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Awards, News & Best of 2024

The NYT announces the 10 best books of 2024.

NYPL selects the best books of 2024. 

The Guardian names “The best ideas books of 2024.”

Liza Minnelli’s forthcoming memoir, due out in 2026, will be adapted for television. People has an interview with the icon, and Minnelli weighs in with her thoughts on casting at Entertainment Weekly. 

Peter Mackay has been named Scotland’s Makar, or national poet, BBC reports. 

Kate Beaton wins the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, CBC reports. 

Oxford University Press selects “brain rot” as its word of the year. NPR’s Book of the Day looks at when philosopher Henry David Thoreau warned of brain rot in 1854.

December Book Clubs

Reese Witherspoon selects City of Night Birds by Juhea Kim (Ecco) for her December book club.

The Last One by Rachel Howzell Hall (Entangled: Red Tower) is GMA’s December pick.

Target’s December book club pick is Roland Rogers Isn’t Dead Yet by Samantha Allen (Zando).

BookRiot suggests the best book club titles for December.

Reviews

NYT reviews How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch (Atria; LJ starred review): “The downside of a structure that unpacks one musical per chapter is that you may be tempted to skip those musicals you don’t know so well. But the freshness of the takes on the familiar shows is great”; Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd (Atlantic Monthly): “Gabriel is a moron coated in Teflon, and his invincibility can be read as a satire of the Cold War era, when entitled men meddled with impunity in the fates of nations”; Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film by Julie Gilbert (Pantheon; LJ starred review): “Replete with interviews old and new and the comma-challenged, sometimes UPPERCASE notes and correspondence of its strong-willed subject, Giant Love is a tender and patient homage to a titan of American letters who has fallen most grievously out of fashion”; A History of the Big House by Charif Majdalani, tr. by Ruth Diver (Other Pr.): “You can’t miss the spectrum of Levantine humanity in A History of the Big House, a 2005 novel by the Lebanese writer Charif Majdalani, newly translated into English”; Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard by Joe Brainard, ed. by Daniel Kane (Columbia Univ.): “Brainard was, in Emily Dickinson’s words, out with lanterns looking for himself. In these letters, you feel the force of a person fully met”; and Rental House by Weike Wang (Riverhead): “It’s in this strange clash of familiarity and friction that Weike Wang’s third novel, Rental House, makes its home.” Washington Post also reviews: “In Weike Wang’s timely third novel, Rental House, childless, mid-30s, dual-income spouses Keru and Nate are knocked for a loop when a couple they meet on vacation call them the ‘textbook example of a DINK family.’”

The Rumpus reviews Magically Black and Other Essays by Jerald Walker (Amistad): “He leans into the idea of representative Blackness, with discussions of mowing his lawn, having white people to dinner, and discovering that the local doctor is a Black man. Nonetheless, the essays have teeth.”

StarTribune reviews Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music by Rob Sheffield (Dey Street): “Because Sheffield’s essays are arranged roughly chronologically, they also illustrate how cleverly Swift’s ginormous career has been built.”

Briefly Noted

LitHub shares 23 new books for the week.

AV Club highlights 10 books for December. 

The Guardian shares the best crime and thrillers of the year.

NPR has “12 novels that NPR critics and staff were excited to share with you in 2024.”

BookRiot has eight new queer books for the month, 

PopSugar lists “48 of the Best Books by Women Authors to Read in Your Lifetime.”

T&C offers a guide to all the Wicked books. 

FoxNews highlights eight top-rated books of 2024. 

ElectricLit offers “8 Poetry Collections for the Broken Hearted.”

Author Stephen King’s Maine radio stations will go silent at the end of the year, Seattle Times reports. 

LitHub explores “Art in the Age of ChatGPT.”

Authors on Air

BookRiot shares everything to know about Rachel Yoder’s book Nightbitch (Doubleday; LJ starred review) before seeing the adaptation.

Marian Keyes’s “Walsh Sisters” books will be adapted for TV in Ireland and the UK, Deadline reports.

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