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Awards News & Book Bans

The 35th Annual Lambda Awards finalists are announced.

The Jhalak Prize longlist is announced.

The Los Angeles Times announces their Festival of Books lineup. 

PEN America asks Hong Kong to “drop sedition charges against booksellers.”

NYT delves into the issue of “prohibited topics" in books at Florida schools, including discussions about race. Author James Patterson discusses the bans of his books in Florida on USA Today. Also, a remembrance of “stars we lost” this year, including authors Kenzaburō Ōe and Russell Banks.

The Washington Post explores books that “examine the attitudes and policties that keep poverty entrenched.”

New Title Bestsellers

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

Fiction

Worthy Opponents by Danielle Steel (Delacorte) debuts at No. 2 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Sellers list.

Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson (Pamela Dorman) reaches No. 5 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Sellers list.

The London Séance Society by Sarah Penner (Park Row) calls in No. 7 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Sellers list.

Weyward by Emilia Hart (St. Martin’s) heads to No. 8 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Sellers list.

Star Wars Jedi: Battle Scars by Sam Maggs (Random House Worlds) slices to No. 11 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Sellers list.

Nonfiction

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell (Random) arrives at No. 8 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Sellers list.

Reviews

NYT reviews Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains, by Alexa Hagerty (Crown): “Besides the advantage of freeing her voice to slip back and forth in time and space, her narrative, thus fractured, reproduces the traumatic, dispersed experience of the bones themselves, and the interrupted lives of the survivors.” And 4 short reviews of new crime and mystery books, including: 48 Clues Into the Disappearance of My Sister by Joyce Carol Oates (Mysterious: Norton); Murder Under a Red Moon: A 1920s Bangalore Mystery by Harini Nagendra (Pegasus); Red Queen by Juan Gómez-Jurado (Minotaur: St. Martin’s); and Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto (Berkley).

The Washington Post reviews The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear (Harper): “Steeped in the stark historical realism of life in Britain during and between the 20th century’s two world wars. But unlike the Maisie books, “The White Lady” does not carry a cozy-ish veneer; it’s darker and more foreboding.”

NPR reviews We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxanna Asgarian (Farrar): “Journalist Roxanna Asgarian’s tenacious and vulnerable reporting reveals the foundation of this intensely disturbing story—a broken child welfare system whose singular accomplishment has been the uniformity by which its bureaucracy has ruined lives across state lines.”

Tor.com reviews Hospital by Han Song (Amazon Crossing): “A maximalist novel, at least in the aesthetic sense—and it’s a work that ventures to some truly unexpected places.”

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

Briefly Noted

The Millions has a conversation with Sabrina Orah Mark about “finding truth” in the subject of her book, Happily: A Personal History—With Fairy Tales by (Random).

Jennifer Rosner, author of Once We Were Home (Flatiron), talks to Natalie Jenner at Lit Hub about “crafting evocative historical fiction that honors the past.”

Mona Simpson, Commitment (Knopf), highlights her own marriage issues by answering NYT’s “By the Book” questions.

USA Today explores revelations made in Paris: The Memoir by Paris Hilton (Dey Street).

Lemony Snicket and Mike Mignola, of Hellboy fame, to come out with an “illustrated edition” of Pinocchio, according to Tor.com.

K-Pop group NCT 127 will come out with a graphic novel titled Limitless with Z2 Comics. Variety has more.

CrimeReads revisists the work and times of crime writer Elisabeth Sanxay Holdling. 

Lit Hub shares a “coming-of-age” reading list for queer readers.

Tor.com recommends “10 Books to Chase Those The Last of Us Vibes.”

The Washington Post provides “5 new mystery novels worth staying up late to finish.”

The Guardian lists “Top 10 visionary books about scientists: searching for an answer.”

Authors on Air

Richard Nuila, author of The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine (Scribner), talks about his experience treating “mostly uninsured and undocumented patients” at a safety-net hospital in an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross on Fresh Air.

Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different (Viking; LJ starred review), chats about “her brush with mortality and the ‘sourdough starter of ego death,’ and the problems of being an artist under capitalism” in conversation with Jordan Kisner of the Thresholds podcast.

The Keen On podcast features a few interviews with authors such as Alissa Quart on the subject of her book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream (Ecco); Meredith Broussard discussing her newest book, More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (MIT); and Patti McCracken on “the early 20th-century Hungarian women who poisoned 160 men” as detailed in her book, The Angel Makers: Arsenic, a Midwife, and Modern History’s Most Astonishing Murder Ring (Morrow). 

Josie Silver’s 2018 book, One Day in December (Ballantine), will be adapted for a Netflix series with Lucy Boynton as executive producer and star. Deadline reports. Also, Guillermo del Toro’s live-action adaptation of Frankenstein will purportedly have a star-studded cast. Tor.com also reports on this news.

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