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Awards & Book News

The winners of the Writers’ Prize are announced: Book of the Year The Home Child by Liz Berry (Chatto & Windus), The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright (Norton; LJ starred review), and Thunderclap: A Memoir of Life and Art and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming (Scribner). The Guardian has coverage, as does The Bookseller.

Elizabeth McCracken wins the Wingate Literary Prize for The Hero of this Book (Ecco). The Bookseller has the news.

The finalists are announced for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards for small-press books. CBC has coverage.

Tanith Lee is the recipient of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association’s Infinity Award, a posthumous lifetime achievement award.

The Atlantic launches “The Great American Novels” project. 

Book ban efforts “continued to surge last year, reaching the highest levels ever recorded by the American Library Association,” NYT reports.

New Title Best Sellers

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

Fiction

The Hunter by Tana French (Viking) tracks down No. 4 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list and No. 5 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Seller list.

Never Too Late by Danielle Steel (Delacorte) catches No. 5 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Seller list and No. 15 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson (Tor) lights up No. 12 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Seller list.

Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera (Celadon) grabs No. 13 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Seller list.

Nonfiction

The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir by RuPaul (Dey Street; LJ starred review) snatches No. 1 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Seller list and No. 14 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up by Abigail Shrier (Sentinel) hits No. 7 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Seller list, though some booksellers report receiving bulk orders.

Reviews

NYT reviews Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De León (Viking): “Given that De León spent years getting to know people as a participant and an observer, doing what he calls ‘deep hanging out,’ his subjects start to trust him and begin to reveal themselves—no small feat, considering that suspicion and mistrust are a matter of professional (and physical) survival”; and Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson by James Marcus (Princeton Univ.): “While he excels at drawing the man’s rounded humanity, Marcus’s portrait of Emerson as a writer often disappoints. Describing genius is always a challenge—but Marcus makes the challenge unnecessarily daunting.”

Washington Post reviews Wild Houses by Colin Barrett (Grove): “Barrett’s dialogue, spiked with the timbre of Irish speech and shards of local slang, makes these characters sound so close you’ll be wiping their spittle off your face”; Until August by Gabriel García Márquez, tr. by Anne McLean (Knopf): “García Márquez’s sons see the book as an exemplar of their father’s focus on love…. But there’s little insight about love to be found here amid the cringey sex scenes”; In True Face: A Woman’s Life in the CIA, Unmasked by Jonna Mendez with Wyndham Wood (PublicAffairs): “This book…is filled with adventures and operations whose details, somewhat to my astonishment, have escaped the gimlet eyes of the censors at the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board”; and One Way Back: A Memoir by Christine Blasey Ford (St. Martin’s): “Readers looking to One Way Back for a magic bullet to prove Kavanaugh’s guilt or innocence are out of luck…. What [Ford] gives instead is a thoughtful exploration of what it feels like to become a main character in a major American reckoning.”

NPR’s Fresh Air reviews Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman (Norton): “If The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. was a droll depiction of the insider culture of literary Brooklyn, Help Wanted is an informed depiction of outsiders: hourly wage workers, mostly without benefits, who see themselves shut out of the American Dream. If there’s not as much witty banter in this novel, well, how could there be?”; and Green Frog: Stories by Gina Chung (Vintage): “Wildly entertaining, wonderfully diverse, and always delivered with a superb understanding of pacing and economy of language, the stories in this collection are full of emotional intelligence but also prove Chung isn’t afraid to explore what genre mixing can do for short narratives.”

LitHub selects “five reviews you need to read this week.”

Briefly Noted

Publishers Weekly shares panels from the graphic biography Ruth Asawa: An Artist Takes Shape by Sam Nakahira (Getty).

CNN anchor Chris Wallace, with coauthor Mitch Weiss, has a new book out this fall: Countdown 1960: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the 311 Days That Changed America’s Politics Forever, to be published by Dutton. Kirkus has the news.

Washington Post speaks with Michael Arceneaux, author of I Finally Bought Some Jordans: Essays (HarperOne).

LitHub has a conversation with Lana Bastašić, the author of Catch the Rabbit (Restless).

Kate Zambreno, author of The Light Room: On Art and Care (Riverhead), answers NYT’s “By the Book” questionnaire.

NYT goes “Inside the Best-Seller List” with Sloane Crosley’s Grief Is for People (MCD).

The Millions interviews Dan Sinykin, author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (Columbia Univ.).

CBC recommends eight books for those who loved Bad Cree by Jessica Johns (Doubleday).

NYT names “22 of the Funniest Novels Since Catch-22.”

Kirkus highlights “four must-read new novels.”

CrimeReads lists “creepy cultish reads” and “crime novels for people who (think they) don’t like crime novels.”

Reactor rounds up “Five Very Good Dogs in Horror Fiction.”

Authors on Air

NPR talks to Kate Manne, author of Unshrinking: How To Face Fatphobia (Crown).

Today, NPR’s Fresh Air will interview Peter Pomerantsev, author of How To Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (PublicAffairs).

LitHub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast speaks with Emily Raboteau, author of Lessons for Survival (Holt).

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

Brad Thor’s Scot Harvath books are being adapted for Sony Pictures Television, Deadline reports.

Colombia Pictures has acquired the rights to adapt Teddy Wayne’s upcoming thriller The Winner (Harper) as a film. Deadline has the news. 

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