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Awards & News

The Horror Writers Association announced the winners of the Bram Stoker Awards, with Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory (Gallery/Saga; LJ starred review) taking the top prize for Superior Achievement in a Novel.

The ITW Thriller Award winners are announced. Locus reports. 

The Griffin Poetry Prize announces that Maggie Burton has won the Canadian First Book Prize for Chores (Breakwater).

The Mythopoeic Awards finalists are revealed. Locus has details. 

Publishers Weekly and Publishing Perspectives highlight findings from the annual Audio Publishers Association Survey, as U.S. audiobook revenue grew 9% in 2023.

The Guardian reports on a new study that shows children in the UK and Ireland reading fewer and less-challenging books.

Reviews

NYT reviews Enlightenment by Sarah Perry (Mariner): “Its sunny title notwithstanding, Enlightenment has an unremitting cloud cover hanging over it that seems to be as much generated as suffered by its protagonists, like the storm cloud that follows poor Joe Btfsplk all through Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner’”; Blessings by Chukwuebuka Ibeh (Doubleday): “What makes these tropes newly urgent, though, is their context in Nigeria. Ibeh sets his story in the years leading up to the country’s 2014 anti-gay law, and, intriguingly, connects the dots of queer persecution and the everyday tragedies that are woven into the fabric of Nigerian life”; Birds Aren’t Real: The True Story of Mass Avian Murder and the Largest Surveillance Campaign in US History by Peter McIndoe & Connor Gaydos (St. Martin’s): “As a movement, Birds Aren’t Real worked as a savvy device for social commentary. As a book, there’s just not enough meat—synthetically engineered or otherwise—to sustain it”; and 1974: A Personal History by Francine Prose (Harper; LJ starred review): “If this quarter-life crisis memoir were a stool, the third leg—after Russo’s story and Prose’s own—would be the author’s attempt at a group portrait of her generation, not the baby boomers writ large but a sophisticated subset of them.” Plus, short reviews of new thrillers: When We Were Silent by Fiona McPhillips (Flatiron); Butter by Asako Yuzuki, tr. by Polly Barton (Ecco); and Swiped by L.M. Chilton (Gallery).

Washington Post reviews The Comfort of Ghosts (Maisie Dobbs, Bk. 18) by Jacqueline Winspear (Soho Crime; LJ starred review): “Readers who snapped up every Maisie Dobbs book as it was released will find great satisfaction in seeing long-standing characters achieve some measure of peace at the end of a terrible time”; The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society by Joseph E. Stiglitz (Norton): “By the end of the book, it’s hard to escape the impression that Stiglitz is fighting battles of the 1990s”; Last House by Jessica Shattuck (Morrow): “Presenting the family’s motivations as ubiquitous and often sympathetic, Last House asks readers to consider how their own personal striving might require unjustifiable involvement in corrupt systems”; and the revised edition of The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasyby Ursula K. Le Guin (Scribner): “Where most others were content to gesture at the existence of The Left Hand of Darkness as settling the question of whether science fiction could push against conventional boundaries, Le Guin was willing to ask herself if she really succeeded in doing so, and to say that the answer might be no.”

Briefly Noted

LitHub highlights 26 new books for the week. 

T&C has “The 39 Must-Read Books of Summer 2024.”

Bustle previews “This Summer’s 40 Most Anticipated Books.”

Time shares “15 LGBTQ+ Books to Read for Pride.”

Reactor shares “Five Very Good Cats in SF and Fantasy.”

Morgan Talty, Fire Exit (Tin House), recommends books by Indigenous authors, at People.

LA Times features the career of Harlan Ellison, as four of his books will be revised and reissued this year. 

Patrick Nathan discusses McCarthyism and his new novel, The Future Was Color (Counterpoint), with LA Times. 

Vogue talks with R.O. Kwon about the “sexiest novel of the year,” Exhibit (Riverhead).

Paul Scheer discusses his new memoir, Joyful Recollections of Trauma (HarperOne; LJ starred review), with Salon.

People shares an excerpt from Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man’s Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future by Joél Leon (Holt). 

CrimeReads shares an excerpt from Allen Eskens’s forthcoming novel, The Quiet Librarian, due out from Mulholland in February 2025.

Authors on Air

Eleanor Burgess will adapt Lisa Jewell’s None of This Is True (Atria) for Netflix, Deadline reports.

Candice Carty-Williams talks to People about the new series Queenie, based on her novel; it premieres on Hulu on June 7.

James Patterson discusses how he completed Michael Crichton's Eruption (Little, Brown), on CBS Sunday Morning.  Also on CBS Sunday Morning, Washington Post book critic Ron Charles recommends summer reads.
 

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