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Awards & Book News

James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (Riverhead; LJ starred review) and Héctor Tobar’s Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” (MCD) win the Kirkus Prize. NPR has a feature on the winners.

Geraldine Brooks’s Horse (Viking; LJ starred review) and Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa’s His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Viking; LJ Best Book) win the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Richard D. Kahlenberg’s Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See (PublicAffairs) wins the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice.

Michael Rosen is awarded the PEN Pinter Prize. The Bookseller has the news.

Spotify’s new audiobook streaming could have “devastating effect” on audio sales, says the UK’s Society of Authors; The Guardian reports.

Novelist Rebecca Yarros denounces book bans, and Jill Biden champions reading at the Barbara Bush Foundation’s 2023 National Celebration of Reading. USA Today has coverage.

Reviews

NYT reviews Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle To Save Reconstruction by Fergus M. Bordewich (Knopf): “A vivid and sobering account of Grant’s efforts to crush the Klan in the South”; and October crime and mystery novels.

Washington Post reviews Blackouts by Justin Torres (Farrar): “Self-identifies as fiction, but the small inverted capitals used to spell “novel” on the front cover nod to its truly amorphous nature. In some ways it’s more like collage, an ingenious assemblage of research, vignette, image and conceit”; and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (Crown): “The authors, whose previous book, How Democracies Die, stood out among the alarm-sounders of the last decade, aren’t the first to point out the dangerous obsolescence of these obstacles to democratic reform, but they write with terrifying clarity about how the forces of the right have co-opted the enshrined rules to exert their tyranny.”

NPR reviews How To Say Babylon: A Memoir by Safiya Sinclair (S. & S.): “Sinclair is a wonderful writer. The magical way she strings sentences together, on its own, is reason enough to indulge in this memoir 10 years in the making.”

LitHub selects “5 Book Reviews You Need To Read This Week.”

New Title Best Sellers

Links for the week: NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers | NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers | USA Today Best-Selling Books

Fiction

Wildfire by Hannah Grace (Atria) burns to No. 1 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Judgment Prey by John Sandford (Putnam; LJ starred review) hunts down No. 2 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list and No. 8 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Throne of the Fallen by Kerri Maniscalco (Little, Brown) is enthroned at No. 5 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Second Act by Danielle Steel (Delacorte) performs at No. 6 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow (Tor; LJ starred review) soars to No. 8 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

The Hurricane Wars by Thea Guanzon (Harper Voyager; LJ starred review) storms to No. 12 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson (Tor) rises to No. 13 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, ed. by Jordan Peele & John Joseph Adams (Random; LJ starred review), screams to No. 15 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Nonfiction

Making It So: A Memoir by Patrick Stewart (Gallery) makes it to No. 2 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon by Michael Lewis (Norton) rises to No. 7 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

The Great Disappearance: 31 Ways To Be Rapture Ready by David Jeremiah (Thomas Nelson) takes No. 9 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Natasha’s Kitchen: 100+ Easy Family-Favorite Recipes You’ll Make Again and Again by Natasha Kravchuk (Clarkson Potter) cooks at No. 10 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Eat To Treat: A Three-Step Plan To Reduce Inflammation, Detoxify Your Life, and Heal Your Body by Maggie Berghoff (Atria) eats up No. 13 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Briefly Noted

Heather Cox Richardson, author of Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (Viking), is featured on NYT’s “Inside the Best-Seller List.”

LA Times shows “how L.A. libraries are supporting the next generation of Latino authors.”

De Gruyter and Brill will merge to create leading a academic publisher in the humanities, announced by press release.

PBS NewsHour covers the Brooklyn Public Library’s Jay-Z exhibit.

Salman Rushdie will publish a memoir about being stabbed last year. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder will be published April 16 by Penguin Random House. NYT has the news, as does Hollywood Reporter.

George Stephanopoulos to release new book on the White House Situation Room. The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis is due out from Grand Central in May, GMA reports.

NPR suggests “3 witchy books for fall that offer fright and delight.” For more genre-spanning witchy fiction, see LJ’s Display Shelf.

Publishers Weekly rounds up September religion best sellers.

“In Time for Halloween, 7 New Comics for Fans of Horror,” NYT recommends.

Tor.com publishes two lists: “Backlist Bonanza: 5 Underrated Horror Books” and “Seven Scary Books That Thankfully Aren’t Real.”

The Millions highlights 10 new audiobooks for fall 2023.

Entertainment Weekly shares “the 14 fall 2023 pop culture memoirs and biographies we’re most excited to read.”

USA Today rounds up the “best horror books to read this spooky season: 10 page-turners to scare your socks off.”

NYT talks to Justin Torres, a National Book Award finalist for Blackouts (Farrar).

Washington Post speaks with Amy Chua, author of The Golden Gate (Minotaur: St. Martin’s; LJ starred review).

Kirkus speaks with Elizabeth Rusch about her book The Twenty-One: The True Story of the Youth Who Sued the US Government Over Climate Change (Greenwillow).

Publishers Weekly interviews Jacob L. Wright, author of Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins (Cambridge Univ.).

The Guardian talks to Safiya Sinclair, author of How To Say Babylon: A Memoir (S. & S.). Sinclair is also interviewed on LitHub’s The Maris Review podcast.

Tiya Miles, author of Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation (Norton), takes NYT’s “By the Book” survey.

Actor Bob Odenkirk answers Elle’s “Shelf Life” questions.

Michael Chiarello, chef, Food Network star, and prolific cookbook writer, dies at 61. NYT has an obituary.

Authors on Air

Jessica Knoll’s thriller Bright Young Women (S. & S./Marysue Rucci; LJ starred review) will be adapted for TV, Deadline reports.

Variety covers the Netflix docuseries Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul, based on Big Vape: The Incendiary Rise of Juul by Jamie Ducharme. Bustle also has coverage.

Today, NPR’s Fresh Air will talk to Martin Baron, author of Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post (Flatiron).

Tomorrow, Hosanna Wong, author of You Are More Than You’ve Been Told: Unlock a Fresh Way To Live Through the Rhythms of Jesus (Thomas Nelson), will appear on Good Morning America, while Cedric the Entertainer, author of Flipping Boxcars (Amistad), will appear on Tamron Hall.

Shelf Awareness rounds up the schedule for this weekend’s Book TV on C-SPAN 2.

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