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Awards & Book News

The NYT Book Review book club picks Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend for August.

Catherine Taylor wins the TLS Ackerley Prize for memoir and biography with The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

The Cundill History Prize longlist is announced.

The short stories on the Caine Prize for African Writing shortlist are revealed.

Finalists are selected for the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award, recognizing the best books with a horse racing backdrop, Shelf Awareness reports.

Howard Andrew Jones wins a Trigon Award, honoring “the past, present, and future of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.”

Time releases its list of the 50 best romance novels.

New Title Bestsellers

Links for the week: NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers | NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers | USA Today Bestselling Books

Fiction

The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves & China Miéville (Del Rey) reaches No. 2 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers list.

The Book of Bill by Alex Hirsch (Hyperion Avenue) hits No. 2 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Soul of a Witch: A Spicy Dark Demon Romance by Harley Laroux (Kensington) lights up No. 15 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Nonfiction

Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run the World by Anne Applebaum (Doubleday) runs No. 3 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers list.

Play a Bigger Game: Seven Universal Principles To Experience True Fulfillment and Win at Life by Markus Kaulius (Amplify) plays for No. 8 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Arise: The Art of Transformational Coaching by Elena Aguilar (Jossey-Bass) transforms No. 11 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How To Crush Them) by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec (War Room: Skyhorse) gets No. 14 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list, though some booksellers report receiving bulk orders.

Reviews

The Guardian reviews Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu (Knopf): “Instead of blockbuster revelations, we get meandering Sebaldian reflections on selfhood, and ghostly photographs of buildings and faces inserted intermittently into the text. All of this increases the book’s exquisite sense of alienation”; and The New India: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy by Rahul Bhatia (PublicAffairs): “By minutely observing the experiences of ordinary Indians…those whose lives are affected by the remarks and actions of pundits who fulminate on India’s increasingly shrill and jingoistic television networks—Bhatia provides a vivid portrait of how a nation turns callous and changes into something unrecognisable.”

LA Times reviews The Age of Loneliness: Essays by Laura Marris (Graywolf): “At times, I longed for more energetic movements in Marris’s watercolor pieces—but hers is an undeniably profound elucidation of losses, some of which are tragedies we’ve occasioned with our hubris and aggressive industry, whether or not we’ve made a new geological epoch from that. Certainly, the author intends her delicate, sober tone.”

LitHub gathers “5 reviews you need to read this week.”

Briefly Noted

NYT talks to literary translators who have now written novels of their own, including Jennifer Croft, Anton Hur, and Bruna Dantas Lobato.

Deborah Harkness, author of The Black Bird Oracle (Ballantine; LJ starred review), answers NYT’s “By the Book” questionnaire.

Kirkus interviews Lev Grossman, author of The Bright Sword (Viking; LJ starred review)

The Guardian recommends five of the best books about art.

LA Times has “10 books to add to your reading list in August.”

LitHub gathers July’s best-reviewed fiction, July’s best-reviewed nonfiction, the 17 best book covers of July, August’s best SFF books, and seven new poetry collections for August.

In The Guardian, writers and readers share the books they enjoyed in July.

Reactor lists “five entertaining SFF stories with relatively low stakes.”

People has a reading list of sports books.

CrimeReads rounds up five thrillers with life-or-death challenges.

Authors on Air

LitHub’s Voyage into Genre podcast talks about the devil and AI with Ananda Lima, author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor; LJ starred review), and L.M. Sagas, author of Gravity Lost (Tor).

LitHub’s Talk Easy podcast interviews Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of Long Island Compromise (Random; LJ starred review).

LitHub recommends “The Literary Film & TV You Need to Stream in August.”

Shelf Awareness gathers the schedule for this weekend’s Book TV on C-SPAN 2 at the Roosevelt Reading Festival.

Kara Swisher’s Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (S. & S.) has been optioned for series development, Deadline reports.

Amazon MGM wins the auction for Caro Claire Burke’s forthcoming novel Yesteryear; Anne Hathaway is attached to star and produce. Deadline has the news.

Prime Video has ordered a series based on Carley Fortune’s Every Summer After (Berkley), Deadline reports.

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