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Awards & News

Abraham Verghese wins the 2023 Writer in the World Prize.

The James Beard Media Award winners are announced.

Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century by Jennifer Homans (Random; LJ starred review) wins the 2023 BIO Plutarch Award.

The Rachel Funari Prize 2023 shortlist is announced. 

The 2023 Taste Canada Awards shortlists are announced.

The 2023 Sturgeon Award finalists are announced. 

The 2023 Roswell Award winners are announced. Locus has details.

The June 2023 Loanstars Adult List is out, featuring top pick Zero Days by Ruth Ware (Gallery; LJ starred review). The book is also LJ’s mystery Pick of the Month. 

Publishing Perspectives provides analysis for this week’s U.S. Circana report. 

Reviews

The Washington Post reviews Loot by Tania James (Knopf): “What stays consistent throughout is James’s wry awareness of the distorting function of racism and colonialism. And her prose is lush with the sights, sounds and smells of India, France and England, and always laced with Dickensian wit”; Halcyon by Elliot Ackerman (Knopf): “Ackerman delivers a potent critique of the what-if nature of talking about history in general”; Pageboy by Elliot Page Flatiron): “The book is an intense, emotional read, delivered in image-drenched prose”; The Last Ride of the Pony Express: My 2,000-mile Horseback Journey into the Old West by Will Grant (Little, Brown): “By the time Grant makes it home to New Mexico, having worn through one pair of boots and 12 pairs of socks, but not, pointedly, his mounts, I knew why horses are counted in head, not heads, and I could smell the sagebrush and hear the wind long after I stopped reading”; George: A Magpie Memoir by Frieda Hughes (Avid Reader/S. & S.): “It’s a passionate book about unconditional love and commitment. It’s also fast-paced and suspenseful, full of amusing anecdotes, poems and Hughes’s sweet drawings of George”; The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals, and True Believers Trying To Win in Washington While America Loses Its Mind by Ben Terris (Twelve): “Despite the relative absence of star power and sweeping theses, it is more relevant than most of its neighbors on the Current Events shelf: It provides a compelling portrait of how Washington works right now”; and All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron; LJ starred review): “Gently supportive and candid, the relationship between Titus and his father, Albert, is one of the most tender relationships I’ve ever seen between two Black men in the pages of a novel.” LA Times also reviews the latter: “While there are more twists and bends that fall back on Cosby’s sometimes overused skills in depicting physical mayhem, it is the root causes and consequences of that violence that make All the Sinners Bleed his most deeply resonant, timely and timeless novel to date.”

Briefly Noted

LJ’s Barbara Hoffert has new prepub alerts in history, social science, and tech; ancient history, forensic anthropology, and geological journeys; and arts.

NYT interviews English writer and academic Rebecca May Johnson about her new book, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen (Pushkin), and her argument that we must “blow up the kitchen.”

Shondaland spotlights “author to watch” Cecilia Rabess and her new book, Everything’s Fine (S. & S.), and also speaks with Maureen Ryan about her new book, Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood (Mariner). 

Helen Schulman, Lucky Dogs (Knopf), answers 10 questions at Poets&Writers. 

Teresa Strasser discusses her new book, Making It Home: Life Lessons from a Season of Little League (Berkley), with USA Today. 

LA Times talks with Deborah Levy about the origins of her new novel, August Blue (Farrar).

ElectricLit talks with Emily Wells about her memoir, A Matter of Appearance (Seven Stories Pr.), and the “aesthetics of illness.”

The Millions chats with Julia Fine about her forthcoming novel, Maddalena and the Dark (Flatiron), “writing routines, violin technology, and researching Venice from afar.” Tor provides an excerpt from the book.

WSJ reporter Brett Forrest, Lost Son: An American Family Trapped Inside the FBI’s Secret Wars (Little, Brown), pens an essay for Time about the “FBI’s troubling history with informants.”

Datebook recommends 5 new books by LGBTQ+ authors. 

Erewhon Books announces a forthcoming anthology, Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, due out in summer 2025. Tor reports.

CrimeReads shares 10 novels featuring horses. 

Tor previews new sci-fi books arriving in June. 

ElectricLit highlights 7 “romances that defy geographical bounds” and “7 novels about people feeling out of place.”

BookRiot shares the best sci-fi and fantasy books of June, 10 books set at the beach, and a list of queer summer sci-fi/fantasy reads to match the perfect summer day. 

Authors On Air

NPR’s All Things Considered talks with Aisha Abdel Gawad about her new novel, Between Two Moons (Doubleday), and how it’s a “love letter to Arab Americans.” 

Elliot Page appeared on GMA to talk about his new memoir, Pageboy (Flatiron). Vulture also has an interview with Page. 

NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour shares love stories on “books we love.”

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