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Awards & News

PEN America announces two award winners: Javier Fuentes’s Countries of Origin (Pantheon) for debut novel and The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer, tr. by Patty Crane (Copper Canyon), for poetry in translation. Shelf Awareness has coverage.

The Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist is announced, featuring books by Anne Enright, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Kate Grenville, Isabella Hammad, Claire Kilroy, and Aube Rey. The Guardian has the news. 

NYPL’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers selects its class of 2024–25 fellows, including Leslie Jamison, Iman Mersal, and Isabella Hammad. 

Sid Marty wins the inaugural Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize, CBC reports.

A new climate fiction prize will launch at Hay Festival on June 2.

The U.S. Senate passed a bill yesterday that could ban TikTok. Associated Press reports. NYT, Washington Post, and NPR have coverage.

Reviews

NYT reviews Bad Habit by Alana S. Portero, tr. by Mara Faye Lethem (HarperVia): “Bad Habit is about identity, yes, but in its keenly observed realism, it’s also a family story of parents and children, and at the same time, it offers a fresh angle on narratives of the working class”; and Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War To End Democracy by Isaac Arnsdorf (Little, Brown): “Finish What We Started focuses instead on the ordinary foot soldiers in the MAGA grass roots—the ‘faces in the crowd’ who, in the aftermath of Jan. 6, continued to insist that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen and are determined to never let such an outrage happen again.” NYT also reviews three romance books and says of Cat Sebastian’s forthcoming You Should Be So Lucky (Avon; LJ starred review): “I can think of no better summary of why we do any art. If you read one romance this spring, make it this one.”

Washington Post reviews Only the Brave by Danielle Steel (Delacorte): “Not that there’s anything poetic about her new Holocaust novel, Only the Brave, but using the Final Solution as the setting for a sentimental melodrama is profoundly unseemly. It’s not good for the Jews. It’s not good for anybody”; Closer Together: Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other by Sophie Grégoire Trudeau (Random House Canada): “It is easy to like Grégoire Trudeau. She’s curious, earnest and a superb interviewer, her book studded with conversations with specialists, plus quizzes and so many tips to becoming our better selves. It is less easy to admire the former talk show host’s prose”; and four action-packed SFF novels: Ocean’s Godori by Elaine U. Cho (Zando), Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell (DAW; LJ starred review), The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills (Tachyon; LJ web review), and The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar (Tor.com).

LA Times reviews Real Americans by Rachel Khong (Knopf): “Disorienting as this narrative shape-shifting can be, Khong’s straddling of multiple literary genres insidiously mirrors her focus on hybrid racial and cultural identity.”

Briefly Noted

LibraryReads and Library Journal offer read-alikes for Funny Story by Emily Henry (Berkley; LJ starred review), the top holds title of the week. Rolling Stone ranks all of Henry’s romance novels. 

LJ has new prepub alerts. 

Parade highlights new releases for the week.

NYT features Kathleen Hanna and her new memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk (Ecco). 

Sasha Vasilyuk discusses her novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury), with Esquire. 

Alison C. Rollins, Black Bell (Copper Canyon), answers 10 questions at Poets & Writers. 

Washington Post publishes an excerpt from Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles (Knopf).

HipLatina previews “15 Poetry Collections by Latina Writers Coming Out in 2024.”

In LitHub, the creators of a bicycle-powered library in Portland, OR, reflect on its “humble beginnings.”

Authors On Air

NPR’s All Things Considered talks with Joan Nathan about her latest cookbook, My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories (Knopf). 

Today, NPR’s Fresh Air will interview Susan Page, author of The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters (S. & S.).

Danielle Steel discusses her forthcoming book, Only the Brave (Delacorte), on GMA. People also has coverage.

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