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Awards & Buzzy Book News

Walter Mosley wins the 2023 Diamond Dagger Award.

The 2023 Association of American Publishers Prose Awards finalists and winners are announced.

A couple more news sources cover the upcoming Barbar Streisand memoir, My Name Is Barbra, including People and Deadline.

There is a possibility for a strike by the Writers Guild of America due to changes in the streaming economy, warns Variety. 

Lit Hub shares their 2022 “Oscar” nominees for best books of the last year. 

The Telegraph announces that the Women’s Prize for Fiction is introducing a “parallel award for nonfiction” to be given annually starting in 2024.

Author Ronald Blythe dies at 100, and speechwriter Bob Orben has died at 95. NYT has more about these men, their lives, and careers.

New Title Bestsellers

Links for the week: NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Sellers | NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Sellers

Fiction

Maame, by Jessica George (St. Martin’s), rises to No. 5 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Sellers list.

Exiles, by Jane Harper (Flatiron), arrives at No. 8 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Sellers list.

Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun, by Elle Cosimano (Minotaur: St. Martin’s), targets No. 15 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Sellers list.

Nonfiction

Love, Pamela, by Pamela Anderson (Dey Street), debuts at No. 2 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Sellers list.

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, by Siddharth Kara (St. Martin’s), starts at No. 7 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Sellers list.

Reviews

NYT reviews Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez, tr. by Megan McDowell, illus. by Pablo Gerardo Camacho (Hogarth): “A mouthpiece for human darkness that, like Dalí’s cards, reveals the unspeakable. It is an enchanting, shattering, once-in-a-lifetime reading experience.” Plus, Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner (Graywolf: Macmillan): “Waidner delivers such moral clarity with nonstop wit and invention makes their novel not just an admirable achievement but a pleasure to read.” Also, three short reviews of “novels rooted in history and a sense of place” including: My Father’s House: The Rome Escape Line Trilogy by Joseph O’Connor (Europa), The Red Balcony by Jonathan Wilson (Schocken), and The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen (Holt). 

The Washington Post reviews Maame, by Jessica George (St. Martin’s): “One of the great pleasures of this novel is being taken on this very personal journey of discovery. Her fresh, vulnerable voice speaks directly to readers, without hiding behind glibness or easy self-assurance. George writes with a natural cadence that keeps the story engaging and her characters multidimensional, each of them deeply believable”; The Sweet Spot by Amy Poeppel (Atria/Emily Bestler): “Poeppel puts more planes in the air than an ambitious air traffic controller, yet manages to gracefully land each one”; All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley (S. & S.): “A beautiful tale about beauty. It is also a tale about grief, balancing solitude and comradeship, and finding joy in both the exalted and the mundane”; The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Martin Wolf (Penguin Pr.): “The historical sweep of the narrative, the profusion of data, the insistence on breaking down every question or proposition into numbered points and subpoints—it all gets to be exhausting”; and Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris (Little, Brown): “A skeptic’s record, a vital, critical demonstration of Northern California’s two centuries of mixing technology and cruelty for money.”

Book Marks provides “5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week.”

Briefly Noted

CrimeReads features a conversation between two authors—Kellye Garrett of Like a Sister (Mulholland; LJ starred review) and Alex Segura of Secret Identity (Flatiron)—as they talk about their new books and the mystery book industry. Also, Ellen Byron, author of Wined and Died in New Orleans (Berkley; LJ starred review), writes about how she became an “accidental culinary cozy author.”

The Millions talks to Chip Livingston, editor of Love, Loosha: The Letters of Lucia Berlin and Kenward Elmslie (High Road), about the processes he took to complete this book.

Jojo Moyes, Someone Else’s Shoes (Pamela Dorman), answers questions posed by NYT’s “By the Book” questionnaire.

NYT’s “Inside the Best-Seller List” interviews Grady Hendrix, author of How To Sell a Haunted House (Berkley; LJ starred review), who shares the evolution of his author events.

Jeff Tweedy, the frontman of band Wilco and author, will release his third book this fall with Dutton, titled World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music, according to Variety.

The New York Times Magazine features the work of artist Caleb Hahne Quintana creating visuals to accompany the 76th pages of several new book releases from this year.

Lit Hub makes books recommendations for “lovers in the exact wrong time and place.” Also, there is a piece remembering Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar on its 60th anniversary.

The New Yorker revisits the work of Marcel Proust.

Tor.com looks back to a list of “Five Works of ’80s SF That Feature Earth’s Alien Overlords.”

NYT shares a list of newly published books.

Authors on Air

Journalist and author Mark Whitaker talks to Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air about “how Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers changed in the civil rights movement” in an interview about his new book, Saying It Loud: 1966—The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement (S. & S.; LJ starred review).

Tor.com announces a film adaptation of Tom Holt’s “The Portable Door” book series to stream on MGM+, starring Sam Neill, Patrick Gibson, and Christoph Waltz, and Sophie Wilde.

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