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Awards & Book News

James McBride’s body of work wins the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction; Kirkus has the news.

A new posthumous novel by Zora Neale Hurston, The Life of Herod the Great, is due out from Amistad in 2025, People reports.

Goose Island, a previously unpublished novel by the late Margaret Walker, is coming next year from Univ. Pr. of Mississippi, Kirkus reports.

Reagan Arthur, the former publisher of Knopf, is joining Hachette to start and run a new imprint, NYT reports.

Page to Screen

July 12

Touch, based on the novel by Olaf Olafsson. Focus Features. Reviews | Trailer

The Vourdalak, based on the novella The Family of the Vourdalak by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy. Oscilloscope Laboratories. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

Washington Post reviews Mourning a Breast by Xi Xi, tr. by Jennifer Feeley (NYRB): “Mourning a Breast resists the conventions of the breast cancer memoir. Rather than plotting a singular, heroic journey between biopsy and remission, punctuated by platitudes and metaphors of war, Xi Xi learns to listen”; and The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family by Jesselyn Cook (Crown): “Cook understandably and wisely doesn’t crowd her book with psychological asides, preferring to allow the specificity of her subjects to speak for themselves…. But the book would have benefited from more use of the many interviews Cook did with psychologists and conspiracy theory experts.”

NYT reviews My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous; A Memoir by Barrett Brown (MCD): “The reader may be forgiven for losing the thread. This is a book in which the stakes are both incredibly high (a state throws you into prison) and very low (a ‘Hobbity-looking’ fellow writes a piece you don’t like in Gizmodo).”

LitHub rounds up the best-reviewed books of the week.

Briefly Noted

Vulture profiles Lev Grossman, author of The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur (Viking; LJ starred review).

Electric Lit talks to Maggie Nye, author of The Curators (Curbstone: Northwestern Univ.).

LitHub hosts a conversation between Zoë Eisenberg, author of Significant Others (Mira: Harlequin), and Rhaina Cohen, author of The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center  (St. Martin’s).

Eley Williams, author of The Liar’s Dictionary (Doubleday), answers The Guardian’s “The Books of My Life” questionnaire.

NYT shares critic Dwight Garner’s take on the trends at work in their list of the top 100 books of the 21st century. They also offer a quiz to help readers pick their next book.

“Elena Ferrante’s Novels Are Beloved. Her Identity Remains a Mystery,” NYT writes.

NYT lists “6 New Books We Recommend This Week.”

CrimeReads gathers examples of humor in serial killer novels.

The Rumpus identifies the seven best bloopers of the literary canon.

CBC recommends “10 historical fiction books to transport you this summer.”

Electric Lit highlights eight novels about toxic relationships.

"Both/And," Electric Lit’s series of essays by trans writers of color, is going to be published as a book by HarperOne, edited by Denne Michele Norris, Electric Lit announces.

Dan Collins, journalist and coauthor of Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, has died at age 80; NYT has an obituary.

Authors on Air

Audiofile’s Behind the Mic podcast talks to narrator Robert Petkoff.

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