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Awards News

Yiyun Li wins the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for The Book of Goose (Farrar). LitHub has details. 

The 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards are announced. Honorees include Geraldine Brooks, Horse (Viking; LJ starred review); Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao (Norton); Matthew F. Delmont, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (Viking; LJ starred review); and Saeed Jones, Alive at the End of the World, (Coffee House; LJ starred review). Charlayne Hunter-Gault is honored with a Lifetime Achievement award. LJ has coverage. 

The 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize winners are announced, including Percival Everett, Ling Ma, Susan Williams, Darran Anderson, Dominique Morisseau, Jasmine Lee-Jones, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and dg nanouk okpik. The Guardian has coverage. 

The National Book Foundation names its 2023 5 Under 35 Honorees: Mateo Askaripour, Black Buck (Mariner); Chelsea T. Hicks, A Calm and Normal Heart (Unnamed Pr.); Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez (Tin House); Jenny Xie, Holding Pattern (Riverhead); and Ada Zhang, The Sorrows of Others (A Public Space Books).

Klaus Flugge will receive the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award. Publishing Perpectives has details. 

CBC introduces the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize readers.

April Book Club Picks

Reese Witherspoon picks Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random; LJ starred review). Sittenfeld shares the books that have shaped her for Entertainment Weekly and also discusses her new book with NPR’s All Things Considered.

Jenna Bush Hager picks Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling (Atria).

GMA selects Dirty Laundry by Disha Bose (Ballantine). 

B&N picks Hang the Moon by Jeannette Walls (Scribner).

Target promotes Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez (Berkley; LJ starred review). 

Amazon’s Sarah Selects chooses The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng (Riverhead). 

AARP recommends “18 Fantastic Book Club Reads Now in Paperback.”

Reviews

NYT reviews House of Cotton by Monica Brashears (Flatiron): “There is a word commonly used to describe books like this: gritty. Fair enough. House of Cotton is unafraid to peer at the unsavory minutiae of getting by. But for this novel, I’d add a few other labels too: magnetic, singular and completely unforgettable."

The Washington Post reviews Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad (Grove): “Although Enter Ghost sometimes seems to fret about its ethics, such as the attention paid to Palestinians while other conflicts, like the one in Yemen, struggle for international attention, it succeeds as that rare fictive project that invites several audiences to pay attention”; and Hidden Brilliance: Unlocking the Intelligence of Autism by Lynn Kern Koegel and Claire LaZebnik (Harper Wave): “The writing style in the book is eminently accessible and unpretentious, never losing sight of the fact that the intended audience is parents in search of answers rather than those in the clinical space.” Plus, a paired review of two books on the messiness of Congress: I Swear: Politics Is Messier Than My Minivan by Katie Porter (Crown), and Why Congress by Philip A. Wallach (Oxford Univ.). 

NPR reviews This Bird Has Flown by Susanna Hoffs (Little, Brown): “This Bird Has Flown is a love story, a sweet and tender romance, but not just one between Jane and Tom—it’s Hoffs’ valentine to music.”

I Can’t Save You: A Memoir by Anthony Chin-Quee (Riverhead): “Chin-Quee’s astute, no-holds-barred insights offer a window into the world of medical practitioners—and also celebrate the nuanced and diverse humanity of physicians.”

LA Times reviews This Is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor, tr. by Sophie Hughes (New Directions): “A lesser journalist massages details to more perfectly fit a narrative. Melchor is doing something more like the opposite: playing with form to expose the lies, hypocrisies, hatreds and oversights that soften or avoid the reality of human evil.”

Briefly Noted

Amazon is closing its book depository at the end of April. BookRiot has coverage. 

Keegan-Michael and Elle Key will close the U.S. Book Show. Publishers Weekly announces. 

LibraryReads and Library Journal offer read-alikes for Homecoming by Kate Morton (Mariner: HarperCollins), the top holds title of the week. 

Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives (Farrar; LJ starred review), discusses poetry and prayer with The Rumpus. 

Parade profiles Cheryl Strayed, author of Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar (Vintage), and puts her books in order.

Nicole Chung, A Living Remedy: A Memoir (Ecco), writes about “The Unbearable Costs of Becoming a Writer,” for Esquire. 

NYT explores the debate about revising classic literature for modern audiences. Plus, changes to e-books inspire questions about digital ownership.

Esquire shares an excerpt from Don Winslow’s forthcoming novel, City of Dreams ( Morrow), due out April 18. 

AARP has new recommendations in its “Weekly Read” column. 

Elle previews 39 books for summer 2023. 

Wired has “7 Books You Need to Read This Spring and Summer.”

LJ shares “A Juneteenth Reading List.”

ElectricLit suggests “7 Books About the Scam of Wellness.”

Shondaland previews 5 books for April, and “20 Can’t-Miss Alien Books for Science Fiction Fanatics.”

BookRiot shares new Asian American and Pacific Islander literature and 8 books about the moon. 

Authors On Air

On NPR’s All Things Considered, Leta McCollough Seletzky talks about her new father-daughter memoir, The Kneeling Man: My Father’s Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (Counterpoint). 

Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao will direct an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet (Knopf). Deadline reports. 

Zoë Kravitz signs on to star in the feature Biter, based on a short story by Kristen Roupenian. Deadline reports. 

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