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Spooky Booklists & News

The Washington Post suggests scary stories for the spooky season.

Buzzfeed shares 21 recent Horror books.

CrimeReads offers 14 books about witches, and 9 books with dark humor.

Publishing professionals have written an open letter calling for PRH to reconsider Amy Coney Barrett’s book. LitHub reports.

Reviews

NYT reviews The Singularities by John Banville (Knopf; LJ starred review): “There’s the same sense of an aging artist revisiting old obsessions, meditating on his craft, while getting ever closer to what seems to matter most. If it isn’t a swan song, it certainly does a good impression.”

The Washington Post reviews And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham (Random; LJ starred review): “Meacham bids to be the redeemer in chief of the narrative of American exceptionalism: the venerable if now-shopworn story in which the United States has a providential and world-historic role as a nation distinctively dedicated to human liberty.” And, Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës by Devoney Looser (Bloomsbury): “Looser’s dual biography admiringly portrays two single women from modest circumstances who seized fame and tenuous economic security through talent and determination.” Plus, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper): “with Demon Copperhead, she’s raised the bar even higher, providing her best demonstration yet of a novel’s ability to simultaneously entertain and move and plead for reform.”

USA Today reviews The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf), giving them 3.5 stars: “It’s impossible to read The Passenger and Stella Maris apart from the looming mortality of its author; this is the work of a man peering into the void of his own soon-to-be nonexistence. If this is McCarthy’s parting “bull on the wall of a cave,” how lucky for us there's still enough light by which to see it.”

LA Times reviews Brave Hearted: The Women of the American West by Katie Hickman (Spiegel & Grau; LJ starred review): “is an alternate history of a frontier that was home for some and a fantasy for others — a liminal space that existed in fact and folklore long after the Census Bureau decided it was gone.”

Tor reviews The Scratch Daughters by H.A. Clarke (Erewhon): “The Scratch Daughters is a sharp, scathing sophomore novel from H. A. Clarke. Middle books in trilogies often function more as table setting to the main event, but not this one.”

Briefly Noted

LibraryReads and LJ offer read-alikes for No Plan B by Lee Child & Andrew Child (Delacorte), the top holds title of the week.

LJ’s Barbara Hoffert has new prepub alerts for Mystery, Current Issues, History, and Fine Arts/Performing Arts/Literature.

LA Times shares details from Matthew Perry’s forthcoming memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (Flatiron). 

People highlights actor Richard E. Grant’s new memoir, A Pocketful of Happiness (S. & S.), written after the death of his wife.

LA Times features Brian Johnson’s memoir, The Lives of Brian (Dey Street Books).

NYT distills “The Essential Philip K. Dick.”

Esquire profiles Cormac McCarthy and his latest work.

Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers take Elle’s Shelf Life literary survey.

The Root shares “November 2022 Books by Black Authors We Can't Wait to Read.”

Authors On Air

NPR’s Fresh Air talks with journalist Jemele Hill about her new memoir, Uphill (Henry Holt), “her career and her life growing up in Detroit.”

FX will stream a series based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go (Vintage), on Hulu. THR reports.

Tembi & Attica Locke discuss their adaptation From Scratch on Deadline’sScene 2 Seen podcast.

Jemele Hill, Uphill (Henry Holt), will be on Tamron Hall today.

Ashley Flowers, All Good People Here (Bantam), will visit Tamron Hall tomorrow.

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume 2 : The Pillars of Civilization (Harper), will be on with James Cordon tomorrow.

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