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Awards & Book Ban News

The 2023 Ignyte Awards finalists are announced.

In spite of a Florida book ban, Amanda Gorman’s books are currently best sellers, according to Variety. 

“Texas Senate approves bill to set new standards for sexually explicit material in books,” reports Fox News. 

Deadline continues coverage of the WGA strike with news about the decrease in Los Angeles on-location filming. 

New Title Best Sellers

Links for the week: NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers | NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers | USA Today Best-Selling Books

Fiction

Only the Dead by Jack Carr (Atria/Emily Bestler) rises to No. 1 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (Morrow) debuts at No. 5 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

The True Love Experiment by Christina Lauren (Gallery; LJ starred review) sparkles at No. 10 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Fractal Noise by Christopher Paolini (Tor) rings in No. 14 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Nonfiction

King: A Life by Jonathan Eig (Farrar; LJ starred review) reigns No. 7 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list.

The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings To Amass Power and Undermine the Republic by Stephen Vladeck (Basic) lights up No. 9 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list.

The World: A Family History of Humanity by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Knopf; LJ starred review) climbs to No. 11 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list.

Reviews

NYT reviews Women We Buried, Women We Burned: A Memoir by Rachel Louise Snyder (Bloomsbury): “What she does describe—vividly and powerfully—is how, instead of responding to relentless hardship by building a protective carapace against the world, she was determined to open herself up to possibility”; Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott (Putnam): “The book spends much of its time trapped in the drowsy, malevolent bardo of its heroine’s increasingly sinister confinement, every hour a slow drip of impending calamity”; and Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea (Little, Brown): “Urrea writes about death with a sort of familiarity, a suspension of judgment that highlights the absurdity inherent in extreme violence.” The Washington Post also reviews: “A reader can’t help but reflect on the roles that so many Americans have played in our decades of almost constant war—not just the men and women who wield the weapons and stitch the wounds, but also those who ease the mental strain. They, too, are worthy of our thanks.”

The Washington Post  reviews On Women by Susan Sontag (Picador): “Whether Sontag’s defiant uncategorizability strikes you as subtlety or evasiveness depends on your stomach for uncertainty.” The Guardian also reviews: “What she really wants to write about is death and history, about the multiplication of images and the sickening, suffering body as it travels through the devastations of time. Those were her subjects. This is not a very good book about women, but on Sontag herself—her machinations, her refusals—it’s as revealing as, well, a face with the makeup scrubbed off.”  Plus, WP has four short reviews on new history books including: The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys—and One Senator’s Fight To Save Democracy by James Risen, written with Thomas Risen (Little, Brown); Soldiers Don’t Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War by Charles Glass (Penguin Pr.); American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress by Wesley Lowery (Mariner); and The Lost Sons of Omaha: Two Young Men in an American Tragedy by Joe Sexton (Scribner). 

Locus Magazine reviews Flux by Jinwoo Chong (Melville House): “A story about grief, trauma, and the power­ful influence of pop culture, especially during childhood. And in telling that story, with a great deal of heart and passion, Flux adds to a growing canon of terrific speculative novels.”

NPR has short reviews of “4 new books by Filipino authors to read this spring,” including: Mayumu: Filipino American Desserts Remixed by Abi Balingit (Harvest), Maribel’s Year by Michelle Sterling (Katherine Tegan Bks.), The Man in the McIntosh Suit by Rina Ayuyang (Drawn & Quarterly), and La Tercera by Gina Apostol (Soho Pr.). 

Bookmarks has “5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week.”

Briefly Noted

Author Abraham Verghese shares how he visualized his book, The Covenant of Water (Grove; LJ starred review), “through drawings, mapping and sculpting” on a whiteboard in his home, in a feature for Oprah Daily. 

The Los Angeles Times has two author interviews: one with Gene Luen Yang on the adaptation of his comic into the television series American Born Chinese and another with Luis Alberto Urrea on how his new book, Good Night, Irene (Little, Brown), “pays tribute to his mother and other unsung heroes.”

Lit Hub highlights a conversation about “nonfiction that takes risks” between authors Laura Tillman, The Migrant Chef: The Life and Times of Lalo García (Norton), and Suzannah Lessard, The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape (Counterpoint). 

J.R. Moehringer discusses with Deadline the false or distorted truths that ghostwriters like himself partake in.

Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans (Riverhead), discusses his reading “by the book,” for NYT.

The Washington Post explores the “many bookish influences” behind the hit series, Succession.

Tor.com shares an excerpt from The Endless Vessel by Charles Soule (Harper Perennial). Also, a cover reveal for Max Gladstone’s new book Wicked Problems (Tor). 

Lit Hub provides a cover reveal for Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino (Farrar). 

CrimeReads lists “Six Thrillers in Which the House Hides a Sinister Past.”

Tor.com recommends books “for the characters of Yellowjackets” and also five books with “Surprisingly Sympathetic Supervillains.”

Time shares “25 new books” for summer reading.

AARP highlights “32 of 2023’s Hot Summer Novels.”

LitHub has “25 Nonfiction Books You Need to Read This Summer.”

Authors on Air

Rita Chang-Eppig discusses her new book, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea (Bloomsbury), on The Maris Review podcast. 

Comedian Hasan Minhaj has been added to the cast of It Ends with Us, the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s book of the same name. Deadline has more.

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