Want to get the latest book news delivered to your inbox each day? Sign up for our daily Book Pulse newsletter.

Awards & Book News

Longlists for the National Book Award for nonfiction and poetry are announced.

Daniel Mason’s North Woods (Random; an LJ Best Book), Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (Penguin Pr.), and James Crews’s The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal (Storey) win New England Book Awards, Shelf Awareness reports.

The shortlist for the BBC National Short Story Award is revealed; LitHub has the announcement.

The longlist for the CBC Nonfiction Prize for unpublished works is announced.

A study by Pearson and Penguin Books shows that diversifying reading lists and teaching texts by writers of color can have a “life-changing” impact on students. The Bookseller has coverage.

Page to Screen

September 13

The Critic, based on the novel Curtain Call by Anthony Quinn. Lionsgate. Reviews | Trailer

The Killer’s Game, based on the novel by Jay Bonansinga. Lionsgate. Reviews | Trailer

Lies We Tell, based on the novel Uncle Silas by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Quiver Distribution. Reviews | Trailer

Uglies, based on the novel by Scott Westerfeld. Netflix. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

Washington Post reviews Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild (New Pr.): “It offers a promising vision of an ‘empathy bridge’ with upper and lower ‘decks’—noblesse oblige up top, solidarity among the downtrodden below—but the idea is underdeveloped”; Playground by Richard Powers (Norton): “Although Playground is nowhere near as mammoth as the author’s Pulitzer-winning opus, The Overstory, it follows a similarly fragmented structure. But trust me, any disorientation will eventually melt into wonderment”

The Guardian reviews Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks To Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman (Farrar): “[Burkeman is] a self-help sceptic, too. He doesn’t trade in magic bullets or revelatory hacks. Indeed, he rejects the premise that life can be somehow mastered and the implication that, until we manage get to that point, we’re still half-formed”; and The Story of a Heart: Two Families, One Heart, and the Medical Miracle That Saved a Child’s Life by Rachel Clarke (Scribner): “As well as a tender account of two families linked by tragic circumstances, and the transfer of a human organ from one body to another, The Story of a Heart provides a detailed map of the surgical innovations, people and logistics that allowed that transplant to happen.”

NYT reviews Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee (Norton): “A Pulitzer Prize–winning critic currently based at the Washington Post, Smee has a gimlet eye, a seductive style and a novelist’s feel for character and incident.”

LA Times reviews two new books about freedom and fascism: On Freedom by Timothy Snyder (Crown) and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past To Control the Future by Jason Stanley (Atria/One Signal).

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

Briefly Noted

The New York Times Magazine has a profile of Tony Tulathimutte, author of the story collection Rejection (Morrow).

NYT also talks to director Pedro Almodóvar about his new book, The Last Dream, tr. by Frank Wynne (HarperVia).

Bernardine Evaristo, author of Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (Grove), shares “The Books of My Life” with The Guardian.

LA Times interviews Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, authors of Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter (Penguin Pr.).

Kirkus talks to Ron Stallworth, author of The Gangs of Zion: A Black Cop’s Crusade in Mormon Country (Legacy Lit).

The BBC interviews Richard Osman, author of We Solve Murders (Pamela Dorman: Viking).

Terry Szuplat, author of Say It Well: Find Your Voice, Speak Your Mind, Inspire Any Audience (Harper Business), has an essay in Time about making a persuasive argument.

People speaks with Christine Pride about her debut novel, All the Men I’ve Loved Again, due out from Atria in July 2025.

Romantasy author Scarlett St. Clair’s novel Terror at the Gates, a sex-positive “feminist rage fantasy,” will be published in July 2025 by Bloom, Publishers Weekly reports.

NYT lists “Seven New Books We Recommend This Week.”

The Guardian recommends “five of the best books about female friendship.”

CrimeReads identifies “5 Great Psychological Thrillers About Reunions and Old Secrets,” and Alison Gaylin, author of Robert B. Parker’s Buzz Kill (Putnam), shares her favorite fictional women detectives.

Reactor gathers “All the New Horror, Romantasy, and Other SFF Crossover Books Arriving in September 2024.”

Mark Jury, a photographer who created one of the first photo books about the Vietnam War, has died at age 80; NYT has an obituary.

Authors on Air

PBS News Hour interviews Dan Slepian about his book The Sing Sing Files: One Journalist, Six Innocent Men, and a Twenty-Year Fight for Justice (Celadon).

NPR’s Fresh Air talks to NYT reporter Nick Corasantini about both the election and the club where Springsteen got his start, as detailed in his new book, I Don’t Want To Go Home: The Oral History of the Stone Pony (Harper).

NPR’s Wild Card speaks with Hanif Abdurraqib, author of the National Book Award–longlisted There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random).

LitHub launches The LitHub Podcast with an episode about “literary lists and the people who love, hate, tolerate, and make them.”

Kirsty Greenwood’s novel The Love of My Afterlife (Berkley) is being developed for the big screen, Deadline reports.

A series adaptation of Alice Feeney’s novel Sometimes I Lie is in the works; Deadline has the news.

Want to get the latest book news delivered to your inbox each day? Sign up for our daily Book Pulse newsletter.