News

The 2024 Pulitzer Prizes are announced, with Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips winning the top prize for fiction. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall, King: A Life by Jonathan Eig, Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo, No Right to an Honest Living by Jacqueline Jones, and Liliana’s Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera Garza also win prizes. Eduardo Halfon is awarded the Berman Literature Prize for his novel Canción. Oprah picks Colm Toíbín’s Long Island for her book club, and Reese Witherspoon selects Yulin Kuang’s How To End a Love Story. Plus, Simon & Schuster acquires Dutch publisher VBK.

Chelsea Heinbach is the teaching and learning librarian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She was named a 2023 LJ Mover & Shaker for her work (with Nimisha Bhat, Hailley Fargo, and Charissa Powell) in developing the blog and related podcast LibParlor, a site dedicated to helping researchers find community resources and have a place to ask questions, discuss issues, and share expertise. She and the team received an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to create LibParlor Online Learning, a free, online curriculum devoted to research topics and how-tos. LJ recently followed up with her to learn more about her work.

Fifty-seven percent of academic libraries report that the use of audiovisual (AV) sources such as news reels, recordings, performances, and films have increased over the past three years—with 21 percent describing significantly increased usage—while only 15 percent say that use of these resources have decreased, according to Library Journal’s recent AV Primary Sources Survey of Academic Libraries, sponsored by AM, that netted 220 responses from academic librarians in the United States and Canada. Thirteen percent of respondents said that college and university students now prefer AV primary source materials, compared with 18 percent who prefer print and other archival primary source materials.

This Summer Will Be Different by Carley Fortune leads holds this week. Also getting buzz are titles by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro, Kaliane Bradley, Mary Kay Andrews, Colm Toibin, and Jayne Castle. Nine LibraryReads and nine Indie Next picks publish this week. People’s book of the week is How To Read a Book by Monica Wood. Alexis Wright wins the Stella Prize for Praiseworthy. Plus, the Pulitzer Prizes will be announced at 3 p.m. EST today.

On April 25, the Peabody Awards revealed the list of 68 nominations for 2023, chosen from a field of 1,100 entries. This year’s contenders include popular TV series such as The Bear, Bluey, and Reservation Dogs, documentaries about Judy Blume and Little Richard, children’s programming, newscasts—and two offerings from public libraries: Milwaukee Public Library’s social media streams in the interactive and immersive media category, and Borrowed and Banned, a 10-episode podcast from Brooklyn Public Library in the podcast/radio category.

Winners are announced for the Independent Book Publishers Association’s Benjamin Franklin Book Awards for books from indie presses. The Asian American Literature Festival will return in September, organized by a collective of literary groups, this time without the Smithsonian. NPR’s Fresh Air looks back today on past interviews with Paul Auster. Plus, Page to Screen and reviews of Kaliane Bradley’s buzzy The Ministry of Time.

Winners of the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Awards are announced, including best novel Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke. The winners of the League of Canadian Poets prizes are Hannah Green’s Xanax Cowboy, Sandra Ridley’s Vixen, and Bradley Peters’s Sonnets from a Cell. The finalists for the Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence in Canadian Crime Writing, the shortlist for the Leacock Medal for Canadian humor writing, and the shortlist for the Reading the West Book Awards are revealed. A record number of writers were jailed globally in 2023, according to a report by PEN America.

Amber Gagliardi’s passion for gardening started as a child when she helped her grandfather plant seeds. She dreamed of starting a seed library at Middle Country Public Library for years before launching one in 2018 with 15 varieties of vegetable, herb, and flower seeds.

LaShawn Myles had not worked specifically with the disability community when she joined the Maryland State Library for the Blind and Print Disabled in 2018. Her work as an educator led her to libraries, where she quickly became a champion for visually impaired patrons, advocating for resources and finding ways to make materials more accessible.