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

Awards, News & Events

Pankaj Mishra wins the Weston International Award for his nonfiction work, CBC reports.

The Frank R. Paul Award winners are announced.

Seattle Worldcon 2025 announces Brandon O’Brien as its poet laureate. Locus has details.

Publishers Weekly previews Comic-Con, which kicks off in San Diego tomorrow. 

The Arthur C. Clarke Award winner will be announced tonight.

Harper Alley will expand to publish adult graphic novels, Publishers Lunch reports.

Influential publisher Peter Jovanovich dies at 75. Publishers Weekly has an appreciation.

Reviews

NYT reviews The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Hidden History of Math’s Unsung Trailblazers by Kate Kitagawa & Timothy Revell (Morrow): “As well as knowing history, Kitagawa and Revell are expert explainers of mathematics. Anyone who has never been sure what an algorithm is can understand the concept here, and their account of calculus is so lucid and compact that I found it thrilling”; and A Hunger To Kill: A Serial Killer, a Determined Detective, and the Quest for a Confession That Changed a Small Town Forever by Kim Mager & Lisa Pulitzer (St. Martin’s): “It takes readers inside the difficult, delicate, disorienting act of earning a killer’s trust so that his victims can have justice. In an era of facile amateur recaps, this has real value.”

Washington Post re-reviews Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance (Harper): “Hillbilly Elegy is an entry in the pantheon of uplift narratives, a kind of appendage to the self-help genre, and it is characteristically cheesy.”

Briefly Noted

LibraryReads and Library Journal offer read-alikes for The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love by India Holton (Berkley), the top holds title of the week. 

LJ has new prepub alerts. 

Vox shares its list of best books of the year so far.

People highlights Kaia Gerber’s literary platform, Library Science, and lists Gerber’s 2024 book club picks.

NYT examines the rise and fall of the Romance Writers of America and talks with Christine M. Larson, author of Love in the Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success (Princeton Univ.), about what went wrong. 

Slate talks with Roland Allen about his forthcoming book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Biblioasis), and how diaries evolved.

Vogue interviews Niko Stratis and Tuck Woodstock about their new project, Girl Dad Press, which centers trans voices. 

Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, The Book of Elsewhere (Del Rey), take Elle’s “Shelf Life” literary survey. The coauthors also talk with People about their collaboration. 

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Catalina (One World), answers 10 questions at Poets & Writers. Cornejo-Villavicencio speaks with People about writing fiction vs. nonfiction. 

At Time, Fred C. Trump, a nephew of Donald Trump, shares details from his forthcoming book, All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way (Gallery), due out next week.

Reactor asks: “What Exactly Makes a Romantasy?”

Entertainment Weekly previews Outlander Cocktails: The Official Drinks Guide Inspired by the Series by James Shy Freeman and Rebeccah Marsters and Outlander Trivia by Diana Gabaldon (Random House Worlds).

The Atlantic suggests “Eight Books That Will Inspire You to Move Your Body.”

CrimeReads shares “6 Crime and Horror Books Featuring Unusual Narrators.”

Novelist, memoirist, essayist and journalist Jill Schary Robinson dies at 88. LA Times has an obituary.

Columnist and author Walter Shapiro dies at the age of 77. NYT has an obituary.

Authors on Air

Sabrina Imbler discusses their book How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures (Little, Brown) on NPR’s Short Wave podcast. 

Anne Applebaum talks with NPR’s Fresh Air about her new book, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run the World (Doubleday), and the “global fight to dismantle democracy.”

T&C provides the latest on Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing TV adaptation.

The film adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys will open the 62nd New York Film Festival in September, before hitting theaters October 25, AP reports.

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