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Awards & Book News

The Booker Prize shortlist is announced. NYT, The Guardian, and Washington Post have coverage. Read LJ’s reviews of The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, and This Other Eden by Paul Harding.

Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias by John Lorinc (Coach House) has won the inaugural Pattis Family Foundation Global Cities Book Award.

The shortlist for the Financial Times/Schroders Business Book of the Year is announced. Shelf Awareness has the news.

A new PEN America report finds a 33% jump in school book bans; Publishers Weekly, NPR, Kirkus, LA Times, and USA Today have coverage.

Page to Screen

September 21

Suspect X (titled Jaane Jaan in India), based on the novel The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino, tr. by Alexander O. Smith. Netflix. Reviews | Trailer

September 22

Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms, based on the 16th-century Chinese novel The Investiture of the Gods by Xu Zhonglin and Lu Xixing. Well Go USA. Reviews | Trailer

Dumb Money, based on The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees by Ben Mezrich. Sony. Reviews | Trailer

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, based on the short story by Roald Dahl, in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. Netflix. Reviews | Trailer Note: This is one of four short films by Wes Anderson adapting Dahl short stories on Netflix. 

September 25

The Irrational, based on the book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely. NBC. Reviews | Trailer

September 28

The Swan, based on the short story by Roald Dahl in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. Netflix. No reviews | No trailer Note: This is one of four short films by Wes Anderson adapting Dahl short stories on Netflix. 

Reviews

NYT reviews The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty by Michael Wolff (Holt): “He is less interested in the ‘public position’ of Fox News than in its ‘private life’; or, as he puts it elsewhere, ‘what is in its heart, or churning in its stomach’”; Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang (Riverhead): “Lauded for the lean, taut prose of her debut…Zhang veers unabashedly here into the decadence of language, a surplus of sensory texture and figuration”; American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson (Farrar): “In calm, precise language that allows the authors’ exhaustive research to shine through, American Gun makes clear that the AR-15’s primary function was to massacre the enemy as expeditiously as possible”; and audiobook of the week Alive and Well Enough: An Audio Memoir by Jeff Daniels (Audible Originals). There’s also a joint review of Rome and Persia: The Seven Hundred Year Rivalry by Adrian Goldsworthy (Basic) and Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age by Tom Holland (Basic).

Washington Post reviews Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad (Norton): “Readable, relevant and from the heart, this is the Iliad we have all been waiting for, whether we knew it or not”; Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll (S. & S./Marysue Rucci; LJ starred review): “Historically, thriller and true-crime writers are notorious for sensationalizing and eroticizing violence against women. Bright Young Women turns this misogynistic tradition on its head”; The Suicide Museum by Ariel Dorfman (Other Pr.): “A novel that strains to draw a metaphorical connection between Allende’s death and climate change”; The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut (Penguin Pr.; LJ starred review): “Labatut’s latest virtuosic effort, at once a historical novel and a philosophical foray, is a thematic sequel, an exploration of what results when we take reason to even further extremes”; The Court at War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made by Cliff Stone (PublicAffairs): “While Sloan makes a compelling case, additional context illuminating the broader history of the judicial branch would have painted a more complete picture of the justices’ actions”; and How Not To Be a Politician: A Memoir by Rory Stewart (Penguin Pr.): “Stewart’s story of his nine years in Parliament is vastly superior to the standard windy self-justifications of many ex-politicians. For a start, he can write.”

NPR’s Fresh Air reviews The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff (Riverhead): “Groff tries to offset the monotony of this marathon run of a plot by including flashbacks to the girl’s hard life in England and, less successfully, by having the girl formulate clumsy cultural commentary about the ‘machinery of domination’ that was the English settlement of the New World.”

LA Times reviews The Pole by J.M. Coetzee (Liveright: Norton): “In this deeply moving novel, Coetzee reminds us of what we wish we didn’t have to remember: that everything dissolves.”

LitHub selects “5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week” and highlights the best-reviewed books of the week.

Briefly Noted

Michael Wolff, author of The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty (Holt), gave an interview about his book and the Murdoch empire to Vanity Fair just before Rupert Murdoch announced his retirement from Fox. Variety also has coverage.

Penguin Pr. will publish filmmaker Werner Herzog’s memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, tr. by Michael Hofmann, on Oct. 10. Herzog discusses the memoir in a profile by Vulture.

FAB Press will publish Naked Theater and & Uncensored Horror, the memoir of the late horror-movie director Stuart Gordon, this month. Variety has coverage.

HGTV star Tarek El Moussa will release a self-help book/memoir, Flip Your Life: How To Find Opportunity in Distress—in Real Estate, Business, and Life, due out in February 2024 from Hachette Go. People has the news.

Vanity Fair has an excerpt from MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards (Liveright: Norton; LJ starred review).

NYT shares photographs from Jimmy Metyko’s Shaping Surf History: Tom Curren and Al Merrick, California 1980–1983 (Rizzoli).

Kirkus interviews Lawrence Lindell, author of the graphic novel Blackward (Drawn & Quarterly), about being “young, awkward, and Black.”

Vulture has a roundtable interview about book-writing with stand-up comedians Maria Bamford, Gary Gulman, and Aparna Nancherla, all of whom released memoirs this month. The Millions also talks to Bamford, author of Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest To Belong Anywhere (Gallery).

Jo Nesbø, The Night House, tr. by Neil Smith (Knopf), answers The Guardian’s “The Books of My Life” questionnaire.

LA Times has a profile of American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson (Farrar).

Wired publishes the “Confessions of a Viral AI Writer.”

The NYPL blog recommends “10 September Fiction Releases To Get Your Hands On.”

NYT has “9 New Books We Recommend This Week,” “6 New Paperbacks To Read This Week,” and a roundup of newly published books.

CrimeReads identifies “six books featuring ghosts with unfinished business.”

LitHub notes “Five Books That Reckon with Illness and Time” and shares “A Reading List of Historical Trauma in Fiction.”

Tor.com has a list of “nine (very) short fantasy stories with happy endings.”

Novelist and nonfiction writer Gita Mehta, “whose writing shaped perspectives of India,” has died at age 80. NYT has an obituary.

Victor R. Fuchs, “the dean of American health care economists” and author of Who Shall Live? Health, Economics and Social Choice, has died at age 99. NYT has an obituary.

Authors on Air

NPR’s Fresh Air talks to Leslie Jones about her new memoir, Leslie F*cking Jones (Grand Central), and how she went from the funniest person on campus to star of SNL.

Kerry Washington lifts the veil on her private life in her new memoir, Thicker than Water (Little, Brown Spark), and in a 20/20 special that airs on Sunday, September 24; the memoir comes out on September 26. GMA has coverage.

LitHub’s Keen On podcast talks to Kat Calvin, author of American Identity in Crisis: Notes from an Accidental Activist (Amistad: HarperCollins); Just the Right Book speaks with Cidny Bullens, author of TransElectric: My Life as a Cosmic Rock Star (Chicago Review Pr.); and The Maris Review interviews Kristi Coulter, author of Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career (MCD).

LitHub notes literary highlights from the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.

Deadline shares the trailer for The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, the final film written and directed by the late William Friedkin, based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel from Herman Wouk.

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