Polling Book Bans and Buzzy Book News

A national NPR/Ipsos poll reveals that 52% of Republicans are opposed to banning books from schools, whereas book bans are supported by 5% of Democrats, 16% of Independents, and 35% of Republicans.

Paige Cowan-Hall has won the Women’s Prize Trust 2023 Discoveries Prize for her yet-to-be-published historical fiction novel Marooned. Locus has the news.

The Society of Authors announced this year’s Authors’ Awards shortlists across 11 categories.

NYT offers “9 New Books We Recommend This Week,” plus a selection of eight books published this week. 

“10 noteworthy books for June,” selected by Washington Post.

Donna Tartt’s agent has debunked the rumor that she is releasing a new novel in June 2023, according to Publishers Lunch.

Page to Screen

June 2:

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, based on associated titles. Sony Pictures. No reviews | Trailer

The Boogeyman, based on the short story by Stephen King. 20th Century Studios. Reviews | Trailer

Scoop, based on the book Behind Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison by Jigna Vora. Netflix. No reviews | Trailer

June 8:

Culpa mía (My Fault), based on the novel by Mercedes Ron. Amazon Studios. No reviews | Trailer

Reviews

NYT reviews Samantha Leach’s The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia (Legacy Lit; LJ starred review): “In this smart and gripping debut, Leach refreshes a familiar heartbreak by weaving the stories of these three lost young women into a larger, more complicated and ultimately tragic narrative of a nation not so much losing the war on drugs as on a death march every bit as doomed as the last battles in Sparta”; and S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron; LJ starred review): “As in S.A. Cosby’s previous two novels, Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears, the body count is high and the action pretty much nonstop.”

Washington Post reviews Elise Hu’s Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture From the K-Beauty Capital (Dutton): “Hu concedes that ‘body rituals’ can be ‘nurturing and inherently human,’ that they can enable ‘experimentation and expression.’ Yet the bulk of her richly researched book reveals the irredeemable shortcomings of the body rituals that are predominant today”; Jenny Erpenbeck’s East Berlin–set Kairos, tr. by Michael Hofmann (New Directions): “With Kairos, she has made that past seem like the present, when history is not yet settled and one’s life is still a contingent thing, open to chance”; My Friend Anne Frank: The Inspiring and Heartbreaking True Story of Best Friends Torn Apart and Reunited Against All Odds by Hannah Pick Goslar with Dina Kraft (Little, Brown): “Pick-Goslar’s story seems more important than ever now, when the incidence of casual, public and criminal antisemitism is rising at home and abroad”; and Jane Wong’s Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City: A Memoir (Tin House): “Wong’s memoir invites those who have been overlooked in America to hold up their verses, accolades and solidarity in a collective rejoinder to their detractors.”

Washington Post also reviews three novels in the otherworldly “genre mastered by H.P. Lovecraft”: the just-reissued classic In a Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner (Valancourt), Dare Segun Falowo’s story collection Caged Ocean Dub (Tartarus), and Rosalie Parker’s Dream Fox and Other Strange Stories (Tartarus).

LA Times reviews Henry Hoke’s Open Throat (MCD): “Hoke makes a…puma his narrator, and from the beginning it is clear the author is mainly on Team Ferality. (First line: ‘I’ve never eaten a person but today I might.’)” NYT also reviews: “Though many readers will label Open Throat unconventional, this act of ravishing and outlandish imagination should be the norm, not the exception.”

Briefly Noted

For LitHub, Zara Raheem compiles a list of novels featuring Muslim women.

CrimeReads selects 12 new crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers to read in June. The site also finds five country-house murder novels set in the United States and celebrates the resurgence of the locked-room mystery with eight contemporary novels. Lastly, five novels featuring “mysteries, musicians, and mayhem against a Tinseltown backdrop.”

Tor.com lists “Six Favorite Authors Writing in New or Unexpected Genres” and “4 Weird and Sexy Books for Pride Month.”

LitHub compiles a list of “the best unhinged books to read while smiling on a beach.” 

Washington Post identifies five books that “explore why we don’t have to tolerate ‘bad sex,’ and what it means to have loving connections with no sex at all.” 

Shelf Awareness gathers Pride Month displays from indie bookstores.

NYT has images from Larry Sultan’s photobook Swimmers (Mack), capturing “recreational swimmers at public pools in 1970s and ’80s California.”

LitHub publishes excerpts from Charlotte Gill’s Almost Brown: A Memoir (Crown) and Steph Catudal’s Everything All at Once: A Memoir (HarperOne).

Tor.com shares an excerpt from Garden of the Cursed (Holt) by Katy Rose Pool. 

V.E. Schwab is leading a readalong of her “Shades of Magic” trilogy on YouTube, in anticipation of the autumn publication of The Fragile Threads of Power (Tor), a new series-starter set in the same world. Tor.com has the news.

Luis Alberto Urrea, Good Night Irene (Little, Brown), has an essay in LitHub’s “Craft of Writing” newsletter.

For LitHub, Peter Mishler interviews poet André Naffis-Sahely, High Desert (Bloodaxe).

USA Today interviews poets including Clint Smith, Above Ground (Little, Brown; LJ starred review), about the accessibility of poetry: “You don’t have to figure out what the poet meant for it to be because that’s what it meant to you, and that’s what matters,” Smith says.

Shelf Awareness has a Q&A with Peter S. Beagle, whose two-volume story collection The Essential Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon) was recently released.

NYT profiles Martha Hodes, My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering (Harper), whose book is about an “an infamous hijacking, revisited through a child’s eyes.” 

Authors On Air

On Fresh Air yesterday, poet Kwame Alexander reflected on his new memoir, Why Fathers Cry At Night (Little, Brown).

Novelist John Vercher, After the Lights Go Out (Soho), will be interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air today.

Tomorrow, NPR’s The People’s Pharmacy will interview Katy Bowman, co-author of Rethink Your Position: Reshape Your Exercise, Yoga, and Everyday Movement, One Part at a Time (Propriometrics Pr.).

On Sunday, MSNBC’s Jen Psaki will interview FBI director–turned–crime novelist James Comey, Central Park West (Mysterious Pr.).

LitHub has a guide to the 2023 Cannes Film Festival’s Literary adaptations.

The Hollywood Reporter has an interview with Lily Rabe, star of the series Love & Death, based on the true-crime book Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs, about a real-life 1980s ax murder. Deadline reports that Love & Death has become Max’s No. 1 most-watched original limited series globally.

Imaginarium Productions has won the rights to adapt Cleo Watson’s Whips (Corsair: Hachette), a “steamy novel written by Boris Johnson’s former adviser that’s been the talk of Westminster,” Deadline reports.

Jens Lapidus’s Swedish novel Paradis City will be adapted for TV by Viaplay, according to Deadline.