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Awards & News

The 2023 Pulitzer Prizes are awarded with Trust by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead), and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper: HarperCollins; LJ starred review), sharing the top prize for fiction. 

His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Viking), wins for Best General Nonfiction and G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage (Viking), wins for Biography. 

Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power by Jefferson Cowie (Basic), takes the Pulitzer in History, and Stay True by Hua Hsu (Doubleday) wins for Memoir/Autobiography.

The prizes for Poetry and Drama go to Carl Phillips, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020 (Farrar), and Sanaz Toossi, English (Theatre Communications Group), respectively.

Andrea Long Chu of New York magazine wins for best criticism. 

NYT has a guide to the awards and winners. The LA Times also covers the awards, as do The Washington Post and NPR’s Morning Edition.

The 2023-2024 Steinbeck Fellows are announced. LitHub reports. 

The French-American Foundation’s 2023 Translation Prize winners are announced. Publishing Perspectives reports.

The MIT Press receives $10 million endowment gift for open access to knowledge. 

Library Journal and Gale announce the inaugural Libraries Defying the Odds award, created to help address the needs of public libraries in a continuously changing landscape. 

Coverage follows the ongoing WGA strike: Variety, Vanity Fair, and Deadline report the latest. 

The Bookseller reports on a mass walkout at Elsevier over 'unethical' fees. 

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) discuss AI and the book business at its annual meeting. Publishing Perspectives has more on that conversation. 

Critic Ronald Steel, dies at 92. NYT has an obituary. 

Reviews

NYT reviews King: A Life by Jonathan Eig (Farrar; LJ starred review): “He doesn’t put King on the couch, but he considers the lifelong guilt King felt about his privileged upbringing, and how he was driven by competitiveness with his father, who had moral failures of his own.”; Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” by Héctor Tobar (MCD): “While Tobar’s book is too slim to satisfyingly encompass every complexity, he nevertheless succeeds in capturing a kaleidoscope of shared stories and circumstances, of feelings and preoccupations that are both buried and overt.”; Professor Schiff's Guilt by Agur Schiff, trans. by Jessica Cohen (New Vessel Pr.): “Schiff the novelist seems more interested in shocking, not elucidating, in appearing contrarian rather than truthful. That’s a shame, because his novel is daring in both scope and imagination.”; Retrospective by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, trans by Anne McLean (Riverhead): “One of the recurring preoccupations of Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s fiction, especially his new novel, Retrospective… is a certain kind of time. A time that ought to go away but will not, a time that shows up in very different, unexpected places.”; The Lost Sons of Omaha: Two Young Men in an American Tragedy by Joe Sexton (Scribner): “By telling their stories in the fullest way possible, Sexton does justice to James Scurlock and Jake Gardner in a way no court of law or court of public opinion ever could.”

NPR reviews Wild Dances: My Queer and Curious Journey to Eurovision by William Lee Adams (Astra House): “Wild Dances, William Lee Adams' page-turning, tragicomic memoir, deftly combines two seemingly divergent themes: a harrowing coming-of-age story of a biracial Vietnamese-American and his ‘queer and curious journey’ to become the bespoke authority on Eurovision.”; Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan (Norton): “Where Branigan does her most profound writing is when she digs deep into the politics of the apology and the purpose of reconciliation, deliberately pushing on the points that hurt."

Slate reviews The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks, illus. by R. Sikoryak (Knopf): “Hanks is simply constitutionally incapable of introducing a new character without delivering eight pages of their life story, which means that over the book’s first 100 pages we make our way very, very slowly through a 20th century delineated with all the complexity of Forrest Gump.”

Briefly Noted

The Washington Post talks with Julia Quinn about the origins of Queen Charlotte written with Shonda Rhimes (Avon), the novel and the Neftlix series. 

NYT has a Q&A with Jonathan Eig about the making of his new book, King: A Life (Farrar; LJ starred review). LJ also has an interview with Eig. 

Andrew McCarthy discusses his new book, Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain (Grand Central), with Shondaland. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah talks about the premise of Chain Gang All Stars (Pantheon), and Mary Beth Keane, The Half Moon (Scribner), reflects on “impostor syndrome, infertility, marriage, and more.”

Karin Lin-Greenberg talks about her novel, You Are Here (Counterpoint), suburbia culture, gun violence and mall food, with ElectricLit.

Sunny Hostin talks about centering Black excellence in her new beach read, Summer on Sag Harbor (Morrow), with Essence. 

Parade addresses the latest on a rumored Taylor Swift memoir. 

The Root previews Whoopi Goldberg's forthcoming menopause graphic novel, The Change (Dark Horse) due out November 28th. 

HipLatina shares "15 Latina Bookstagrammers You Need to Follow for Your TBR List."

BookRiot has 12 book club picks for May. 

Authors On Air 

NPR’s Fresh Air talks with James Risen, The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys—and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy written with Thomas Risen (Little, Brown), about his story of Sen. Frank Church. 

NPR’s All Things Considered chats with Henry Grabar about his new book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Penguin Pr.), and “why the U.S. builds more three-car garages than one-bedroom apartments.” 

Tom Hiddleston and Mark Hamill will star in an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Life Of Chuck. Deadline has the story. 

Directors Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok talk about the unexpected timeliness of their documentary Judy Blume Forever, with PopSugar.

Amy Weinland Daughters, Dear Dana: That Time I Went Crazy and Wrote all 580 of My Facebook Friends a Handwritten Letter (She Writes Press), will appear on The Kelly Clarkson Show.

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