Want to get the latest book news delivered to your inbox each day? Sign up for our daily Book Pulse newsletter.

October Book Clubs, Booklists & Awards

October's Read with Jenna book club pick is The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn (Knopf).

GMA selects Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan (Ballantine).

B&N picks The Night Ship by Jess Kidd (Atria).

Reese Witherspoon chooses Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press; LJ starred review).

Amazon’s Sarah Selects is reading River Woman, River Demon by Jennifer Givhan (Blackstone).

The inaugural Utopia Awards winners are announced.

Reviews

NYT reviews The Winners by Fredrik Backman (Atria): “in The Winners, the third installment in the hockey-centric Beartown trilogy, Fredrik Backman takes competition, friendship, politics and town rivalry to appropriately biblical proportions.” And, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks (Farrar): “The book could prove highly influential, inspiring scholars to use the lens of military history to re-examine the victories and defeats of other consequential social movements.” Also, Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way by Kieran Setiya (Riverhead): “Reading it is like speaking with a thoughtful friend who never tells you to cheer up, but, by offering gentle companionship and a change of perspective, makes you feel better anyway.” And, Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America’s Cemeteries by Greg Melville (Abrams): “this clever, sensitive book gives us a new way to think about death, not as the final chapter, but as a window onto life in America.” Plus, Late Summer Ode by Olena Kalytiak Davis (Copper Canyon Pr.): “The energy of her work hasn’t waned, and you have to wonder whether her poetry is less minor than she thinks. Out of the raw materials of a messy, overripe life there is still juice to be extracted…”

The Washington Post reviews Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman (Penguin Pr.): “The best of them will have learned from Haberman’s book that none of it would have been possible but for a social, cultural, political, media and moral breakdown that overtook New York beginning in the 1970s, a fiasco of trusted institutions that, having allowed the Trumpian virus to grow, failed at every step to contain its spread, then profited from, aided and even cheered its devastation.” LA Times also reviews: “Over time, such nuts stale faster than a Christmas fruitcake, but what will remain from “Confidence Man,” marketed as the most insightful volume on Trump by his most insightful chronicler, is Haberman’s view of the man.”

USA Today reviews Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press; LJ starred review), giving it 4 out of 4 stars: "Ng’s paragraphs are built with sentences so lovely and lyrical you likely will find yourself marking passages in every chapter to share with others." LA Times also reviews: “One of Ng’s most poignant tricks in this novel is to bury its central tragedy — the forcible separation of children from their parents — in the middle of the action.”

The Rumpus reviews Life Is Everywhere by Lucy Ives (Graywolf): “Life is Everywhere shatters any kind of straightforward narrative arc in favor of a collage of shards that emphasizes the tone, atmosphere, and the general experience of life in the world at a particular moment. And it wouldn’t work were Ives not a Big Ideas writer on the level of Gaddis, or DeLillo, or Wallace. Fortunately for all of us, she is.”

Slate reviews The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler (MCD): "the imaginative stretches the novel calls for—the consideration of what shapes minds might take in bodies radically different from ours—make up for the occasional finger wagging. His octopuses are so much more than teacherly dispensers of life lessons, and fortunately, this wondrous novel is, too."

Briefly Noted

LA Times talks with Adam Hochschild about his new book, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis (Mariner; LJ starred review).

Constance Wu discusses her new memoir, Making a Scene (Scribner), with USA Today.

Bustle profiles and interviews Elizabeth Strout, author of Lucy by the Sea (Random).

Tor shares an excerpt from Veronica Roth’s forthcoming dystopian, Poster Girl (Morrow; LJ starred review), due out October 18th.

BookPage has suggestions for Horror, Mysteries, Witchy books, Whodunit, and Deathly Nonfiction.

Today shares “The best vampire books to read, Twilight and beyond.”

Bustle picks 10 must-read books for the week.

Vulture has "The Best Horror Novels of 2022 (So Far).”

BookRiot rounds up the best books from July-September, and the 25 best space operas.

CrimeReads shares 10 books for October.

Shondaland suggests spooky reads.

BookRiot recommends 12 romances.

LitHub previews 15 paperback releases.

Authors On Air

NPR’s Fresh Air speaks with NYT reporters Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe about their new book, When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm (Doubleday).

NPR’s All Things Considered talks with GennaRose Nethercott about her new book, Thistlefoot, (Anchor; LJ starred review), and exploring “painful history through folklore.”

NPR’s Morning Edition discusses Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 (Farrar), with author Thomas E. Ricks.

Constance Wu, Making a Scene (Scribner), talks about "her recent allegation that she was sexually harassed by a producer of Fresh Off the Boat" with Good Morning America.  

Salon previews what to expect from AMC's Interview with the Vampire, based on the book by Anne Rice. 

Lady Chatterley’s Lover will get a new screen adaptation. T&C has details.

Want to get the latest book news delivered to your inbox each day? Sign up for our daily Book Pulse newsletter.