Alice Winn Wins 2023 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize for ‘In Memoriam’ | Book Pulse

Alice Winn wins 2023 Waterstones debut fiction prize for In Memoriam. The UK’s Ackerley Prize for Autobiography names its 2023 shortlist. SFF and horror novelist (and music composer and conductor) S.P. Somtow is honored by the Thai National Committee for Culture. 

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Awards & News

Alice Winn wins 2023 Waterstones debut fiction prize for In Memoriam (Knopf; LJ starred review). The Guardian has coverage.

The UK’s Ackerley Prize for Autobiography names its 2023 shortlist. Publishing Perspectives has the news.

SFF and horror novelist (and music composer and conductor) S.P. Somtow is honored by the Thai National Committee for Culture, Locus reports.

Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights has returned to school library shelves in Mason City, Iowa, several weeks after it was removed by a school board using AI to identify books to ban; Kirkus has coverage.

A reading of Blueberries for Sal performed by Sarah McCloskey, the inspiration for the book (and the daughter of author Robert McCloskey), recently drew 225 people to Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, Maine. NYT covers the event.

Page to Screen

August 25

Killer Book Club, based on the Spanish-language novel El club de los lectores criminales by Carlos García Miranda. Netflix. Reviews | Trailer

White Bird, based on the graphic novel White Bird: A Wonder Story by R.J. Palacio. Lionsgate. Reviews | Trailer

You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, based on the novel by Fiona Rosenbloom. Netflix. Reviews | Trailer

August 31

One Piece, based on the manga series by Eiichiro Oda. Netflix. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

NYT reviews An Indigenous Present (Big NDN Pr./DelMonico), edited by Jeffrey Gibson: “Challenges the outsider’s destructive fascination with Indigenous cultures, inverting and inviting it into a new perspective authored by Indigenous artists themselves”; and the audiobook of How To Write About Africa: Collected Works by Binyavanga Wainaina (One World): “You fall back, relax and imagine yourself alongside Wainaina himself, absurdly funny and inviting, in the corner of a bar in Nairobi drinking Tusker and eating the Swahili braised chicken you hear about in his essay ‘Food Slut.’”

Washington Post reviews a new translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, tr. by Michael R. Katz (Liveright: Norton): “While I certainly enjoyed rereading The Brothers Karamazov in this well-designed Liveright edition, I suspect that almost any modern translation will convey the deeply felt humanity, as well as the majesty, of Dostoevsky’s final masterpiece”; and three great novels to listen to at summer’s end.

The Guardian reviews Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue (Little, Brown): “Simply and without a shred of sentimentality, she evokes a relationship that is convincing and exquisitely touching.”

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

Briefly Noted

The Root identifies “September 2023 Books By Black Authors We Can’t Wait To Read.”

NYT shares “9 New Books We Recommend This Week” and newly published titles, “from children’s books to 1970s counterculture.”

The NYPL blog finds 10 page-to-screen graphic novels and comics.

Vanity Fair talks to Alex Kazemi, author of New Millennium Boyz (Permuted: S. & S.).

Elle chats with Alicia Kennedy, author of No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating.

The Millions speaks with Donovan X. Ramsey, author of When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era (One World).

Hollywood Reporter interviews comedian Yvonne Orji, author of Bamboozled by Jesus: How God Tricked Me Into the Life of My Dreams (Worthy: Hachette).

EW interviews Ben McKenzie, author of Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud (Abrams).

The Guardian talks to novelist Jonathan Coe, author of Bournville (Europa).

Actress Lana Condor, known for To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, tells the Seattle Times what she’s reading.

Bret Easton Ellis, author of The Shards (Knopf), answers The Guardian’s “The Books of My Life” questionnaire.

Filmmaker Kevin Smith will make Quick Stops II, a second anthology-style comic book series (following Quick Stops I), due out from Dark Horse in November. Deadline has the announcement.

The Millions posts an excerpt from Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead (Princeton Univ.).

LA Times reveals secrets from the set of Friends, gleaned from Patty Lin’s memoir End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood (Zibby).

Popsugar has an excerpt from Ava Glass’s The Traitor (Bantam).

EW shares a snippet of actor Adam Scott’s performance in the audiobook of From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi (Books on Tape).

In the LA Times, there’s an exchange between scholar-poet Jackie Wang and poet Christopher Soto about AI’s impact on writing as a career.

In NYT, Ayana Mathis, author of The Unsettled (Knopf) asks, “What Can Literature Teach Us About Forgiveness?

Authors on Air

Today, Alli Worthington, author of Remaining You While Raising Them: The Secret Art of Confident Motherhood (Zondervan), appears on Good Morning America.

Variety shares the trailer for Foe, based on the novel by Iain Reid (Gallery/Scout).

Wired’s Have a Nice Future podcast interviews Kristen Ghodsee, author of Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life (S. & S.).

LitHub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast talks to Julie Schumacher, author of The English Experience (Doubleday); The Maris Review chats with Jenn Shapland, author of Thin Skin: Essays (Pantheon); Just the Right Book speaks with Anthony T. Kronman, author of After Disbelief: On Disenchantment, Disappointment, Eternity, and Joy (Yale Univ.); and Keen On interviews Lee McIntyre, author of On Disinformation: How To Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy (MIT), and Anya Kamenetz, author of The Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children’s Lives, and Where We Go Now (PublicAffairs: Perseus).

Jana Monroe’s upcoming book Hearts of Darkness: Serial Killers, The Behavioral Science Unit and My Life as a Woman in the FBI (Abrams) will be packaged for TV, Deadline reports.

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