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

Awards and Buzzy Book News

The Lambda Literary Foundation has announced some of its 2023 winners. Eboni J. Dunbar wins the Randall Kenan Prize for Black LGBTQ Fiction; Naseem Jamnia, author of The Bruising of Qilwa (Tachyon; LJ starred review and 2022 best book), and Maya Salameh, author of the poetry collection How To Make an Algorithm in the Microwave (Univ. of Arkansas, win the Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers; and Jaquira Díaz, author of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir (Algonquin; LJ starred review and 2019 best book), wins the Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction. The Lambda Literary website has Q&A’s with Dunbar, Salameh, and Díaz. The rest of the Lambda Literary Award winners will be announced on June 9.

Chinese American Librarians Association announces the winners of its Best Book Awards. Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (Penguin Pr.; LJ starred review) wins for adult fiction, and Stay True: A Memoir by Hua Hsu (Anchor) wins for adult nonfiction. Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou (Penguin Pr.) receives honors for adult fiction, and Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu (Riverhead) receives honors for adult nonfiction. Via email.

A shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award has been released, Locus reports. Locus also has the shortlist for the Michael Knost Wings Award.

The National Centre for Writing has announced that Santanu Bhattacharya, Carole Hailey, and Csilla Toldy are the winners of the Desmond Elliott Residencies for debut fiction writers, The Bookseller reports.

The Writers’ Trust of Canada announced that Cooper Skjeie’s Scattered Oblations (poetry) and Zak Jones’s So Much More To Say (short fiction) are winners of this year’s RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, Shelf Awareness reports.

Vulture selects the best books of 2023 so far.

Publishers Weekly rounds up the various June book club picks.

June’s EarlyWord GalleyChat spreadsheet is available now.

A new statue of Willa Cather has been unveiled in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall; it was sculpted by Littleton Alston, the first Black artist to have work represented in the national collection, PBS’s Canvas reports.

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library expands its free-book program in California, LA Times reports.

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, whose first edition came out in 1981, is getting an expanded edition from Morrow in November 2023, now including 150 additional letters that were excised from earlier editions. Tor.com has the news.

For readers waiting to get their hands on Cross Down by James Patterson and Brendan DuBois (Little, Brown), the top holds title of the week, LibraryReads and LJ suggest read-alikes by S.A. Cosby, John Hart, and Lee Child.

New Title Best Sellers

Links for the week: NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers | NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers | USA Today Best-Selling Books

Fiction:

Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421 by T.J. Newman (Avid Reader/S. & S.; LJ starred review) surfaces at No. 5 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

The Celebrants by Steven Rowley (Putnam) shows up at No. 12 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Killing Moon by Jo Nesbø, tr. by Sean Kinsella (Knopf) hits no. 13 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea (Little, Brown) arrives at no. 15 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Sellers list.

Nonfiction:

Everything All at Once: A Memoir by Steph Catudal (HarperOne) appears at No. 12 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list.

The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America by Monica Potts (Random) takes No. 13 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list.

Audio:

New June audiobook best seller lists arrive. The no. 1 NYT Audio Fiction best seller is Only the Dead by Jack Carr, read by Ray Porter (S. & S. Audio). The no. 1 Audio Nonfiction best seller is Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia with Bill Gifford, read by Attia (Random House Audio/Books on Tape).

Reviews

NYT reviews The Dissident by Paul Goldberg (Farrar; LJ starred review): “The sociological description of 1970s Soviet activist life that Paul Goldberg layers onto his new novel, The Dissident, is as thick, gleaming and rich as a slab of fatback on rye”; Lament for Julia by Susan Taubes (NYRB Classics): “The enigmatic Susan Taubes wrote the coming-of-age novel Lament for Julia in the 1960s; 54 years after her death, its gothic splendors shine”; Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future by Patrick J. Deneen (Sentinel): “Deneen’s worldview is unrelentingly zero-sum. He says he seeks nothing less than the ‘renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization’”; You Have To Be Prepared To Die Before You Can Begin To Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America by Paul Kix (Celadon; LJ starred review): “In his new book, in lieu of analysis, he opts for character development and edge-of-your-seat drama. This is history as motion picture”; The Mythmakers by Keziah Weir (S. & S./Marysue Rucci): “Keziah Weir’s assured first novel, The Mythmakers, is a laudable addition to a reading list that already includes such standouts as Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife, Karen Dukess’s The Last Book Party, Andrew Lipstein’s Last Resort and R.F. Kuang’s new novel, Yellowface”; and Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant (Knopf): “Vaillant anthropomorphizes fire. Not only does it grow and breathe and search for food; it strategizes. It hunts. It lays in wait for months, even years.” Washington Post also reviews the latter: “A book about an isolated disaster thereby unfurls into a book about boreal forest ecosystems, the chemistry of combustion, the flammability of modern furniture, the history of environmental exploitation in Alberta…and much more—at times, too much more.”

Washington Post reviews Frances Haugen’s The Power of One: How I Found the Strength To Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook (Little, Brown): “What really makes the book worth reading is the broader wisdom in her story (and the absence of the self-importance implied by the book’s unfortunate title).” They also have four short reviews of SF/fantasy novels.

NPR reviews Darrin Bell’s graphic memoir The Talk (Holt): “Like the effects of an unduly perceptive editorial cartoon, The Talk makes a penetrative, and lasting, impression”; and Fresh Air reviews two summer suspense novels—Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott (Putnam) and My Murder by Katie Williams (Riverhead)—that “delight in overturning the ‘woman-in-trouble’ plot.”

LA Times reviews Burn It Down: Power, Complicity and a Call for Change in Hollywood by Maureen Ryan (Mariner: Houghton Harcourt): “In placing sexual assault allegations alongside complaints from writers about being sidelined, her book risks diminishing the former”; and Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, tr. by Michael Hofmann (New Directions): “In her severe but rewarding Kairos, Erpenbeck has done it again, carefully mapping the disintegration of an East German love affair onto the era just before the 1990 reunification of Germany.”

WSJ reviews The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means for Our Country by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett (Basic): “Currid-Halkett writes perceptively about rural Americans’ blissful freedom from meritocratic aspirations, and her desire to correct urban elites’ misperceptions of small-town life is heartfelt. In the end, though, her thesis amounts to a platitude”; Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living by John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle (Princeton Univ.): “Lively and informal, it will prompt fruitful conversations about the role of work in our lives. Scholars of Thoreau, however, may find that it doesn’t go far enough into Thoreau’s own rigorous thinking on the subject”; and Elixir: A Parisian Perfume House and the Quest for the Secret of Life by Theresa Levitt (Harvard Univ.): “Vividly evokes cultural life in Bohemian Paris, the turbulence of the French Revolution and its aftermath, and the feuds that plagued rival scientists.”

LitHub’s BookMarks chooses “five reviews you need to read this week.”

Briefly Noted

Artist Françoise Gilot—author of About Women: Conversations Between a Writer and a Painter (Nan A. Talese) and the 1964 memoir Life with Picasso, written with Carlton Lake (NYRB Classics)—has died at the age of 101. NYT has an obituary. Town & Country re-runs a profile of Gilot from 2015, when About Women came out.

Shelf Awareness has an obituary for William E. Glassley, author of the award-winning 2018 book A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice, who died in March at age 75.

The Guardian compiles a list of the “top 10 Sapphic love stories.” SF Chronicle also has a Pride Month reading list: “These 5 new books by LGBTQ+ authors will make you laugh, cry and shout for joy.” And Autostraddle lists “81 Queer and Feminist Books Coming Your Way Summer 2023.”

Chicago Tribune has a list of 52 books for summer 2023.

LitHub has “a reading list of linked stories,” “seven books that feature rock music,” “a reading list of motherhood and adoption,” and “a dystopian mystery reading list.”

Tor.com selects “Seven SFF Short Stories Featuring Students and Scholarship” and celebrates “The Books That Queered Us.”

CrimeReads has a list of novels about missing persons.

LitHub has excerpts from Anne Lekas Miller’s Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World (Algonquin), Juliet Duncan’s Juliet: The Life and Afterlives of Shakespeare’s First Tragic Heroine (Seal), Nick de Semlyen’s The Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage (Crown), Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen (Pushkin), Frieda Hughes’s George: A Magpie Memoir (Avid Reader/S. & S.), and Danna Staaf’s Nursery Earth: The Wondrous Lives of Baby Animals and the Extraordinary Ways They Shape Our World (The Experiment).

There’s an excerpt from Darrin Bell’s graphic memoir The Talk (Holt) in Publishers Weekly.

Vanity Fair publishes an excerpt and photographs from England: The Last Hurrah (ACC Art Books), in which longtime Vanity Fair photographer Dafydd Jones “chronicles the twilight hours of the young, upper-crust debauched.”

Time has an excerpt from 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) and an excerpt from Elliot Page’s memoir Pageboy (Flatiron).

EW also has excerpts from Elliot Page’s memoir Pageboy (Flatiron: Macmillan), about his romantic relationships with costars. People also covers the memoir, with an interview with Page. USA Today has more excerpts from the book, which it calls “essential Pride Month reading.”

People shares revelations from Maria Elena Fernandez’s And Don’t F&%k It Up: An Oral History of RuPaul’s Drag Race (The First Ten Years) (Grand Central; LJ starred review) and, in two separate articles, from Maureen Ryan’s Burn It Down: Power, Complicity and a Call for Change in Hollywood (Mariner: Houghton Harcourt).

Publishers Weekly has an interview with cartoonist Mattie Lubchansky about their debut graphic novel, Boys Weekend (Pantheon).

The Rumpus talks with Jared Pappas-Kelley, author of Stalking America (Delere Pr.), which bends the genres of fiction and memoir.

Vogue interviews Geena Rocero, author of the memoir Horse Barbie (Dial), which it calls “a moving chronicle of trans resilience and joy.”

LitHub talks to Jon Michaud, Last Call at Coogan’s: The Life and Death of a Neighborhood Bar (St. Martin’s), about bar literature, Washington Heights, and the ideal New York City saloon, and to Peter Constantine, The Purchased Bride (Deep Vellum), about “the joys of translation and multilingual writing.” There’s also a group interview with Daphne Palasi Andreades, Bushra Rehman, and Christine Kandic Torres, “three homegrown Queens authors on the importance of centering marginalized voices in the New York novel.”

Henry Hoke, Open Throat (MCD), tells LitHub’s “The Annotated Nightstand” what he’s reading now and next.

NYT goes “Inside the Best-Seller List” with David Von Drehle, The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man (S. & S.).

Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch (Knopf; LJ starred review), answers NYT’s “By the Book” questionnaire.

The Guardian has an interview with Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans (Riverhead), who says, “Writing is the most fun I’m capable of having.”

LA Times interviews Keri Blakinger, Corrections in Ink: A Memoir (St. Martin’s), who says, “There’s a dearth of books about women’s prison experiences, and a lot of what people get is from TV and has varying levels of accuracy.”

Seattle Times interviews Elmer Dixon, founder of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party and author of the memoir Die Standing: From Black Panther Revolutionary to Global Diversity Consultant (Two Sisters Writing and Publishing).

On the occasion of launching her new publishing imprint, Sarah Jessica Parker talks with the imprint’s first author, debut novelist Elysha Chang, A Quitter’s Paradise (SJP Lit: Zando), in Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair also has an interview with Frieda Hughes, daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and author of George: A Magpie Memoir (Avid Reader/S. & S.).

The New York Times Magazine profiles Merlin Sheldrake, mycologist and author of the best-selling book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures (Random), “the man who turned the world on to the genius of fungi.”

Autostraddle has a profile of sociologist Clare Forstie, Queering the Midwest: Forging LGBTQ Community (NYU), who “wants to change the way you think about the queer Midwest.”

Publishers Weekly profiles Tiny Reparations Books, the Penguin Random House imprint founded by stand-up comedian Phoebe Robinson.

James Byrne, Deadlock (Minotaur: St. Martin’s), publishes an essay in CrimeReads about “the makings of the tech bro villain.”

Elle has an essay by Anne Lekas Miller, Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World (Algonquin): “Everything I Know About Love I Learned Through Writing About Immigration.”

“Lack of time and confidence are the main barriers to low-income parents reading with children, BookTrust finds.” The Bookseller has the report.

Authors On Air

NPR’s Fresh Air talked with Elliot Page about his memoir, Pageboy (Flatiron: Macmillan), and why, “in a climate rife with hate…‘the time felt right’ to tell his story.” CBC also has an interview with Page.

Fresh Air also interviewed constitutional lawyer Michael Waldman, The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America, on “the transformational changes wrought by the conservative supermajority, which now dominates the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Frances Haugen, The Power of One: How I Found the Strength To Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook (Little, Brown), appears today on Here & Now.

Tomorrow, William W. Li, author of Eat To Beat Your Diet: Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, and Live Longer (Balance), will go on Rachael Ray.

LitHub’s Keen On podcast talks to Chad Williams, the author of The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World War (Farrar). Keen On also interviews Jordan Crandall, Autodrive (Goldsmiths), on “the appropriate literature for our new age of superintelligence.”

LitHub’s Otherppl podcast interviews Jim Ruland, author of the novel Make It Stop (Rare Bird), about “how getting sober impacted his creative life.”

Former Republican U.S. congressman Jason Chaffetz debuts his new book The Puppeteers: The People Who Control the People Who Control America on Fox News.

Ruth Ware’s thriller Zero Days (Gallery; LJ starred review) has been acquired by Universal International Studios for series development, Deadline reports.

According to Deadline, Lennie James will star in and executive produce an eight-part BBC adaptation of Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Mr. Loverman (Akashic; LJ starred review).

Deadline has the trailer for Prime Video’s Good Omens season 2 (based on the novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman), which premieres on July 28, more than four years after the series debut in 2019. Tor.com also has coverage.

Syfy’s Reginald the Vampire, based on the “Fat Vampire” series of novels by Johnny B. Truant, adds actor Garfield Wilson for season 2, Deadline reports.

Brian King joins NBC’s The Irrational, based on Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Deadline has the news.

Deadline also has more coverage of the Max limited series Love & Death (based on the true-crime book Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs)—an interview with star Tom Pelphrey.

IFC Films and Sapan Studios have acquired North American rights to The Disappearance of Shere Hite, a documentary on the sex researcher and author of The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, which remains one of the bestselling books of all time since its publication in 1976. Deadline has the news.

Subscription streaming outlet MHz Choice announces the U.S. premieres of French TV series Agatha Christie’s Criminal Games: The ’70s, adapted from Christie’s novels, Deadline reports.

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