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Awards & Book News

The shortlist has been chosen for the Aspen Words Literary Prize.

The finalists for the Nebula Awards are announced, Reactor reports.

After a complaint brought by Meta, an arbiter has blocked former Facebook employee Sarah Wynn-Williams from promoting Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (Flatiron), her recently published tell-all about the company, NYT reports.

UK bookseller Waterstones expands its Books of the Month program with YA and additional nonfiction offerings, The Bookseller reports.

Page to Screen

March 14

The Actor, based on the novel Memory by Donald E. Westlake. Neon. Reviews | Trailer

The Electric State, based on the graphic novel by Simon Stålenhag. Netflix. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

Washington Post reviews Edgar Allan Poe: A Life by Richard Kopley (Univ. of Virginia): “Where Kopley really excels is in connecting the life back to the work. I always knew, for instance, that ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ was a revenge fantasy against one of Poe’s literary rivals, but it had never occurred to me that ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ was a revenge fantasy against John Allan”; Naples 1944: The Devil’s Paradise at War by Keith Lowe (St. Martin’s; LJ starred review): “Lowe faults previous historians for relying too heavily on accounts like [Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44], and he takes pains to infuse more of the local Neapolitan perspective, widely citing Italian-language sources ‘to fill a glaring gap in the British and American historiography of the war’”; On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe by Jamieson Webster (Catapult): “On Breathing is not a self-help book, nor does it have a singular thesis on breathing, other than for the author to shine a light on this fundamental but underexamined fact of our existence”; Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China by Emily Feng (Crown): “It is no surprise that, in 2022, Beijing refused to let Feng remain in the country where she had lived for nearly seven years. She is now based in Taipei, Taiwan. Luckily for her readers, she had time to gather some of the country’s many flowers before her expulsion, and each chapter of her indispensable new book treats one of them”; Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful by David Enrich (Mariner): “Enrich himself seems puzzled by how rapidly many conservative lawyers turned against [New York Times v. Sullivan], and his account left me wishing for more detail on the intellectual and ideological roots of this shift”;and Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Riverhead; LJ starred review): “Readers new to Gurnah’s work will need time to reset their gait to match his pace…. Steady and free of extraneous motion, his sentences follow the riverbed of some ancient legend, even as he describes complicated modern lives.”

NYT reviews Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, tr. by Sophie Hughes (NYRB): “The strength of Perfection is that it never succumbs to the temptation of ridiculing its protagonists. Whether or not they live in Berlin, many of its readers will belong to the same class and generation as they do, and bald contempt is generally less effective at inducing the discomforts of recognition than keen, tactful observation”; Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America by Clay Risen (Scribner): “Risen tells his story with a punch and an economy that are at times almost Hemingwayesque”; and Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco by Gary Krist (Crown): “Except for brief vignettes from the trial, Krist’s narrative does not return to the scene of the crime for more than 200 pages. This structure demands a fair amount of investment in people whose motives and morals are muddled, at best.”

LA Times reviews The Expert of Subtle Revisions by Kirsten Menger-Anderson (Crown): “But as Hase herself knows from editing Wikipedia, neither history nor language are neutral, and Menger-Anderson superbly demonstrates how a writer needn’t shy away from the political tensions of a historical period but can use them to heighten and contextualize setting, character and plot.”

LitHub rounds up the best-reviewed books of the week.

Briefly Noted

Vulture has a profile of 96-year-old writer Cynthia Ozick in time for the publication of In a Yellow Wood (Everyman’s Library), a 712-page collection of her stories and essays.

Reactor hosts a conversation between Silvia Park, author of Luminous (S. & S.; LJ starred review), and Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love (Random).

CrimeReads talks to Emma van Straaten, author of the debut thriller Creep: A Love Story (Harper Perennial).

Publishers Weekly interviews Ricky Lima, writer of the YA graphic novel Undergrowth (Top Shelf Productions), illustrated by Daniele Aquilani.

Jess Kidd, author of Murder at Gull’s Nest (Atria), shares “The Books of My Life” with The Guardian.

Torrey Peters, author of Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories (Random), answers “The LitHub Questionnaire.”

NYT shares “8 New Books We Recommend This Week.”

CrimeReads rounds up the best psychological thrillers of March 2025.

LitHub suggests “Nine Books on Migration That Experiment with Point of View.”

Reactor identifies SFF that plays with form.

In The New Yorker, Jesmyn Ward discusses the rewards of reading laborious novels and recommends some of her favorites.

Felice Picano, a writer and publisher who helped usher in a golden age of gay literature in the 1970s and ’80s, has died at age 81; NYT has an obituary.

Sportswriter and prolific author John Feinstein has died at age 69; NYT has an obituary.

NYT runs an obituary for Irish novelist Jennifer Johnston, who has died at age 95.

Authors on Air

There’s a new episode of The LitHub Podcast, talking about Zando’s acquisition of Tin House and featuring a discussion with Erika Swyler, author of We Lived on the Horizon (Atria).

NPR’s Fresh Air reairs a 1982 interview with South African playwright Athol Fugard, who has died at age 92.

Tomorrow, Good Morning America will interview Jefferson Fisher, author of The Next Conversation: Argue Less, Talk More (TarcherPerigee).

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