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Awards & Book News

Caleb Azumah Nelson wins the Dylan Thomas Prize for Small Worlds (Grove; LJ starred review). The Guardian and BBC have coverage.

Finalists have been selected for the Firecracker Awards, honoring the best independently published fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry.

Abrams buys Taunton Books, Publishers Weekly reports.

Page to Screen

No literary adaptations to report this week.

Reviews

NPR reviews Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor (Pantheon): “O’Connor constructs her setting with precise, atmospheric detail that captures a world slowly being eroded.”

Washington Post reviews And Then? And Then? What Else? by Daniel Handler (Liveright: Norton): “Lines like that reflect the sort of tone we want from writer’s guides—intimate, self-deprecating. But these days, we also want them to be practical. The most prominent modern example remains Stephen King’s memoir On Writing…. Handler’s book belongs in that company”; and Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs by Johann Hari (Crown; LJ starred review): “What he does give is an easy-to-read summary of just what the subtitle suggests—benefits and risks—though there are a couple of points about which I think he’s wrong. And the amount of digressive fluff…implies this could have easily been a long magazine article rather than a short book.”

The Guardian reviews Henry Henry by Allen Bratton (The Unnamed Pr.): “Don’t come expecting a retread of Shakespeare’s Henriad: Falstaff is barely present, there’s little soaring rhetoric, and the fate of England is not at stake. This is a diminished house that clings to rituals and history, adept at keeping up appearances and confessing sins, but holding no real political clout.”

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

Briefly Noted

Attica Locke will conclude her “Highway 59” trilogy of crime novels with Guide Me Home, due out from Mulholland in September, Kirkus reports.

The Rumpus interviews Saúl Hernández, author of the poetry collection How To Kill a Goat & Other Monsters (Univ. of Wisconsin).

The Guardian talks to Coco Mellors, author of Blue Sisters (Ballantine).

Hari Kunzru, author of Blue Ruin (Knopf), answers The Guardian’s “The Books of My Life” questionnaire.

NYT has “6 New Books We Recommend This Week” and 6 new paperbacks to read this week.

LitHub features a reading list of books featuring superstitions.

Electric Lit rounds up “7 Novels Featuring Literary Translators As Characters” and “7 Poetry Collections by Chinese Indonesian Writers.”

CrimeReads has a list of gothic fiction.

People discusses the new Grady Hendrix horror novel Witchcraft for Wayward Girls (Berkley), which “feels like Rosemary’s Baby in Florida.”

Authors on Air

NPR’s Fresh Air speaks with Carvell Wallace, author of Another Word for Love: A Memoir (MCD).

PBS Newshour talks to Rob Gore, author of Treating Violence: An Emergency Room Doctor Takes on a Deadly American Epidemic (Beacon).

An interview with Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Romantic Comedy (Random; LJ starred review), is featured on LitHub’s Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference podcast.

Deadline solves the mystery of the anonymous author of the forthcoming book Next To Heaven, whose TV rights have already been sold.

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