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Awards & Book News

Winners are announced for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for works that deepen understanding of race and diversity.

Finalists are selected for the Independent Book Publishers Association Awards.

The shortlist has been selected for the Stella Prize for works by Australian women or nonbinary writers.

The Great Gatsby turns 100, and The Guardian, Washington Post, NPR, People, and Public Books consider its legacy.

Former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (Flatiron), testifies in front of Congress, Kirkus reports.

Andrews McMeel launches a religious book imprint, Amen Editions, Publishers Weekly reports.

Page to Screen

April 11

The Amateur, based on the novel by Robert Littell. 20th Century Studios. Reviews | Trailer

The King of Kings, based on the children’s book The Life of Our Lord by Charles Dickens. Angel Studios. Reviews | Trailer

That They May Face the Rising Sun, based on the novel by John McGahern. Juno Films. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

Washington Post reviews Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening by Ben Ratliff (Graywolf): “Run the Song is not an argument in favor of listening to music while running, nor is it exactly a personal chronicle. Perhaps it is best characterized as a work of phenomenology, an attempt to capture what running while listening to music is like.”

NYT reviews Precious Rubbish by Kayla E. (Fantagraphics): “Of course, there’s lots of popular literature that’s hard to bear—that quality is the most important feature of horror literature, and even of some comedy. E. isn’t the first person to explore these connections, but her work is such an unexpected mixture of control and frankness that it is impossible to ignore”; and Poet in the New World: Poems, 1946–1953 by Czeslaw Milosz, ed. and tr. by Robert Hass & David Frick (Ecco): “Written from Milosz’s mid-30s into his early 40s, these poems cannot compare with later work composed when, having wrestled with the losses of exile, the poet had grown both warier and more compassionate. Few of these poems can be considered among his best, though many possess hints and whispers of the later style.”

LA Times reviews Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life by Dan Nadel (Scribner).: “Generously illustrated with work from throughout Crumb’s career, Crumb is an artist biography that astutely connects the work to the life story without forcing or simplifying anything. It works as cultural history and criticism; you won’t find a sharper analysis of the underground comix movement. Nadel honors the complexity of his subject, even, perhaps particularly, when it gets ugly”; and The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays by Meghan Daum (Notting Hill Editions): “And there it is: the ‘honest’ appraisal. This is the rhetorical device the real-talk brigade uses to self-authenticate its own arguments, to tear down the straw people they establish as the targets of their ire. It’s a method of justifying saying out loud what Daum might still call the unspeakable—even if that feels, in 2025, like a sadly outmoded concept.”

The Guardian reviews Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford (Scribner): “Bamford conjures, in vivid, amplified language, how children fluidly and unpredictably make sense of the world through the little that they know and the much that they see, unmoored from the rigidity of adult apprehension, so often trapped in convention and cliché”; and Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney (Bloomsbury): “There are between 1,000 and 2,000 [Proto-Indo-European] words, and Spinney’s book is at its most interesting when dealing with them.”

LitHub gathers the best-reviewed books of the week.

Briefly Noted

Publishers Weekly interviews Peter Trachtenberg, author of The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists of New York (Black Sparrow).

Kirkus talks to Katie Kitamura, author of Audition (Riverhead).

CrimeReads hosts a conversation between Eric Rickstad, author of Remote: The Six (Blackstone), and Don Winslow, author of City in Ruins (Morrow), on “suspense, serial killers, and dismantling pop culture myths.”

The Guardian has a feature unlocking the private life of novelist Edna O’Brien.

People reports that filmmaker Malcolm D. Lee and coauthor Jayne Allen are adapting The Best Man, his 1999 rom-com movie (turned 2022 Peacock series) as a novel; The Best Man: Unfinished Business is due out from Storehouse Voices on Jul. 1.

Julianne Moore will narrate the audiobook of Joan Didion’s posthumous Notes to John (Books on Tape), due out in both print and audio on Apr. 22, People reports.

NYT has “8 New Books We Recommend This Week.”

For Reactor, Cynthia Pelayo, author of Vanishing Daughters (Thomas & Mercer), suggests five SFF books set in Chicago.

Publishers Weekly recommends “6 New Mysteries To Scratch That White Lotus Itch” and “12 Genre-Stretching Works of Fiction.”

Reactor gathers all the new horror, romantasy, and other SFF crossover books arriving in April.

Time publishes an excerpt from The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward by Melinda French Gates (Flatiron).

Authors on Air

NPR’s Fresh Air talks to Gardiner Harris, author of No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson (Random; LJ starred review).

The Today show will host Marjorie Taylor and Kendall Smith Franchini, authors of French at Heart: Recipes That Bring France Home (Abrams).

Tamron Hall will talk to Janice Kaplan, author of What Your Body Knows About Happiness: How To Use Your Body To Change Your Mind (Sourcebooks), and Liz Walker, author of No One Left Alone: A Story of How Community Helps Us Heal (Broadleaf).

Tyriq Withers will star in the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s Reminders of Him, Deadline reports.

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