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Book News

Minnie Bruce Pratt, celebrated poet of lesbian life, dies at 76. NYT has an obituary.

Former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson will publish a book, Kirkus reports. Kirkus also rounds up the 45 Emmy nominations received by book adaptations.

Page to Screen

July 14

Bird Box Barcelona, based on the novel Bird Box by Josh Malerman. Netflix. Reviews | Trailer

July 18

Justified: City Primeval, based on the novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit by Elmore Leonard. FX. Reviews | Trailer

July 20

Sweet Magnolias, based on the series by Sherryl Woods. Netflix. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

NYT reviews The Stolen Coast by Dwyer Murphy (Viking): “If you, like me, lament the absence in modern-day Hollywood of the whip-smart neo-noir thrillers that flourished in the 1990s…then I have great news for you. It comes in the form of Dwyer Murphy’s second novel, The Stolen Coast, which offers all the abundant pleasures of those films, and more”; and Strip Tees: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles by Kate Flannery (Holt): “Strip Tees is devourable, rendered in efficient, colorful scenes. Flannery’s conversion from credulous retail recruit to company woman doesn’t trade in hyper-intellectual #MeToo-era analysis or retrospective scolding.”

Washington Post reviews Terrance Hayes’s Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry (Penguin Poets): “The title…provides a preview of [Hayes’s] signature gesture, which recurs in the dazzling pieces that follow: Time and time again, he introduces a phrase or form that appears familiar, then radically reinvents it”; Molly Dektar’s The Absolutes (Mariner): “The Absolutes asks you to consider what matters more: the moment the stone is dropped into the pool or the ripples that spread across the surface long after the stone has sunk out of sight”; Rachel Swarns’s The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church (Random): “The 272 succeeds not only in its telling of a tragic story. By drawing on existing studies as well as her own archival research exploring letters, deeds, ship manifests and reports, she also shows how the Jesuits increasingly managed their plantations as capitalist ventures”; and five collections of detective tales perfect for midsummer reading.

LA Times reviews John McPhee’s Tabula Rasa: Volume 1 (Farrar): “In his lively new collection, Tabula Rasa, the very longtime, very long-form journalist writes of ‘old-people projects,’ the kinds of things we feel compelled to do when the end is a lot closer than the beginning.”

NPR reviews Paul Tremblay’s The Beast You Are (Morrow; LJ starred review): “Smart, self-aware, fun, creepy, and strange, The Beast You Are is even better than the outstanding Growing Things—and it further cements Tremblay as one of the finest voices in modern horror fiction as well as dazzling innovator of the short form regardless of genre.” See LJ’s recent interview with Paul Tremblay here.

Briefly Noted

NYT lists “9 New Books We Recommend This Week.”

LitHub’s BookMarks selects the best-reviewed books of the week.

Kirkus chooses six hot fiction reads for July.

USA Today lists “five fun feminist books” to recommend to those waiting to see the film Barbie.

Publishers Weekly finds “10 Brilliantly Unexpected Jane Austen Homages.” Also check out LJ’s Jane Austen–inspired display shelf for additional titles.

CrimeReads selects five stories featuring bad guys you love to root for and seven thrillers in which friendships are threatened.

Tor.com lists “All the New Horror and Genre-Bending Books Arriving in July.”

NYT’s dining section profiles Jon Bonné and his two-volume wine book The New French Wine: Redefining the World’s Greatest Wine Culture (Ten Speed).

Poets&Writers has a profile of Terrance Hayes, author of Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry (Penguin Poets).

Kirkus has a profile of graphic memoirist Thien Pham, Family Style: Memories of an American From Vietnam (First Second).

Time publishes an essay by Sarah Watling, author of Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Writers, Outsiders, and the Spanish Civil War (Knopf).

CrimeReads has essays by Tasha Sylva, author of The Guest Room (Holt); Josh Winning, author of Burn the Negative (Putnam); and Candi Sary, author of Magdalena (Regal House).

Tor.com has an excerpt from Ehgibor Okosun’s Forged by Blood (Harper Voyager).

Authors On Air

NPR’s Fresh Air interviewed Donovan X. Ramsey, author of When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era (One World).

Audiobook narrator Kevin R. Free, a 2023 Golden Voice narrator, is interviewed on LitHub’s Behind the Mic podcast.

NYT explains that the forthcoming film Oppenheimer “stands on the shoulders of the exhaustive and exhilarating 721-page Pulitzer Prize–winning biography called American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” (Vintage) by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird.

There is an upcoming TV adaptation of Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz To Warn the World (Harper); Deadline has the news.

The film rights to Shelley Read’s debut novel Go as a River (Spiegel & Grau; LJ starred review) have been acquired, according to Variety.

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