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Awards & Book News

The National Book Critics Circle Awards finalists are announced. Publishers Weekly has coverage, as does Shelf Awareness.

The nominees for the NAACP Image Awards are announced; among the literature award finalists are Jesmyn Ward, James McBride, and Clint Smith.

Mimi Khalvati is awarded Britain’s King’s Gold Medal for Poetry, The Bookseller reports.

Bernie McGill wins the Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her collection This Train Is For (No Alibis Pr.); The Bookseller has coverage.

The Bookseller reports that BookTok has remained a key driver of fiction sales, “with the genre achieving an all-time record in value and volume terms last year.”

Fred Chappell, “admired but unsung writer of the South,” dies at 87; NYT has an obituary.

Page to Screen

The Peasants, based on the novel by Władysław Reymont. Sony Pictures Classics. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

Washington Post reviews John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community by Raymond Arsenault (Yale Univ.): “The arc of Lewis’s life is ably accounted for in historian Raymond Arsenault’s new book…though it sometimes drains its subject of his dynamism, focusing on the bare facts of his life at the expense of emotional punch”; and Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti (Farrar): “The game that is Alphabetical Diaries has clear rules but no clear objective. The structure is strict, the substance almost uniformly enigmatic.”

NYT reviews Subculture Vulture: A Memoir in Six Scenes by Moshe Kasher (Random): “Kasher’s ability to blend humor with homework works almost too well. You might find yourself asking, ‘That can’t be true, right?’ And on some occasions, the answer is indeed ‘no,’ though Kasher notes when this is the case”; and the audiobook of Leslie F*cking Jones by Leslie Jones (Hachette Audio): “In her refreshingly unflinching narration, Jones often breaks the fourth wall, even admitting to straying from the hardcover version to include off-the-cuff riffs. But something about her unfiltered meandering…makes the listener trust her all the more.”

Briefly Noted

Gallery will publish RoseMarie Terenzio and Liz McNeil’s JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography this summer, Kirkus reports.

The Millions prints a conversation between Francesca Peacock, Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish (Pegasus), and Regan Penaluna, How To Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How To Live a Life of the Mind (Grove).

CrimeReads interviews debut novelist and former police officer Adam Plantinga, author of The Ascent (Grand Central).

Publishers Weekly has a feature on new SF/fantasy publisher Gungnir and also dives into Bloomsbury Academic’s “Object Lessons” series “that explores the hidden lives of ordinary things.”

In CrimeReads, Shubnum Khan, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years (Viking; LJ starred review), writes an essay about “decolonizing the gothic.”

Brandi Wells, The Cleaner (Hanover Square), takes LitHub’s “The Annotated Nightstand” questionnaire.

NYT selects “6 New Paperbacks to Read This Week” and “9 New Books We Recommend This Week.”

Publishers Weekly highlights “4 New Books That Explore Geopolitics” and “4 Provocative New Surveys of Love and Sex.”

LitHub has a booklist of “all the literary mean girls.”

Kirkus recommends “3 Spellbinding Indie Novels About Magic.”

Reactor (aka Tor.com) lists “Five Horror Books Featuring Weird, Spooky Mountains.”

People has “Six Books to Read if You’re Mad at the Greta Gerwig Barbie Oscars Snub.”

Authors on Air

A teaser trailer has been released for Apples Never Fall, the Peacock limited series based on Liane Moriarty’s 2021 novel, Shelf Awareness reports.

Prime Video has picked up the family drama The Baxters, based on the best-selling book series by Karen Kingsbury, Deadline reports.

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