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Awards & Buzzy Book News

New York Public Library announces the 2023 Young Lions Fiction Award finalists.

The 2023 Commonweath Short Story Prize finalists are announced.

Wandering Planet Toys  launches the “first-ever officially licensed Nancy Drew retro-style action figures on Kickstarter,” via press release.

Orbit, a division of Hachette Book Group featuring science fiction and fantasy titles, introduces Orbit Works, a new digital publishing imprint.

NYT delves into PEN America’s report on “book bans rising rapidly in the U.S.” Also, an exploration into a new novella Death of an Author written by Stephen Marche with the help of A.I.

Music memoirist Blair Tindall, author of Mozart in the Jungle, has died at 63. NYT has more.

New Title Bestsellers

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

Fiction

Dark Angel by John Sandford (Putnam) flies to No. 1 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Sellers list.

The Only Survivors by Megan Miranda (S. & S.: Marysue Rucci) starts at No. 3 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Sellers list.

Lassiter by J.R. Ward (Gallery) debuts at No. 7 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Sellers list.

Things I Wish I Told My Mother by Susan Patterson and Susan DiLallo with James Patterson (Little, Brown) begins at No. 9 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Sellers list.

Nonfiction

You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith (Atria: One Signal; LJ starred review) shines at No. 3 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Sellers list.

I Swear: Politics Is Messier Than My Minivan by Katie Porter (Crown) rises to No. 6 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Sellers list.

It. Goes. So. Fast.: The Year of No Do-Overs by Mary Louise Kelly (Henry Holt, & Co.) starts at No. 7 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Sellers list.

On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory by Thomas Hertog (Bantam) clocks No. 11 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Sellers list.

LeBron by Jeff Benedict (Avid Reader Press: S. & S.) scores No. 14 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Sellers list.

Reviews

NYT reviews Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe (Farrar): “Offers a multiplicity of notes as a rejoinder, assembling memories and observations, artifacts and artworks, tracing the persistence of racism and brutality while also exploring the varieties of Black life”; The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen (Penguin Pr.): “A thoughtfully built, deeply sourced indictment of a society that prioritizes profit, quick fixes and happy endings over the long slog of care”; and Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia by Hadley Freeman (S. & S.): “Anorexia is narrow and claustrophobic, just as was Freeman’s own life when she was in the grip of the disease. Freeman seems to be aware of this pitfall. She has brought to bear every ounce of her trademark clarity, precision and wit to render her own experience, and that of other women with anorexia, with the utmost specificity and sensitivity.” Also, four short reviews of debut novels containing fairy tales including: The Gospel of Orla by Eoghan Walls (Seven Stories); Chlorine by Jade Song (Morrow; LJ starred review); American Mermaid by Julia Langbein (Doubleday; LJ starred review); and Chrysalis by Anna Metcalfe (Random). 

The Washington Post reviews Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Pantheon): “Presents a dystopian vision so upsetting and illuminating that it should permanently shift our understanding of who we are and what we’re capable of doing”; Greek Lessons by Han Kang, trans. by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won (Hogarth): “The prose Han deploys, at once evocative and elliptical, complements her characters’ inner torment and alienation. There is a sense of inevitability when at last the protagonists begin, touchingly, to communicate with one another, since they alone embody the ideas and predicaments of the text”; and The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen (Penguin Pr.): “Part memoir, part manifesto—Rosen asks uncomfortable but crucial questions, some of them unanswerable, all of them compelling, and the result is an incisive but intimate tour de force that’s as much about Michael’s story as it is about the stories we tell as a culture—what we value, what we see, and what we do our best not to see even when it’s right in front of us.”

NPR reviews The New Earth by Jess Row (Ecco): “A modern epic that takes an unsparing look at family and national dynamics that nobody really wants to confront. It's ambitious and magnificent, the rare swing for the fences that actually connects.”

Locus Magazine reviews New Suns 2: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, ed. By Nisi Shawl (Solaris): “Think of jazz and its essence of intimacy and truth, timelessness and depth, mood and sooth—whole and stimulating beats that set you free. Some stories in New Suns 2 shake you to this rhythm and you feel alive. They make you buzz and sway in tune with yourself, and they speak to your soul at its most intuition.”

Book Marks selects “5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week.”

Briefly Noted

Writer and translator Alison L. Strayer explores how “Annie Ernaux captures the spirit of her era through its big-box stores” as detailed in Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux (Yale Univ.) in an interview with Lit Hub. Also, Elizabeth Graver, Kantika (Metropolitan; LJ starred review), and J.C. Hallman, author of Say Anarcha: A Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women’s Health (Holt), discuss “the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction.

The New York Times Style Magazine’s Culture Issue features conversations between women authors and other artists on “Legends and Heirs,” including: fashion designer Ulla Johnson and Raven Leilani, author of Luster (FSG: Macmillan); Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through (Riverhead), and Weike Wang, Joan Is Okay (Random), on their “mentor-mentee relationship”; “years of advice about building a creative life” with Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (Grove), and Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home (Berkley); and detailing the mutual admiration between Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories (Doubleday), and Mona Awad, Bunny (Viking). Plus, “Mothers and Daughters,” highlighting the relationship between illustrator Sybil Lamb and Imogen Binnie, Nevada (Farrar).

Jonathan Rosen discusses “mental-illness, murder, and a life-altering friendship” with CrimeReads as detailed in his new book, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions (Penguin Pr.).

Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts (Catapult), speaks to the Washington Post about her “new travelogue for Harper’s about a Goop-branded cruise.”

People features two pieces based on an interview with Minka Kelly, on her new memoir Tell Me Everything (Holt), set to come out on May 2, with revelations about reconnecting with her dad, Aerosmith guitarist Rick Dufay and “reconciling with her mom after her ‘chaotic’ childhood.”

Kate Morton chats with NYT’s “Inside the Best-Seller List” about how “a change of perspective changed everything” for her to write her new book, Homecoming (Mariner: HarperCollins).

Judy Blume answers questions posed by the NYT’s “By the Book” questionnaire.

Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Atria: One Signal; LJ starred review), recommends “what not to say to a friend going through a divorce” in an article for Oprah Daily. 

Thriller writer Heather Graham, Shadow of Death (MIRA), writes a piece for CrimeReads exploring how her “band became the highlight of many a mystery convention.”

The Millions revisits the “haunted writing life” of early 19th-century writer John Polidori, The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre (Oxford Univ.).

Becky Chalsen, author of Kismet (Dutton), shares a “reading list of twins in literature” for Lit Hub. 

Tor.com lists “Five SF Stories Set in Eco-Friendly Futures.”

Authors on Air

Julia Lee, Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America (Holt), advocates for “weaponizing invisibility” in a conversation on NPR’s Morning Edition. 

The Keen On podcast features a handful of author interviews featuring: Tanis Rideout, The Sea Between Two Shores (McClelland & Stewart) on “whether we should apologize for the sins of our colonizing ancestors”; Daniel F. Runde on the subject of his book, The American Imperative: Reclaiming Global Leadership through Soft Power (Bombardier); Genevieve Wheeler, Adelaide (St. Martin’s), chatting about “banter, trash talk, and true romance in our social media age”; and, Julia Angwin, author of Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance (Times Bks.: Holt; LJ starred review) expounding on “MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and the origins of our age of advertising driven surveillance capitalism.”

Victor LaValle, Lone Women (One World), discusses “the truth of family secrets” on The Maris Review podcast.

AMC will produce another Anne Rice series based on supernatural secret society Talamasca. Tor.com has more.

USA Today reports on a new Twilight series with Lionsgate TV, based on the book by Stephanie Meyer.

Jonathan Majors will no longer star in the adaptation of Walter Mosely’s The Man in My Basement (Back Bay) in light of his recent domestic violence arrest, according to Shadow and Act.

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