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Booklists: Antiracism, Pride Month, Summer Reading, & More

Anti-racism

Town & Country: “12 Books About Racism to Read Right Now.”

Bustle: “10 Books About Race To Read Instead Of Asking A Person Of Color To Explain Things To You.”

The Cut: “13 Books You Should Read About Black Lives.”

Esquire: “If You Want to Learn About Anti-Racism, These 10 Books Are a Start.”

Omnivoracious: “6 books on antiracism to read right now.” Also, “Books for kids to celebrate diversity and inspire change.”

Popsugar: “100+ Books by Black Women That Should Be Essential Reading For Everyone.” Also, “8 Impactful Books on Race in America White People Should Read.”

Lifehacker: “Check Out This List of More Than 100 Diverse Children's Books.” With the list is a focus on why such books are vital.

Literary Hub: “Let the World Be a Black Poem: Poetry at a Time of Protest.” Not a list but the poems themselves. Also, "Readings on Racism, White Supremacy, and Police Violence in America Looking Back in Order to Move Forward."

Tor.com has a piece by Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby (Tor.com): “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: The Duty of the Black Writer During Times of American Unrest.”

The Atlantic has “The American Nightmare: To be black and conscious of anti-black racism is to stare into the mirror of your own extinction,” an essay by Ibram X Kendi, How To Be an Antiracist (One World Pubs.; LJ starred review).

Electric Lit collects some of their interviews “with authors who are shedding light on the experience of living as a Black American under white supremacy.”

Slate reports “There’s Been a Run on Anti-Racist Books: Books like How to Be an Antiracist and The New Jim Crow are outselling the new Hunger Games.”

Pride Month

BookPage: “A Pride parade for your bookshelf.”

BuzzFeed: “17 LGBTQ-Authored Cookbooks To Cook From During Pride (And Beyond).”

National Indigenous History Month

In Canada, June is National Indigenous History Month. CBC has a reading list.

Summer Reading and June Books

The StarTribune: “Great Escapes.”

BookPage: “8 ways to spend a summer day.”

The Millions: “The Most Anticipated” June preview.

Entertainment Weekly: the best books of June.

Bustle: “The 25 Most Anticipated Books Of June 2020.”

Tor.com: “All the New Fantasy Books Arriving in June.”

Gizmodo: “Somehow It's Time for June's List of New Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books.”

Lastly, Esquire: “The Best Books to Elevate Your Reading List in 2020.”

Awards

Lambda Literary announces the Lammy Award winners. Among the winners are Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn (Liveright: W.W. Norton; LJ starred review) for Lesbian Fiction and Lot: Stories by Bryan Washington (Riverhead: Penguin) for Gay Fiction.

The Shortlist for the Desmond Elliott Prize is announced. The Bookseller reports.

The shortlist is also announced for the Klaus Flugge Prize.

Reviews

NPR reviews The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (Riverhead: Penguin): “Again and again, throughout this entertaining and brazenly improbable novel, Bennett stops readers — or at least stopped this white reader — in their tracks with such pointed observations about privilege and racism.”

The Washington Post reviews A Good Marriage by Kimberly McCreight (Harper): “gimlet-eyed.” Also, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (Riverhead: Penguin): “exquisite story of love, survival and triumph.”

The NYT reviews A Burning by Megha Majumdar (Knopf; LJ starred review): “This is a book to relish for its details, for the caress of the writer’s gaze against the world, the way it dawdles over all that might be considered coarse or inconsequential.” Also, A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner by Chris Atkins (Atlantic Books): “explores how public perceptions of prison life are wildly different from the reality.” The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir by Wayétu Moore (Graywolf Press: Macmillan; LJ starred review): “This memoir adds an essential voice to the genre of migrant literature, challenging false popular narratives that migration is optional, permanent and always results in a better life.” The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move by Sonia Shah (Bloomsbury: Macmillan): “explores the history of intellectual connections among all these migration phenomena, tackling with compassion and insight a deeply complex and challenging subject.” Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan (Ecco: Harper): “The novel is shot through with moments of such startling self-awareness.” The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America by Eric Cervini (FSG): “Kameny has found his hagiographer.” Between Everything and Nothing: The Journey of Seidu Mohammed and Razak Iyal and the Quest for Asylum by Joe Meno (Counterpoint): “we don’t get a clear picture of their distinctive personalities, tics and desires. Their similar reactions of fear, anger and disbelief along the way feel repetitive.” Lastly, the paper’s “New & Noteworthy” column gathers visual books.

Briefly Noted

Barnes and Noble announces its June book club pick, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (Riverhead: Penguin).

The New Yorker has a newly published Ernest Hemingway short story: “Pursuit As Happiness.”

USA Today features #VERYFAT #VERYBRAVE: The Fat Girl's Guide to Being #Brave and Not a Dejected, Melancholy, Down-in-the-Dumps Weeping Fat Girl in a Bikini by Nicole Byer (Andrews McMeel Publishing).

Entertainment Weekly excerpts Set My Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson (Hanover Square Press: Harper). It is source of director Edgar Wright’s, (Baby Driver, Last Night in Soho), forthcoming adaptation.

Shondaland interviews Meredith Talusan, Fairest (Viking: Penguin; LJ starred review).

Electric Lit interviews Carter Sickels, The Prettiest Star (Hub City Press).

Tor.com interviews Mercedes Lackey.

Entertainment Weekly interviews Matt Ortile, The Groom Will Keep His Name And Other Vows I've Made about Race, Resistance, and Romance (Bold Type Books; LJ starred review). Literary Hub has an interview.

USA Today features Kristen Bell and The World Needs More Purple People (Random House Books for Young Readers).

In its “The Americans” series, the NYT features Wallace Stegner.

The NYT reports that PRH, Harper, Hachette and others are suing the Internet Archive over its posting of free ebooks.

PBS NewsHour has “5 book covers that show how Ann Petry’s ‘The Street’ was depicted over time.”

EarlyWord is moving its GalleyChat from today to next Tuesday, to participate in #TheShowMustBePaused initiative that includes a social media blackout today.

COVID-19 Reading and RA/Collection Development Resources

There is more serialized fiction, one of the noteable new aspects of the literary response to the pandemic: io9 is offering Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Charm and Hunger (John Joseph Adams/Mariner Books: HMH) through June 2020, with a chapter a day.

The NYT writes “How You Should Read Coronavirus Studies, or Any Science Paper” in a piece about the genre of scientific research.

More publishers announce they will not take part of the Frankfurt Book Fair. The Bookseller reports.

The World Fantasy Convention will go virtual this year.

Tor.com is hosting a virtual convention, TorCon, starting on June 11.

Authors on Air

PBS NewsHour has “Roxane Gay, Anna Deavere Smith and Tay Anderson on the protests’ hope and despair.”

Bustle has a list of “The Best Book Adaptations Streaming On HBO Max Now.”

The Today show features Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of the National Book Award–Winning Stamped from the Beginning by Jason Reynolds & Ibram X. Kendi (Little, Brown: Macmillan), Oh Gussie!: Cooking and Visiting in Kimberly's Southern Kitchen by Kimberly Schlapman, Martha Foose (William Morrow: Harper), A Dolly for Christmas: The True Story of a Family's Christmas Miracle by Kimberly Schlapman, illustrated by Morgan Huff (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers: Hachette), and Walls Can Fall: Race, Reconciliation & Righteousness in a Divided World by Kenneth C Ulmer (Four Rivers Design).

Richard Adams’s estate wins a court case for rights to Watership Down. Author Bill O’Reilly, who was fired from Fox, is getting a new TV show on the OTT network. Deadline reports.

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