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Awards & News

Essie Chambers’s Swift River is Barnes & Noble’s 2024 Discover Prize winner. Kirkus has coverage.

Ross Perlin wins the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding for his book Language City: The Fight To Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York (Atlantic Monthly), LitHub reports. 

Barnes & Noble releases its best books of the year lists, including best fiction, best mysteries, best science fiction and fantasy, best history, and best cookbooks.

Publishers Weekly reports from the 2024 New York Comic Con. 

University of Toronto Press has acquired Legas Publishing, PW reports.

Reviews

NYT reviews the audiobook of Lifeform by Jenny Slate (Little, Brown): “Listening to Jenny Slate’s Lifeform is like watching a decathlete set multiple records on stubbly terrain. She can go from honey-voiced ingénue to frat bro in a nanosecond.”

Washington Post reviews Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin (Farrar): “At one point, Florence, drawing on Lacan, compares love to ‘a vast referential system,’ full of hidden links and surprises. This is also an apt description of Scaffolding, with its baroque structure and block-bound setting, which pay direct homage to Georges Perec’s 1978 novel Life: A User’s Manual”; and Blood Test: A Comedy by Charles Baxter (Pantheon): “The narrative voice he creates for Blood Test sounds like an old friend simultaneously touching your heart and pulling your leg, like a disciple of Spalding Gray.” NPR also reviews: “In Blood Test, Baxter invites us to laugh at this all-American zaniness and to acknowledge some of the pain that fuels it.”

Briefly Noted

LibraryReads and Library Journal offer read-alikes for In Too Deep by Lee Child & Andrew Child (Delacorte), the top holds title of the week. 

LJ has new prepub alerts. 

Publishers Lunch highlights new books for the week. 

Reactor shares “5 SFF Books About Elections and Technology.”

The Atlantic recommends “Seven True Stories That Read Like Thrillers.”

NYT highlights five books about the immigration debate and six books about the reproductive rights debate. 

Danielle Trussoni talks with CrimeReads about The Puzzle Box (Random; LJ starred review) and “the odyssey, the quest for secrets, for clues, for solutions and for self.” 

Alex van Halen talks with USA Today about his new book, Brothers (Harper). 

LA Times shares an excerpt from Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle To Get Inside by Melissa Ludtke (Rutgers Univ.).

The Verge chats with Jeff VanderMeer about returning to Area X in his new book Absolution (MCD). 

The Millions has an interview with Evan Friss, author of The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore (Viking). 

NYT writes about the making of A Great Gay Book: Stories of Growth, Belonging & Other Queer Possibilities, ed. by Ryan Fitzgibbon (Abrams). 

Esquire ventures “Inside the Political Book Machine.”

Maria Shriver announces her debut book of poetry, I Am Maria: My Poems and Reflections on Heartbreak, Healing, and Hope (Open Field), due out April 1, People reports.

John Green will publish a new nonfiction book, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection (Crash Course) in March 2025.

Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison (Random) arrives on February 18, People reports.

Jenny Slate, Lifeform (Little, Brown), takes Elle’s “Shelf Life” questionnaire. 

Miller Oberman, Impossible Things (Duke Univ.), answers 10 questions at Poets & Writers.

Scholar of antisemitism Yehuda Bauer dies at the age of 98. NYT has an obituary. 

Authors on Air

Rebecca Nagle discusses her book, By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land (Harper), on NPR’s Code Switch podcast. 

WSJ writes about former Teen Mom 2 star and rising book influencer Kailyn Lowry, whose podcast Barely Famous is attracting buzz and A-list authors. 

PBS Canvas spotlights the new book Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told the Truth by Richard Esposito (Crime Ink). 

T&C rounds up “everything we know” about Netflix’s forthcoming adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. 

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