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Awards & News

The 2023 Elgin Awards winners are announced. Locus shares details.

Zadie Smith will headline the Vancouver Writers Fest, which takes place Oct. 16–22. CBC reports.

Infodocket reports on AI book bans as the debate on banned books moves to the senate. LJ has coverage.

The Atlantic sifts through the dataset behind Books3, used to train generative AI without permission. The Atlantic also published the searchable dataset here. 

Martha Stewart announces her 100th cookbook is on its way at the end of 2024. Parade has all the details. 

Reviews

NYT reviews Fear Is Just a Word: A Missing Daughter, a Violent Cartel, and a Mother’s Quest for Vengeance by Azam Ahmed (Random): “Ahmed’s book is a study of how such a war touches every aspect of social life, tearing it to pieces, and how the impunity with which cartels operate perpetuates a never-ending cycle of evil”; Devil Makes Three by Ben Fountain (Flatiron): “I was grateful for the old-fashioned pleasure of immersion in a long book with engaging characters, a sense of history and place, and a multifaceted vision of people trying to figure out what to do when the world around them is changing”; The Hungry Season: A Journey of War, Love, and Survival by Lisa M. Hamilton (Little, Brown): “A nonfiction deep dive into rice farming may not sound like a page turner. But Ia’s story has real suspense to it, her farm constantly teetering on the edge of inviability”; The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism by Adam Nagourney (Crown): “It is, if you like, a history of kings and queens, and some readers might have wished to hear more from the foot soldiers. But it’s an important story”; and The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, tr. by Lara Vergnaud (Other Pr.): “The novel bucks the clichés, expectations and pigeonholes that generations of French readers have used to stymie African novels and novelists.”

Washington Post reviews The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty by Michael Wolff (Holt): “Generally regarded as the puppet master behind the modern conservative movement, in The Fall Murdoch is depicted as a man who has conclusively lost the plot”; Thicker than Water: A Memoir by Kerry Washington (Little, Brown, Spark): “Washington illuminates a very narrow and specific slice of her life — avoiding the sensational in favor of the sincere—and the result is very affecting”; and Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights by Dylan C. Penningroth (Liveright): “From this archive of private-law civil rights, Penningroth persuasively argues that historians and legal scholars have overlooked how extensively ordinary Black people understood and used the law in the century before the modern civil rights movement.”

Briefly Noted

C Pam Zhang discusses her new novel, Land of Milk and Honey (Riverhead), with LA Times. Vanity Fair also features an interview with Zhang.

USA Today shares key takeaways from Cassidy Hutchinson’s new memoir, Enough (S. & S.). 

T&C reports on an unfinished Truman Capote story, “Another Day in Paradise,” which has been published for the first time by The Strand Magazine.

Slate talks with Zadie Smith about her new book, The Fraud (Penguin Pr.; LJ starred review), “what Charles Dickens got wrong about slavery—and why it doesn’t really matter.”

Vogue has an interview with Yomi Adegoke about her forthcoming novel, The List (Morrow), which it calls the “media novel of the season.”

CrimeReads shares how James Patterson and Mike Lupica teamed up to write their new thriller, 12 Months To Live (Little, Brown). 

Jason Rantz talks with FoxNews about his new book, What’s Killing America: Inside the Radical Left’s Tragic Destruction of Our Cities (Center Street). 

AARP shares photos from the forthcoming Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel (Callaway Arts & Entertainment; LJ starred review), due out October 24.

Jon Batiste gives a health update on his wife Suleika Jaouad, who is the author of the memoir Between Two Kingdoms (Random; LJ starred review). People has the story. 

BBC reflects on the “cozy crime” phenomenon.

ElectricLit suggests “15 Small Press Books to Read This Fall.”

LitHub shares 27 new books for the week. 

BookRiot recommends the best September releases. 

Tor shares “5 Fantasy Books Featuring Jewish Mythology.”

Authors on Air

Kerry Washington discusses her new memoir, Thicker than Water (Little, Brown, Spark), with NPR’s Fresh Air.

BET cofounder Sheila Johnson talks about her groundbreaking career and new memoir, Walk Through Fire (S. & S.), with PBS Canvas. 

C Pam Zhang talks about her new novel, Land of Milk and Honey (Riverhead),“the mythology of the worlds she creates, the secret to great food writing, the politics of privilege and pleasure” on B&N’s Poured Over podcast.

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