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

Awards & Book News

In honor of the centenary of James Baldwin’s birth, NPR’s Morning Edition explains his relevance today, NYT has a life in pictures, LitHub revisits his Sonny’s Blues, and Colm Tóibín celebrates his enduring, international influence.

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright (New Directions) wins the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's most prestigious literary prize.

The longlist has been selected for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and tr. by Mark Solms (Rowman & Littlefield/Institute of Psychoanalysis), has been in the making for 30 years, Publishers Weekly reports.

The Dallas-based Southwest Review is launching New Pony Press, which plans to publish one book by a “cult writer” each year. Publishers Weekly has the news.

Page to Screen

August 2

Boot Camp, based on the novel by Gina Musa. Wattpad. Reviews | Trailer

Escape from Germany, based on “Mine Angels Round About”: West German Mission Evacuation 1939 by Terry Bohle Montague. Samuel Goldwyn Films. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

LA Times reviews Hum by Helen Phillips (Marysue Rucci: S. & S.): “Helen Phillips has written an eerie and electric novel that blurs the lines between dystopia and reality. What makes this especially creepy is how masterfully she taps the sense we feel in our own lives that what was once the stuff of sci-fi has seeped into the everyday.” NYT also reviews: “In spite of its clever science fiction elements, Hum reads like a work of beautifully observed contemporary realism, an intimate and tender portrait of one mother’s day-to-day struggles to keep her children safe, and to find a little joy, in a damaged and dangerous world.”

NYT also reviews Unspeakable Home by Ismet Prcic (Avid Reader): “[Pricic] would likely bristle at the label of autofiction. His new novel is too kinetic to merit inclusion in that trendy cohort. Part existential cry, part urinal graffito, part anguished confession, Unspeakable Home is a survival strategy, a transfiguring of personal memory to obscure the terrible cost of exile.”

Washington Post reviews The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss (Viking): “As a professor of American and urban studies at James Madison University, Friss can be expected to know his way around a research library, but he also proves to be an adept reporter. As a result, he has produced a work of popular history that is both entertaining and informative”; Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu (Knopf): “Like all of Mengestu’s novels, it’s about the struggle to feel settled, to feel at peace, but once again he edges around that theme by a wholly unexpected route”; and The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982 by Chris Nashawaty (Flatiron): “That these and the other half-dozen movies that Nashawaty surveys have enjoyed such a long afterlife means much of this history has been previously told…. Even so, Nashawaty supplements this wealth of extant material with his own reporting, both new to this book and drawn from his 25 years on the beat as a reporter and critic.”

Briefly Noted

NYT gathers “6 new paperbacks to read this week” and “6 new books we recommend this week.”

USA Today recommends romantic thrillers similar to Verity by Colleen Hoover.

In People, actor Emma Roberts shares her 10 favorite travel-inspired books.

CrimeReads rounds up August’s best new psychological thrillers and “six mysteries about female friendships gone wrong,” plus explains “Why Sedona, Arizona, Is a Prime Location for Crime Fiction.”

“Embrace Your Love for Romance Novels. It’s Good for You,” suggests Time.

Vulture explores “Four Friends, Two Marriages, One Affair—and a Shelf of Books Dissecting It.”

Fox News interviews Juan Williams about his new book, New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement (S. & S.). Kirkus also has coverage.

Authors on Air

NPR’s Fresh Air interviews Chris Nashawaty, author of The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982 (Flatiron).

Universal Pictures has won the rights to adapt Britney Spears’s memoir The Woman in Me as a biopic, and Wicked filmmaker Jon M. Chu is attached to direct, according to Deadline.

There will be a big-screen adaptation of Sanford D. Greenberg’s 2020 inspirational memoir, Hello Darkness My Old Friend: How Daring Dreams and Unyielding Friendship Turned One Man’s Blindness into an Extraordinary Vision for Life, Deadline reports.

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