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Awards & Book News

Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman (Soho) wins the 2023 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Read LJ's audio review here.

The longlist is released for the Laurel Prize, honoring the best collection of environmental or nature poetry.

“Authors call on FTC to investigate Amazon’s alleged monopoly in the bookselling industry,” reports The Verge. NYT also has the news.

NYT profiles Skyhorse Publishing, which takes on “authors that other houses avoid,” like Alex Jones, Woody Allen, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Washington Post runs an obituary for the late scholar Nechama Tec, a Holocaust survivor who authored Defiance (Oxford Univ.), which was adapted into a 2008 film starring Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber.

New Title Best Sellers

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

Fiction

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Riverhead; LJ starred review) comes out at No. 3 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Seller list and No. 8 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Cruel Seduction by Katee Robert (Sourcebooks Casablanca; LJ starred review) takes in No. 4 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell (Atria) achieves No. 4 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Seller list and No. 14 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Happiness by Danielle Steel (Delacorte) reaches No. 5 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best-Seller list.

Dreamland by Nicholas Sparks (Dell) holds No. 12 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Nonfiction

American Playbook: A Guide to Winning Back the Country from the Democrats by Clay Travis (Threshold Editions) wins No. 10 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Adversity for Sale: Ya Gotta Believe by Jeezy (HarperCollins Leadership) soars to No. 15 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list.

Reviews

Washington Post reviews The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman (Atria): “Alas, this tribute to Hawthorne’s classic earns not a red A but a puce C-minus”; Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue (Little, Brown): “It has characters with complex internal lives, insights into the human soul and a wrenching love story that’s both queer and multiracial”; five late-summer mysteries; and Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder (Knopf): “Wifedom is part biography and part speculative fiction written in the present tense; it includes passages of dialogue and accounts of private thoughts and intimate moments that only the people involved could have recorded or witnessed.” The Guardian also reviews the latter: “Funder believes Eileen is a woman in a box, a woman who needs rescuing from the bad actors of patriarchy, the malevolent magicians who have effected her disappearance. Her self-appointed task is to piece Eileen back together.”

LitHub selects “5 Book Reviews You Need To Read This Week.”

Briefly Noted

Tor.com rounds up “Five Fascinating Retellings of Norse Mythology.”

NYT runs an overview of the essential Ursula K. LeGuin.

The Atlantic identifies “Seven Books That Explore How Marriage Really Works.”

The Guardian locates the top 10 books set in Cornwall.

CrimeReads selects “eight unforgettable books about missing persons” and the best international crime fiction of August 2023.

LitHub has an essay by David Shih about key Asian American books.

Kirkus shares three gritty new crime-fiction audiobooks and previews several great fall reads.

Lifehacker tracks down “The Best Books To Help You Find Work-Life Balance.”

The NYPL blog has “Feel-Good Readalikes for Fans of Red, White & Royal Blue” and “A Reading List To Prepare You for the Alien Invasion.”

Vogue profiles Zadie Smith, who’s back with a new novel, The Fraud (Penguin Pr.; LJ starred review).

CrimeReads interviews Kyle Dillon Hertz, author of The Lookback Window (S. & S.), and Adrian McKinty, author of The Detective Up Late (1.: Blackstone).

Kirkus talks to Annie Ernaux, author of the forthcoming The Young Man, tr. by Alison Strayer (Seven Stories).

LitHub hosts a conversation between Elizabeth Rush, author of The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth (Milkweed Editions), and Kerri Arsenault, author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains (St. Martin’s). LitHub also interviews Pidgeon Pagonis, author of Nobody Needs To Know (TOPPLE Books & Little A).

Vanity Fair shares an excerpt from Naomi Klein’s forthcoming book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Farrar).

Autostraddle has an excerpt from Thin Skin: Essays by Jenn Shapland (Pantheon).

LitHub has an essay by Miranda Miller, author of Angelica Paintress of Minds (Barbican): “How My Friend Hilary Mantel Got Inside People’s Minds.”

The Guardian reports that Stephen King might publish a third “Talisman” novel, after writing the first two with the late Peter Straub.

NYT’s “Inside the Best-Seller List” covers Everyone Here Is Lying by Shari Lapena (Pamela Dorman).

CrimeReads’s “My First Thriller” column looks at the early career of James Patterson.

Authors on Air

NPR’s Fresh Air talks to R. Eric Thomas, author of Congratulations, the Best Is Over!: Essays (Ballantine).

Shelf Awareness rounds up this weekend’s schedule for C-SPAN 2’s Book TV.

Ally Henny, author of I Won’t Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries To Silence You (Baker), will appear on Good Morning America tomorrow.

LitHub’s Authors in the Tent video series has an interview with Alex Segura, author of Secret Identity (Flatiron). Edan Lepucki, author of Time’s Mouth (Counterpoint), appears on The Maris Review podcast, while Samuel G. Freedman, author of Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights (Oxford Univ.), is interviewed on the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast. The Keen On podcast talks to Peter Kim, author of How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken, and Repaired (Flatiron), and Matthew Moynihan, author of Fusion’s Promise: How Technological Breakthroughs in Nuclear Fusion Can Conquer Climate Change on Earth (And Carry Humans to Mars, Too) (Springer).

Netflix’s cancelled Warrior Nun series (based on the graphic novel Warrior Nun Areala by Ben Dunn) will return to screens as a trilogy of movies, Tor.com reports.

Deadline has the trailer for the Hulu series The Other Black Girl, based on the novel by Zakiya Dalila Harris (Atria; LJ starred review).

Town & Country shares “Everything We Know About Edith Wharton Drama The Buccaneers,” an Apple TV+ adaptation based on Wharton’s unfinished final novel.

Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series will be adapted as an anime on Netflix, Vulture reports.

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