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Awards & Book News

Chidi Ebere wins the Royal Society of Literature Christopher Bland Prize for his debut novel, Now I Am Here (Picador).

New inductees to the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame are announced, including Nalo Hopkinson and Jo Walton.

EC Dorgan, Paola Ferrante, Daysha Loppie, Aubrianna Snow, and Karianne Trudeau Beaunoyer are named Writers’ Trust 2024 Rising Stars, CBC reports.

Macmillan will launch another graphic novels imprint, 23rd Street Books, a sister imprint to First Second Books; Publishers Weekly has the news.

Random House will acquire comic book, graphic novel, and licensed storytelling publisher Boom! Studios, Publishers Weekly reports.

New Title Bestsellers

Links for the week: NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers | NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers | USA Today Bestselling Books

Fiction

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (Riverhead; LJ starred review) rules over No. 3 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list and No. 7 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

The Night Ends with Fire by K.X. Song (Ace: Berkley) ends up at No. 12 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list and No. 15 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Nonfiction

Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan (Little, Brown) gets No. 5 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers list.

Capitalism Created the Climate Crisis and Capitalism Will Solve It: The Market Forces Catalyzing a Climate Technology Renaissance by Kentaro Kawamori (Wiley) takes No. 13 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Reviews

NYT reviews The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry (Doubleday; LJ starred review): “Let’s get the bad news out of the way. The Heart in Winter is not top-shelf Kevin Barry. He never quite gets a handle on these characters. The grace and casual wit that flowed through Night Boat to Tangier is largely absent”; and The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (Catapult; LJ starred review): “The novel’s power is not in cohesion, but in chaos—in an ambience that is consistently murky, morally numbed, deceptively blasé. Throughout, her prose manages to be both deadpan and fertile.”

Washington Post reviews Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi (Knopf): “Navola…is a long book, the first in a series, and it comes from an author known for taking his time. It ends with questions unanswered, secrets unrevealed, fates unknown and grave wrongs unavenged. But as eager as I am to know what happens next, Navola would stand among the best of its genre even if a second volume never appeared”; Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan (Little, Brown): “The anecdotes that make up this book are not news, but Callahan strings them together in a way that makes the House of Kennedy look like Bluebeard’s castle of horrors”; Catherine de’ Medici: The Life and Times of the Serpent Queen by Mary Hollingsworth (Pegasus): “A more tempered view of the monarchal matriarch who shaped politics, culture, society and religion at a critical time in French history…. [It] serves as a compelling counterpoint to some of the more common disparaging claims against the Gallic ruler”; and Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics by Elle Reeve (Atria): “Black Pill is a feat of fearless reporting, and its ambiguities and tensions are not necessarily weaknesses. Instead, they point to essential contradictions at the heart of what was once the alt-right and is now Trump’s Republican Party.” 

LitHub selects “5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week.”

Briefly Noted

LitHub talks to Emily Van Duyne, author of Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation (Norton).

NYT interviews Amy Tan, author of The Backyard Bird Chronicles (Knopf; LJ starred review).

Kevin Barry, author of The Heart in Winter (Doubleday; LJ starred review), answers NYT’s “By the Book” questionnaire.

Graywolf has acquired two nonfiction books by Story Prize winner and Booker Prize finalist Brandon Taylor Publishers Weekly reports.

Esquire goes behind the scenes of Barack Obama’s reading lists.

William E. Burrows, historian of the Space Age, has died at 87; NYT has an obituary.

NYT runs a belated obituary (part of its “Overlooked” series) for novelist Ursula Parrott, the subject of a recent biography by Marsha Gordon.

NYT asks Megan Abbott, Bonnie Garmus, and other writers about the books they love (the ones that didn’t make NYT’s top 100 list).

The Guardian recommends five of the best novels about celebrity culture.

CrimeReads gathers “6 creepy novels about stalking and obsession.”

Kirkus rounds up “3 Totally Gonzo Memoirs of Sex, Drugs, and More.”

Reactor lists all the new science fiction books arriving in July.

Authors on Air

NPR’s Fresh Air speaks with Richard Behar, author of Madoff: The Final Word (Avid Reader/S. & S.).

NPR’s Morning Edition interviews photographer Cory Richards, author of the memoir The Color of Everything: A Journey To Quiet the Chaos Within (Random).

LitHub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast talks to PR operative Phil Elwood, author of All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians (Holt).

NPR’s Wild Card interviews poet laureate Nikki Giovanni.

Christina Sharpe (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize) joins the Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast to rave about 2018 prize-winner John Keene’s Counternarratives (New Directions).

LitHub’s Emergence Magazine Podcast talks to David James Duncan, author of Sun House (Little, Brown).

Shelf Awareness rounds up the schedule for this weekend’s Book TV on C-SPAN 2.

Sony wins the rights to adapt Eruption by Michael Crichton & James Patterson (Little, Brown), Deadline reports.

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