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Awards & Book News

Helen Czerski’s The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works (Norton) and Michael Malay’s Late Light: Finding Home in the West Country (Manilla Pr.) win Wainwright Prizes for nature writing; The Guardian has coverage.

The shortlist for the American Library in Paris Award is announced in LitHub.

The shortlist is announced for the Mo Siewcharran Prize for unpublished fantasy by writers from underrepresented backgrounds; Locust has the news.

Amicus briefs are filed ahead of key Fifth Circuit “freedom to read” hearings, Publishers Weekly reports.

Canada’s Giller literary prize drops sponsor Scotiabank from its name after protests over the bank’s investments in Israeli weapons manufacturing, The Guardian reports.

New Title Bestsellers

Links for the week: NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers | NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers | USA Today Bestselling Books

Fiction

The Games Gods Play by Abigail Owen (Red Tower) wins No. 1 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list and the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Capture or Kill by Vince Flynn & Don Bentley (Atria/Emily Bestler) captures No. 2 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list and No. 13 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Chainsaw Man, Vol. 16 by Tatsuki Fujimoto (VIZ Media) cuts down No. 2 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

The Cursed by Harper L. Woods (Bramble) enchants No. 3 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list and No. 15 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Passions in Death by J.D. Robb (St. Martin’s) grasps No. 4 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list and No. 6 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig (Viking) soars to No. 6 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list.

Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors (Ballantine) holds No. 8 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list.

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Scribner) jumps to No. 10 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list.

Wild Eyes by Elsie Silver (Bloom) gallops to No. 10 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Clive Cussler: Ghost Soldier by Mike Maden (Putnam) marches to No. 14 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list.

Nonfiction

Lovely One by Ketanji Brown Jackson (Random) achieves No. 1 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers list and No. 9 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Dynamic Drive: The Purpose-Fueled Formula for Sustainable Success by Molly Fletcher (Hachette Go) is propelled to No. 4 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Upworthy: Good People—Stories from the Best of Humanity by Gabriel Reilich and Lucia Knell (National Geographic) rockets to No. 7 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers list.

America’s Deadliest Election: The Cautionary Tale of the Most Violent Election in American History by Dana Bash & David Fisher (Hanover Square) reaches No. 8 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers list.

Save America by Donald J. Trump (Winning Team) gets No. 11 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers list, though some booksellers report receiving bulk orders.

The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl (Spiegel & Grau) flies to No. 12 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers list.

Reviews

NYT reviews Office Politics by Wilfrid Sheed (McNally Editions): “Encompassing a year in the none-too-robust life of a low-circulation magazine called The Outsider, the novel reads like a Game of Thrones among warring cubicles, or an extremely low-stakes version of Succession”; Health and Safety: A Breakdown by Emily Witt (Pantheon): “It’s a lovely, earnest sentiment. But Witt…writes with such cool precision that it’s hard to imagine her fully losing herself in sentimental projects, even with chemical assistance”; Herscht 07769 by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, tr. by Ottilie Mulzet (New Directions): “Is Krasznahorkai using style to convey something that the story alone can’t? And will he pull it off? Having persisted to the final period, I am happy to report that he is, and does”; and three new books about “debt’s fraught politics and history”: The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding by William Hogeland (Farrar), We Are Not Able To Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance by Mara Kardas-Nelson (Metropolitan), and Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis by Ryann Liebenthal (Dey Street).

LA Times reviews Us Fools by Nora Lange (Two Dollar Radio): “The real pleasure of the book, once you get used to it, is the complexity of Lange’s narrative style, the way it replicates the moment-by-moment passage of time in Bernie’s life and portrays how she puts up with the difficulties of learning to understand and survive the hand she has been dealt.”

Washington Post reviews Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari (Random): “This is a book about AI that shares in the prevailing spirit of the era of ChatGPT. This is not an accusation…. It is only an acknowledgment that a lucid reader cannot help but see just how reflective this book is of the same worrisome trends that Harari…proposes to expose and critique”; Question 7 by Richard Flanagan (Knopf): “Flanagan has produced a kind of philosophical fantasia, a highly original weaving together of a half-dozen essayistic narratives about the sad, wondrous world we all live in”; and Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro (Grove): “This is not a lusty book, but it is without a doubt Quatro’s fleshiest, and her most formally inventive.”

LitHub has “Five Book Reviews You Need To Read This Week.”

Briefly Noted

Ketanji Brown Jackson, author of Lovely One (Random), answers NYT’s “By the Book” questionnaire.

Vulture talks to Robert Caro about trying to finish the final volume of his LBJ pentalogy. Meanwhile, in NYT, Caro reflects on the 50th anniversary of his seminal work The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, and NYT asks why it took until now to publish an ebook version of the 1,300-page tome.

Publishers Weekly discovers how a graphic novel is translated to audiobook, speaking with the team behind the audio adaptation of Darrin Bell’s The Talk (Macmillan Audio; LJ starred review).

LitHub interviews poet Srikanth Reddy, author of Underworld Lit (Wave).

LitHub recommends “Ten Books That Reveal Myanmar for the Complex Mosaic It Is.”

CrimeReads gathers seven eerie crime novels.

Kirkus has three riveting suspense audiobooks.

Reactor selects five horror books built around women’s friendships.

Vulture has an obituary for writer Noel Parmentel, “the man Joan Didion left behind.”

Authors on Air

Fox News interviews Carlos Whittaker, author of Reconnected: How 7 Screen-Free Weeks with Monks and Amish Farmers Helped Me Recover the Lost Art of Being Human (Thomas Nelson). He will also appear on Good Morning America today.

NPR’s Fresh Air talks to Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, authors of Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter (Penguin Pr.). Later today, Fresh Air will speak with Nick Corasaniti, author of I Don’t Want To Go Home: The Oral History of the Stone Pony (Harper).

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

Lilly Wachowski will adapt Andrew Joseph White’s queer YA debut novel, Hell Followed with Us, into a full-length animated feature, Deadline reports.

Supernatural webcomic Third Shift Society is headed to TV; Deadline has the news.

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