Want to get the latest book news delivered to your inbox each day? Sign up for our daily Book Pulse newsletter.

 Awards & News

The British Book Awards are announced. Menopausing: The Positive Roadmap to Your Second Spring by Davina McCall and Dr. Naomi Potter (HQ) wins Overall Book of the Year. 

Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry (Doubleday), is Author of the Year, and R.F. Kuang’s Babel; or, The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution (Harper Voyager) wins Fiction Book of the Year.

Salman Rushdie is also honored at the awards. Publishing Perspectives reports. 

WA Premier’s Book Awards shortlists are announced.

The June LibraryReads list is out, featuring top pick The Quiet Tenant by Clémence Michallon (Knopf). 

The U.S. Book Show’s “Libraries Are Essential” virtual program is on May 22. Librarians can register on the U.S. Book Show website.  

Archie Comics will introduce its first trans character. Gizmodo has the story. 

Publishers Weekly rounds up this month’s book club picks.

LA Times reports on “The 15 most banned books in America this school year” and the two moms who are fighting book banning.

The Guardian reports on Tiananmen Square books being removed from Hong Kong libraries. 

Reviews

NPR reviews Quietly Hostile: Essays by Samantha Irby (Vintage): “As always, Irby dexterously plays both sides: the awkward people-pleaser and the snarky cynic. Like a cartoon character in a tennis match against herself, she races back and forth between self-deprecation and scalding humor, never once missing a stroke.”

NYT reviews Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (Morrow): “Yellowface is a kind of Art Monster story, but one that can’t allow room for ambiguity or revelation without rushing in to fill that space”; Glassworks by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith (Bloomsbury): “Glassworks is so deeply imagined and immersive that reading it felt like an invitation: Shatter what needs to be shattered and mold your story from what’s left”; The Garden of Seven Twilights by Miquel de Palol, tr. by Adrian Nathan West (Dalkey Archive Pr.): “This intellectual mystery’s varied themes and tensile irony seem to exist outside of a specific time or genre. Science fiction, classic philosophy, futurism, high culture and pornography are sheathed in a verbose, nearly Jamesian elegance. Hiding within the heady formalism is a finely calibrated—and eminently readable—fiction”; Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity by Leah Myers (Norton): “Thinning Blood is slender and poetic but also wide-ranging, moving with ease from memoir to Native history to myth and back again, yielding a blend that transcends genre”; and The Postcard by Anne Berest, tr. by Tina Kover (Europa; LJ starred review): “For Anne, embracing her Jewishness—both its pleasures and its difficulties—is a choice, one to which she has committed herself fully. And the quest leads to a profound identification with those who suffered and died.” Plus, there are short reviews of three new books.

The Washington Post reviews Berlin by Bea Setton (Penguin Books): “It’s written in funny, punchy vignettes perfect for consumption between U-Bahn stops, and a few hours in the presence of Daphne Ferber pay generous spiritual dividends”; and Barbara Isn’t Dying by Alina Bronsky (Europa): “This is a wise, carefully constructed novel about fragile hidden identities, whose ending reads like a deeply felt beginning.”

Briefly Noted

NYT interviews Michael Lewis about FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried ahead of the release of his new book, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (Norton), due out in October. The Guardian also previews “the high octane” book. 

LA Times talks with Jonathan Eig about shattering myths in his new book, King: A Life (Farrar; LJ starred review). Also, R.F. Kuang discusses the inspirations behind her dark satire, Yellowface (Morrow). 

Martha Stewart is the new cover model for this year’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. USA Today has the story. 

Greg Harden discusses his protegé Tom Brady, who wrote the forward to his forthcoming book Stay Sane in an Insane World: How To Control the Controllables and Thrive (Blackstone), with People. 

Ebony highlights Jacqueline Crooks’s new novel, Fire Rush (Viking). 

Jack Carr, Only the Dead (Atria/Emily Bestler), talks about the managment of AI with FoxNews. 

Andrew Rannells talks about his new book, Uncle of the Year: & Other Debatable Triumphs (Crown; LJ starred review), with USA Today.

The Guardian tests AI and ChatGPT as blurb-writers.

Essence shares “7 Page-Turning Coffee Table Books By Black Authors.”

LitHub recommends 24 new books this week. 

BookRiot highlights new books for the week and 11 horror books by AAPI authors and offers an introduction to “weird queer.” 

Authors On Air

NPR’s Morning Edition talks with Jonathan Eig about his new book, King: A Life (Farrar; LJ starred review).

Netflix Cancels Lockwood & Co. adaptation of Jonathan Stroud’s supernatural series. Tor reports. 

PBS Canvas previews what to expect at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. 

Want to get the latest book news delivered to your inbox each day? Sign up for our daily Book Pulse newsletter.