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Awards & Book News

The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards are announced. NYT has coverage.

The shortlists for the British Science Fiction Association Awards are announced, Locus reports.

The 2025 Canada Reads winner is A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder by Ma-Nee Chacaby, written with Mary Louisa Plummer (Univ. of Manitoba); CBC has the news.

The Guardian reports how Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Facebook exposé, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (Flatiron), came to top the NYT bestsellers list this week, despite Meta’s attempt to stifle its author. The Bookseller also has coverage.

Rape survivor Gisèle Pelicot will publish a memoir with Penguin Pr. in Jan. 2026, The Guardian reports. Publishers Weekly also has coverage.

President Trump has appointed Keith E. Sonderling as the new acting director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, NPR reports.

Page to Screen

March 21

Being Maria, based on My Cousin Maria Schneider: A Memoir by Vanessa Schneider. Kino Lorber. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

Washington Post reviews a new edition of The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd (Scribner): “The Living Mountain, which was so uncategorizable that it put publishers off until a small press issued it in 1977, has since become a classic of nature writing for good reason. It is one of the most ecstatic testaments to what Shepherd calls ‘the tang of height’ that I have ever encountered”; Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service, ed. by Michael Lewis (Riverhead): “The profiles themselves serve as a balm for the chaos of our government right now. To read them—each takes about 20 minutes—is to drift into an alternate universe filled with the most thoughtful and caring people doing hard things for all the right reasons”; and Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance by Laura Delano (Viking): “And yet, as the latest volume in a more-than-half-century-old strain of anti-psychiatry literature, Unshrunk is limited and highly predictable. There’s much more accurate information, and deeper insight, available in the work of other sophisticatedly critical yet less polemical authors: the social psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Eric Reinhart, for example.”

The Guardian reviews Changing My Mind by Julian Barnes (Notting Hill Editions): “Ultimately it is not just these niggles of inconsistency, but the sense of writing forced to fit a frame that is altogether too neat that left me cold. Who knows, though—a future reread might do the trick. Perhaps when I reach his age, in half a century, I’ll have changed my mind too.”

LA Times reviews The Colony by Annika Norlin, tr. by Alice E. Olsson (Europa): “If only the whole story had been told from Låke’s curious and blinkered perspective, The Colony might have ended up more show than tell, and the more eloquent for it. As it stands, the characterization is thin, the motivations are overdetermined, and the Colony’s endurance demands too steep a suspense of disbelief”; and A Better Ending: A Brother’s Twenty-Year Quest To Uncover the Truth About His Sister’s Death by James Whitfield Thomson (Avid Reader/S. & S.): “At times, Thomson’s accounts of events—such as his role in the hazing of one of his high school football teammates—is narrated at such a distance that it reads as if he wasn’t a participant. That distance recurs often when he becomes a character in the story—almost as if he feels duty-bound to report his actions, but is unwilling to offer insight about himself.”

Briefly Noted

Washington Post revisits Mark Z. Danielewski’s horror novel House of Leaves, which was published 25 years ago this month.

NYT discusses the comedy advice doled out in How To Write a Funny Speech…: For a Wedding, Bar Mitzvah, Graduation & Every Other Event You Didn’t Want To Go to in the First Place by Carol Leifer and Rick Mitchel (Chronicle).

In NYT, V.E. Schwab, author of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (Tor; LJ starred review), names her favorite cross-genre fantasy novels.

David Szalay, author of Flesh (Scribner), shares “The Books of My Life” with The Guardian.

CrimeReads interviews Joshua Hammer, author of The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World’s Oldest Writing (S. & S.).

NYT has “9 New Books We Recommend This Week” and a starter pack of classic private-eye detective novels.

Publishers Weekly notes “6 Books with a Novel Approach to Dating.”

Authors on Air

Today, NPR’s Science Friday will interview John Green, author of Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection (Crash Course).

There’s a new episode of The LitHub Podcast, discussing AI scraping and the books that populate The White Lotus.

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