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Awards News

Six novels make the Booker Prize shortlist: A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam (Hogarth: Crown), Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead (Knopf; LJ starred review), Bewilderment by Richard Powers (Norton; LJ starred review), The Promise by Damon Galgut (Europa Editions), No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead: Penguin), and The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed (Knopf). The Guardian, The NYT , and The LA Times, all have reports. The BBC and The Guardian offer analyses.  

Patricia Smith is awarded 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. LitHub has more.

The shortlist for the 2021 Polari Prize has been announced, including Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez (Doubleday), and Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Grove; LJ starred review). Locus has more. 

The Omega Sci-Fi Awards launches the Feminist Futures Award to recognize “an outstanding feminist sci-fi story.” Locus reports.

StokerCon 2022 announces its guests of honor, including Ernest R. Dickerson, Gemma Files, Brian Keene, John Edward Lawson, and Sheree Renée Thomas.

Reviews

The Washington Post reviews Misfits: A Personal Manifesto by Michaela Coel (Henry Holt): “Coel weaves the pain from racism, loneliness, overt sexualization and assault into every line and every accomplishment…Yet her story isn’t just about surviving success, it’s about surviving.” And, Competing with Idiots: Herman and Joe Mankiewicz, a Dual Portrait by Nick Davis (Knopf): “It is that strange brew — the facility with language and the ability to shrewdly shred a portentous moment while undercutting human relations — that led to Herman and Joe’s greatest successes and failures, and Davis captures it all.” Plus, A Play for the End of the World by Jai Chakrabarti (Knopf): “While the novel circles its characters’ internal dramas, we’re drawn on by the immense gravity of events on the global stage.”

The NYT reviews Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose by Leigh Cowart (PublicAffairs): “a book about people who covet pain — and the relief that comes after it — in seemingly disparate ways, from sexual masochists to competitive hot-pepper-eaters to ultramarathoners competing in a race with no finish line.”

NPR reviews Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday; LJ starred review): “Whitehead has a couple of Pulitzers under his belt, along with several other awards celebrating his outstanding novels. Harlem Shuffle is a suspenseful crime thriller that's sure to add to the tally — it's a fabulous novel you must read.” And, Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest by Fernando Cervantes (Viking): “Cervantes marshals an enormous array of primary and secondary sources to tell the story of the decades that followed Christopher Columbus' arrival on an island off what is now Cuba, in ‘three cramped, ill- equipped vessels, with a combined capacity of ninety men’."

Briefly Noted

Vulture profiles Ruth Ozeki, whose latest novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness (Viking; LJ starred review).

Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday; LJ starred review), shares his writing secrets with Entertainment Weekly’s “Writer’s Room.” Tarana Burke, Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement (Flatiron; LJ starred review) gives EW her pop culture favorites.

Entertainment Weekly has an exclusive first-look and cover reveal of Tom Perrotta's forthcoming sequel to Election, Tracy Flick Can't Win (Scribner), due out June 7th, 2022. 

People has interviews with Tarana Burke, author of Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement (Flatiron; LJ starred review), and Gabrielle Union, You Got Anything Stronger? (Dey Street Books), about their memoirs.

Vanity Fair also has a Q&A with Gabrielle Union about “about the weight of the accountability it takes to open up like this again.”

Salon has an interview with author and veteran Elliot Ackerman, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, (Penguin), about Afghanistan and “how every president made the war worse.”

Esquire speaks with Darla Worden, Cockeyed Happy: Ernest Hemingway's Wyoming Summers with Pauline (Chicago Review Press), about "Hemingway's 'mountain man' persona, his faults as a husband, and his lasting legacy in the Wyoming region." 

The Rumpus talks with Jacques Rancourt, Brocken Spectre (Alice James Books), about his new collection, "the AIDS crisis, the gay pastoral, and what’s next for queer art."

The NYT writes about “The Coming ‘Tsunami’ of Books on Race.”

“Newly discovered Tennessee Williams story published for the first time,” The Guardian reports.

OprahDaily takes a look back on 25 years of Oprah's Book Club. 

BookRiot writes about lessons learned from  "Book Clubbing During a Pandemic: The Online/Offline Experience."

The Atlantic offers this perspective on reading and bookiness: “Ebooks Are an Abomination.”

FoxNews shares an excerpt of The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power by Ben Schreckinger (Twelve), out next week.

Jhumpa Lahiri will publish her next book, Translating Myself and Others, (Princeton Univ. Pr.) in the Spring of 2022, reports LitHub. 

Women crime writers talk about women and violence, and what “readers will and won’t accept” at a CrimeReads roundtable.

CrimeReads shares “Five Books Featuring Paintings That Reveal Emotional Truths About Their Characters.” And, author Joe R. Lansdale pays tribute to Michael K. Williams.

AARP suggests "4 Books That Will Broaden Your View of Disability."

The NYT shares 5 Visual Books and 3 Newly Published books to read this week.

The Millions lists “Southern Gothic: Ten Essentials Books.”

PopSugar offers “The Best New Books by Latinx Authors For This Fall.”

The Washington Post lists this week’s hardcover bestsellers.

Catherine Sheldrick Ross, renowned expert in readers’ advisory and one of the academics leading the study of reading and the reading experience, has died. The Globe & Mail has an obituary. Advisors will know her seminal work from articles such as “Finding without Seeking: The Information Encounter in the Context of Reading for Pleasure” and the book Reading Still Matters: What the Research Reveals about Reading, Libraries, and Community. 

Authors on Air

NPR’s Fresh Air talks with Mary Roach about her new book, Fuzz (Norton; LJ starred review), and “the weird world of animal crime.”

Netflix picks up Grendel, based On Matt Wagner’s Dark Horse comic series. Deadline reports. 

Entertainment Weekly previews Amanda Gorman: Brave Enough with Robin Roberts — A Special Edition of 20/20, which airs tonight 10 p.m. ET on ABC.

Antoni Porowski, Antoni: Let’s Do Dinner (Houghton Harcourt) will be on Watch What Happens Live and Tarana Burke, Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement (Flatiron; LJ starred review), will be on Tamron Hall on Thursday.

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