, tr. by David Ruano (Holt). The author and translator also answer 10 questions for Poets & Writers. 

Paulo Scott leads a literary tour of São Paulo for NYT. 

Former investigative journalist Michael Robotham, Lying Beside You (Scribner; LJ starred review), considers why so many journalists turn to fiction writing, at CrimeReads. 

LitHub learns that “All Shirley Jackson Award finalists get stoned.”

The Guardian offers the “top 10 neglected books about the Spanish civil war.”

Tor shares Jo Walton’s reading list: January 2023

CrimeReads explores the creepiest old houses in fiction. 

“Jean Anderson, 93, Exacting and Encyclopedic Cookbook Author, Dies.” NYT has an obituary.

Authors on Air

NPR’s Fresh Air talks with Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter about her work in film. The Art of Ruth E. Carter: Costuming Black History and the Afrofuture, from Do the Right Thing to Black Panther (Chronicle) will be published in May. 

NPR’s Consider This talks with romance readers about what they love about the genre.

NPR’s It’s Been A Minute spreads “the gospel of bell hooks.”

NPR’s All Things Considered talks with editors Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters about their new essay collection, Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult). Also, a conversation with Camonghne Felix, author of the new memoir, Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation (One World).

Stone Cold Fox by Rachel Koller Croft (Berkley; LJ starred review) will get a TV series adaptation. Deadline reports. 

Ishana Night Shyamalan will make her directorial debut with an adaptation of The Watchers by A M Shine (Head of Zeus). Deadline reports. 

CrimeReads recommends eight podcasts for the winter. 

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