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Awards & News

The winners of the National Book Award are announced: Justin Torres’s Blackouts (Farrar), Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (Yale Univ.), Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory [åmot] (Omnidawn), and Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain, tr. by Bruna Dantas Lobato (New Vessel). NYT, Washington Post, NPR, LA Times, and The Guardian have coverage of the awards ceremony.

Halik Kochanski wins the Wolfson History Prize for Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939–1945 (Liveright: Norton).

Kirkus lists its best fiction of 2023.

Washington Post shares more picks for the best books of 2023: the 11 best poetry collections, the 10 best science fiction and fantasy novels, and the 50 best works of nonfiction.

New Title Best Sellers

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

Fiction

Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros (Entangled: Red Tower) burns to No. 1 on both the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list and the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown) strolls to No. 3 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list and to No. 7 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Clive Cussler The Corsican Shadow by Dirk Cussler (Putnam) rises to No. 11 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list and No. 56 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Pretty Boys Are Poisonous: Poems by Megan Fox (Gallery) holds No. 14 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

The Olympian Affair by Jim Butcher (Ace: Berkley) claims No. 15 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Nonfiction

My Name Is Barbra by Barbra Streisand (Viking) sings to No. 2 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list and No. 6 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Unwoke: How To Defeat Cultural Marxism in America by Ted Cruz (Regnery) takes No. 7 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list, with indications of bulk orders. 

World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music by Jeff Tweedy (Dutton) chimes to No. 8 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list and No. 17 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Teddy and Booker T.: How Two American Icons Blazed a Path for Racial Equality by Brian Kilmeade (Sentinel) rises to No. 9 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list. 

A City On Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith (Penguin Pr.) builds to No. 11 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list, with indications of bulk orders, and to No. 41 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list. 

The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World by Dan Senor and Saul Singer (Avid Reader) holds No. 15 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list. 

Reviews

Washington Post reviews Day by Michael Cunningham (Random House), calling Cunningham “the most elegant writer in America” and the book “gorgeous”, “pensive,” and “plaintive.” 

NYT reviews A Woman I Know: Female Spies, Double Identities, and a New Story of the Kennedy Assassination by Mary Haverstick (Crown): “As a fresh history of U.S. espionage…[it] is an absorbing read. As a smoking-gun investigation into the Kennedy murder, it is less convincing”; Living the Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans by Kenneth Womack (Dey Street): “An interesting case study of two matters: the collateral damage of fame and the difficult process of life writing”; The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire by Tim Schwab (Metropolitan: Holt): “Schwab makes a strong case, based on years of reporting, that under the direction of a humbler man the Gates Foundation would probably be a more effective force for good. The problem is that Schwab is rarely content to let the facts speak for themselves”; and The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens by Helena Kelly (Pegasus): “When Kelly unleashes her inner literary critic, she delights readers with pages upon pages illustrating the enduring influence of Dickens’s fictional biography on his fiction.”

LitHub lists “5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week.”

Briefly Noted

The Millions talks to Ahmed Naji, author of Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison, tr. by Katharine Halls (McSweeney’s Publishing).

Kirkus interviews the authors of two of its 2023 best fiction picks: Daniel Clowes, author of Monica (Fantagraphics; LJ starred review); and Tania James, author of Loot (Knopf).

Washington Post has a Q&A with Olga Ravn, author of My Work, tr. by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell (New Directions).

LA Times speaks with Garrett M. Graff, author of UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There (Avid Reader), and Sigrid Nunez, author of The Vulnerables (Riverhead).

Tracy K. Smith, author of To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (Knopf), answers NYT’s “By the Book” questionnaire.

NYT’s “Inside the Best-Seller List” focuses on Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (Harper; LJ starred review), still on the best seller list after 54 weeks.

NYT has a feature on “the African Artists Driving a Cultural Renaissance,” including authors Nnedi Okorafor and Ruth E. Carter.

Publishers Weekly has a feature for the 20th anniversary of Bloomsbury Academic’s line of books about albums, “33 1/3,” including an interview with a Bloomsbury publisher, a spotlight on movie tie-ins, a focus on the series’ best sellers, and a round-up of its recent releases.

CrimeReads rounds up thrillers where natural disaster looms large.

Washington Post critic Michael Dirda reveals 22 books he wants to re-read.

NYT asks therapists for 7 books that “will make your relationship stronger.”

Workers unionize at the graphic novel publisher Drawn & Quarterly, Publishers Weekly reports.

“A California book club started reading Finnegans Wake in 1995. It just finished,” Washington Post writes.

Authors on Air

NPR’s Fresh Air interviews actor Courtney B. Vance and psychologist Robin L. Smith, authors of The Invisible Ache: Black Men Identifying Their Pain and Reclaiming Their Power (Balance: Hachette).

Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams (Random; LJ starred review), talks to LitHub’s The Maris Review podcast; Zeke Caligirui, coeditor of the essay collection American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (Coffee House Pr.), talks to Fiction/Non/Fiction; and Neill Lochery, author of Cashing Out: The Flight of Nazi Treasure, 1945–1948 (PublicAffairs), talks to Keen On.

Shelf Awareness rounds up the schedule for this weekend’s Book TV on C-SPAN 2.

Tomorrow, Lauren Graham, Have I Told You This Already?: Stories I Don’t Want To Forget To Remember (Ballantine), will appear on the Today Show, and Jonathan Karl, author of Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party (Dutton), will appear on Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

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