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Awards, News & Book Clubs

Oprah picks From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir by Lisa Marie Presley with Riley Keough (Random) for her book club. USA Today has coverage. People shares details from the memoir. Keough appears on Oprah’s CBS special “The Presleys: Elvis, Lisa Marie and Riley.”

Publishers Weekly rounds up the rest of October’s book club picks.

Finalists for the Governor General's Literary Awards are announced. 

The Wonderland Awards finalists are announced. Locus has details. 

October’s Loanstars list is out featuring top pick The Waiting by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown; LJ starred review).

LitHub shares bookies’ odds for the Nobel Prize in literature, while NYT asks: “What Good Is Great Literature?”

Reviews

NYT reviews Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon by Lauren Sherman & Chantal Fernandez (Holt): “Instead, in chatty but precise prose, Sherman and Fernandez unfurl the kind of forensic, thoroughly sourced narrative more often found in the business pages of a newspaper, albeit one that makes clear the ongoing role that sexism, racism and sizeism played in the company’s undoing”; The Witches of El Paso by Luis Jaramillo (Atria: Primero Sueno): “Ultimately, The Witches of El Paso wields the same blessing and curse as La Vista itself: ‘The energy goes where it wants,’ Nena says. By the end, the magic dissipates back to a faint humming in the ear”; and Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst (Random): “Our Evenings is that rare bird: a muscular work of ideas and an engrossing tale of one man’s personal odyssey as he grows up, framed in exquisite language, surrounding us like a Wall of Sound.”

Washington Post reviews Elaine by Will Self (Grove; LJ starred review): “The pleasure of reading his prose is both unchanged and, one imagines, the same pleasure he derives when composing it: a full-blooded Nabokovian relish for the possibilities of the sentence, the phrase, the word. This is not just Self’s idea of fun, it is his modus operandi”; and Melania by Melania Trump (Skyhorse): “Melania is a love story, actually. It’s about two famous vanity plates who truly are perfect for each other.”

The Guardian reviews Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems, 1961–2023 by Margaret Atwood (Knopf; LJ starred review): “It is all voice, story, touchstone, tough liberation. A joy.”

Briefly Noted

LibraryReads and Library Journal offer read-alikes for The Last One at the Wedding by Jason Rekulak (Flatiron), the top holds title of the week. 

LJ has new prepub alerts. 

FoxNews previews new books for fall.

NYT highlights 8 comics for Halloween.

NYPL lists recent works by Indigenous authors.

People features details from Eric Idle’s new book, The Spamalot Diaries (Crown). 

Washington Post reveals key details from Bob Woodward's forthcoming book, War (S. & S.), due out next week. NYT also looks at revelations from the book here and here.

NYT has a feature on The Propagandist by Cécile Desprairies, tr. by Natasha Lehrer (New Vessel Pr.).

Reactor shares “Five SF Scenarios Involving the Presidential Line of Succession.”

Steve Wasserman, Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays (Heyday), answers 10 questions at Poets & Writers. 

CrimeReads talks with Robert Dugoni, Beyond Reasonable Doubt (Thomas & Mercer), about his writing life. 

Authors On Air

Arash Javanbakht discusses his new book, Afraid: Understanding the Purpose of Fear and Harnessing the Power of Anxiety (Rowman & Littlefield), with NPR's Short Wave podcast and why some people love scary movies.

BBC will adapt The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow (Picador; LJ starred review), to be aired during the 30th anniversary of BBC’s classic Pride and Prejudice series. Deadline reports.

The Princess Diaries 3 movie, based on the books by Meg Cabot, has been confirmed. Vanity Fair reports.  People rounds up the latest news. 

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