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Library of Congress & Book News

Trump has fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, Washington Post reports; NYT also has coverage, as does Shelf Awareness. InfoDocket has a compilation of media coverage and statements.

Winners of the Vermont Book Awards are announced.

Winners of the Sarton and Gilda Women’s Book Awards are announced.

They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms by Mike Hixenbaugh (Mariner) wins the NYPL’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. The Library Talks podcast has an interview with Hixenbaugh.

Frank Herbert posthumously wins the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association’s Infinity Award.

The shortlists for the UK Booksellers Association’s Indie Book Awards are announced, The Bookseller reports.

Page to Screen

May 9

Clown in a Cornfield, based on the YA novel by Adam Cesare. Image Entertainment/RLJ. Reviews | Trailer

Juliet & Romeo, based on the Shakespeare play. Briarcliff Entertainment. Reviews | Trailer

Marcella, with associated titles by its subject, cookbook author Marcella Hazan. Greenwich Entertainment. Reviews | Trailer

Sharp Corner, based on the short story in the collection Whirl Away by Russell Wangersky. Vertical Entertainment. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

Washington Post reviews Sleep by Honor Jones (Riverhead): “This is a woman—and a novel—determined to avoid confrontation and drama, and it’s surprising just how hypnotic that is to witness in Jones’s carefully calibrated telling. There will be no glorious retribution, no weepy breakthrough in a therapist’s office, no clarifying moment of remembrance that shatters the leather cloak of repression”; as does NYT: “Jones takes her cues from writers like John Cheever, Richard Yates and Virginia Woolf, all masters of the repressed and unsayable. She covers the same material—the resentments and traumas that smolder in families wrapped in a suburban idyll—and with similar delicacy and humor. But Sleep also introduces a measure of optimism and generosity I found refreshing.”

NYT also reviews The Family Dynamic: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success by Susan Dominus (Crown): “This may be frustrating to parents who want a pat prescription for world domination. However, Dominus leaves us with common-sense things to avoid, and things to do: Expose children to enrichment opportunities, socialize them and read to them.”

LA Times reviews The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America by Mark Whitaker (S. & S.): “That the two strands manage to connect is a testament to Whitaker’s clarity and organizational skills as a writer, and his experience as a journalist. The former editor of Newsweek—he was the first Black leader of a national news weekly—Whitaker has a gift for streamlining gobs of material, some of it quite contentious, into a smooth, readable narrative, or series of narratives that click together”; Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan (Pantheon): “But as Kwan shows, such visions of the future are the refractions of nihilism and the American belief that individual survival and success is due solely to individual effort”; and Mark Twain by Ron Chernow (Penguin Pr.; LJ starred review): “Twain himself once said that ‘Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written.’ But this one feels like the truth of one man’s star-crossed life.”

NPR’s Fresh Air reviews The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, tr. by Ross Benjamin (S. & S.: Summit): “As a novel, The Director itself joins the pleasures of ‘commercial’ fiction with the moral weight of a novel of ideas.”

LitHub gathers the best-reviewed books of the week.

Briefly Noted

Jennifer Hope Choi, author of The Wanderer’s Curse: A Memoir (Norton), shares her “Annotated Nightstand” with LitHub.

Washington Post interviews Rachel Cockerell, author of the debut book Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land (Farrar).

NPR talks to Craig Thompson, creator of the graphic memoir Ginseng Roots (Pantheon).

NYT explores the legacy of Italian chef Marcella Hazan and her cookbooks, as the documentary Marcella premieres.

Controversial former NHL player Sean Avery, who has been accused of domestic violence, has written his debut novel, a hockey romance, People reports; Summer Skate, coauthored by Leslie Cohen, is due out from BenBella on Sept. 9. Hockey romance novelist Emily Rath shares her thoughts on Threads.  

Actor Brie Larson and chef Courtney McBroom are releasing a cookbook, Party People: A Cookbook for Creative Celebrations, due out from DK on Oct. 21, People reports.

Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda shares the books that are getting him out of his political-disillusionment-induced reading slump.

NYT offers “8 New Books We Recommend This Week.”

Reactor recommends what to read after watching Sinners, gathers five novels about human cloning, and rounds up all the new horror, romantasy, and other SFF crossover books arriving in May.

Authors on Air

LitHub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast talks to Hamilton Nolan, author of The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor (Grand Central; LJ starred review).

NPR’s Bullseye interviews Jean Grae, rapper and author of the essay collection In My Remaining Years (Flatiron).

NPR’s Fresh Air speaks with Amanda Hess, author of Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age (Doubleday).

LitHub’s Behind the Mic podcast looks at audiobooks about Chinese cuisine.

The latest episode of The LitHub Podcast features an interview with Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Exit Zero: Stories (FSG Originals).

Christie Brinkley, author of Uptown Girl: A Memoir (Harper Influence), is interviewed on Fox News.

Today, NPR’s All Things Considered will talk to Fredrik Backman, author of My Friends (Atria).

LA Times reports “how Judy Blume’s books became a hot commodity in Hollywood, 50 years later.”

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