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Awards News

Susanna Clarke wins the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction for Piranesi (Bloomsbury USA: Macmillan; LJ starred review), her second novel, after Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

The shortlist for the prize, rich with display and RA possibilities, is here.

The 2021 Deutscher Science Fiction Preis Winners are announced. Locus Magazine has the news.

New Title Bestsellers

Links for the week: NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers | NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers | USA Today Best-Selling Books

Fiction

A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins (Riverhead) crackles at No. 1 on both the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list and on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Spy School at Sea by Stuart Gibbs (S. & S. Books for Young Readers) swims to No. 8 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

The Aristocrat by Penelope Ward (Kindle) debuts at No. 13 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Nonfiction

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock (S. & S; LJ starred review) starts at No. 2 and No. 4 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list.

The Nightmare Before Christmas: The Official Cookbook & Entertain Guide by Kim Laidlaw, Jody Revenson, Caroline Hall (Insight: S. & S.) cuts to No. 10 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Reviews

NYT reviews People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present by Dara Horn (Norton): ““People Love Dead Jews” is an outstanding book with a bold mission. It criticizes people, artworks and public institutions that few others dare to challenge.”

NPR reviews On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson (Graywolf Press): “She doesn't write, as so many people on the internet are conditioned to do, from a position of defensiveness, an assumption of bad faith readings, a desire to make her words sleek and unassailable. The result is not fuzziness but precision, a hyper-awareness of moral shading. In On Freedom, Nelson is doing what feels like intellectual echolocation: putting out calls and seeing what answers.” Also, The Archer by Shruti Swamy (Algonquin): “The Archer's beauty resides in Swamy's sequential narrative form, which reads like music — at times almost exactly like reading a musical score — but with something more; her words carry the visceral power of a dancer's intersection with air.”

The Washington Post reviews Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood by Dawn Turner (S. & S.; LJ starred review): “Turner is a natural born storyteller and a sponge for knowledge, trivia, memories, gossip and urban folk lore (many Black women readers may be particularly shocked at the origins of a common anatomical nickname). She is a keen observer with a journalist’s curiosity and the wisdom to know that the panorama becomes clearer the narrower the focus.” Also, O. Henry:101 Stories, edited by Ben Yagoda (Library of America: Penguin): “Even though O. Henry revels in puns and wordplay, period slang and colorful rhetorical exaggeration, he keeps his narrative voice intimate and confiding.”

Tor.com reviews The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina by Zoraida Córdova (Atria): “Lyric and wry, The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina is an innovative novel full of richly memorable characters and an enchanted atmosphere. There’s a deep comfort to it, a thorough, luminous hope.”

Book Marks has "5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week."

Briefly Noted

People chats with Aliza Kelly about her newest book This Is Your Destiny: Using Astrology to Manifest Your Best Life (St. Martin’s: Macmillan), and shares an excerpt of her book to be released on Sept 28. Also, a discussion with Hannah Brown about her book God Bless This Mess: Learning to Live and Love Through Life’s Best (and Worst) Moments (HarperCollins) and the “messiness” of her life’s journey thus far. Gabrielle Union, You Got Anything Stronger? (Dey Street Books), talks to NYT's By the Book about her reading habits.

Lauren Groff, Matrix (Riverhead), talks with Rebecca Makkai about “literary ethics, the loneliness of bodies, and writerly friendship” for LitHub. BOMB Magazine features an interview between Asha Pandya, The Archer (Algonquin), and her mother Shruti Swamy “about dance, desire, and more.”

Nick Rennison, editor of American Sherlocks: The Golden Age of the American Detective (No Exit), explores “the early days of American detective fiction and the sleuths who competed with Sherlock Holmes for mystery readers” for CrimeReads. Also, Lisa Morton and Leslie Klinger, editors of Weird Women: Volume 2: 1840-1925: Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Female Writers (Pegasus: S. & S.), write about “the 19th century women who wrote ‘weird’ stories and refused to pigeonholed by genre.” Plus, Matthew Hart, Ice Angel (Pegasus: S. & S.), discusses “the strange story of a dog, a diamond discovery, and the fierce rivalries of the Canadian arctic.” And, Alice Feeney, author of Rock Paper Scissors (Flatiron), shares “10 novels about unraveling relationships.” Stewart Neville of The House of Ashes (Soho Crime) explains why he will no longer hide his Northern Irish accent in his writing.

Annabel Abbs writes about her book Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women (Tin House: W. W. Norton) and about "following the paths of wild-walking women of the past, from Nan Shepherd to Georgia O'Keeffe" for Lit Hub. 

NPR lists “3 Books - And 3 Lessons - 20 Years After 9/11” featuring The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock (S. & S), The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence by Douglas London (Hachette), and The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden by Peter Bergen (S. & S.).

Tor.com has a cover reveal for Alix E. Harrow’s newest, A Mirror Mended (Tor.com: Macmillan) to be released June 2022.

The New York Times Style Magazine has an exploration of "the Black recovery stories speaking to individual and collective wellness."

Lit Hub lists "7 Novels For Living Out Your Cottagecore Fantasies."

Tor.com provides “All the New Science Fiction Books Arriving in September!”

CrimeReads has “10 New Books Coming Out This Week.”

The Washington Post gives "15 books to read this fall."

Authors on Air

Yiyun Li, Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace with Yiyun Li (Public Space: Ingram), talks about "her love of Russian novels and describes what it was like reading War and Peace in sections at the ends of the newspaper when she was growing up in Beijing" with the Fiction / Non / Fiction podcast.

Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Graywolf Press), chats about "criticism, intentionality, and pain" on the The Maris Review podcast.

Bryan Christy of In the Company of Killers (Putnam) speaks about "exposing corruption through journalism...and spy thrillers" with the Book Dreams podcast.

Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth: Crown), discusses “the artificial boundary between the natural and man-made” on the Thresholds podcast.

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