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Awards & Book News

The Ned Kelly Award winners, celebrating the best in Australian crime writing, have been named.

The winners of the Davitt Awards, recognizing the best crime and mystery books by Australian women, are announced.

CrimeReads previews the most anticipated crime fiction of fall 2023.

The AP reports that the same effort that promotes book bans is spurring libraries (including the state libraries in Montana, Missouri, and Texas and the local library in Midland, Texas) to leave the ALA over its defense of books.

Edith Grossman, eminent translator of Spanish literature by Cervantes and Gabriel García Márquez, dies at 87. Washington Post has an obituary.

“Journalist and author Peter C. Newman, who chronicled Canada’s power brokers, dead at 94,” CBC reports.

Page to Screen

September 8

After Everything, based on the “After” novels by Anna Todd. Voltage Pictures. Reviews | Trailer

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, based on the novel by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. Blue Fox Entertainment. Reviews | Trailer

Joyce Carol Oates: A Body in the Service of Mind, based on the work of Joyce Carol Oates. Greenwich Entertainment. Reviews | Trailer

The Nun II, based on the books of Ed and Lorraine Warren. Warner Brothers. Reviews | Trailer

Poor Things, based on the novel by Alasdair Gray. Searchlight Pictures. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

Washington Post reviews Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland by Scott Shane (Celadon; LJ starred review): “Shane’s account is a reminder of the obstacles faced by an earlier era’s ‘bright stars of benevolence,’ as Smallwood called the activists of the underground railroad, and of the urgent need to nurture and honor those of our own time.”

NYT reviews Daughter by Claudia Dey (Farrar): “Throughout the novel, spiraling grief is shot through with spiky, often comic descriptions”; and The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff (Riverhead): “This all makes for a rather lonely novel, yet one shot through with Groff’s perennial interest in the pioneering spirit.” LA Times also reviews the latter: “Groff’s world is Darwinian, but she doesn’t chronicle the survival of the fittest; she convinces us instead that even the unluckiest among us can find a way to the blessings of peace, quiet and freedom.” Plus, NYT reviews essay collections by Myriam Gurba, Jenn Shapland and Wang Xiaobo and an audiobook of the week.

NPR’s Fresh Air reviews The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright (Norton): “The power of Enright’s novel derives not so much from the age-old tale of men behaving badly, but from the beauty and depth of her own style.”

LA Times reviews How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto (Little, Brown): “Nobel Prize is a kind of experimental lab of satirical fiction: How many through lines of today’s culture wars can you realistically stuff into a novel while still claiming to have produced a comedy?”; and The Lights: Poems by Ben Lerner (Farrar; LJ starred review): “This notion of time as both fixed and fluid extends into the mechanics of the collection: the line breaks, elisions and susurrations, the position of the words on the page.”

LitHub notes the best-reviewed books of the week.

Briefly Noted

NYT rounds up “9 New Books We Recommend This Week,” newly published books, and six paperbacks to read this week.

HipLatina identifies 14 new books by Latinx authors to read for Latinx Heritage Month (Sept. 15–Oct. 15).

Kirkus shares eight big new fiction books from small presses.

USA Today lists “books with pick-me-up power.”

Tor.com notes all the new horror, romantasy, and other SFF-crossover books arriving in September.

CrimeReads selects “5 great thrillers with island settings that get very, very dark.”

T&C chooses the 25 best cookbooks by Great British Baking Show contestants.

Seattle Times shares five audiobooks for that back-to-school feeling, while Electric Lit has 10 books that show the lives of school teachers.

BookRiot finds nine read-alikes for Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (Morrow).

The Millions features Mark O’Connell and his latest true-crime book, A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder (Doubleday).

Salon talks to British novelist Wendy Holden about The Princess (Berkley), her novel about Lady Diana Spencer.

Wired interviews Naomi Klein about her new book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Farrar).

Popsugar publishes an essay by Denene Millner about the origins of her new novel One Blood (Forge; LJ starred review).

Gizmodo shares a story from Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology (Vintage).

Elle has an excerpt from Elyssa Maxx Goodman’s Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City (Hanover Square: Harlequin; LJ starred review).

Celebrity chef José Andrés will move into graphic novels with Feeding Dangerously: On the Ground with José Andrés and World Central Kitchen, due out in November from TKO Books, Deadline reports.

Canadian indie publisher Greystone and news media organization Postmedia plan an “instant book” on wildfire season, The Summer Canada Burned, which will be on shelves in November; Kirkus has the news.

Authors on Air

LitHub’s Just the Right Book podcast interviews Elise Loehnen, author of On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay To Be Good (Dial); Fiction/Non/Fiction talks to Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author of The American Daughters (One World); and So Many Damn Books chats with Stacey Mei Yan Fong, author of 50 Pies, 50 States: An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the United States Through Pie (Voracious).

Lionsgate has acquired the remake of The Crow, based on the graphic novel by James O’Barr. Deadline has the news. 

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