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Awards & Book News

The National Book Awards announces its longlists for nonfiction and poetry. The longlist for fiction will be announced later today.

The Flow: Rivers, Waters and Wildness by Amy-Jane Beer (Bloomsbury Wildlife) and The Lost Rainforests of Britain by Guy Shrubsole (William Collins) win the Wainwright Prize for nature writing. The Guardian has the news.

Page to Screen

September 15

A Haunting in Venice, based on the novel Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie. 20th Century Studios. Reviews | Trailer

Love at First Sight, based on the novel The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith. Netflix. Reviews | Trailer

A Million Miles Away, based on José M. Hernández’s middle-grade memoir From Farmworker to Astronaut: My Path to the Stars (Piñata Bks.). Amazon. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

NYT reviews Mr. Texas by Lawrence Wright (Knopf): “The novel is a fiery sample of the chili of Texas politics: equal parts tragedy, comedy and farce”; the audiobook of Poems of the Night by Jorge Luis Borges (Books on Tape); and three new story collections.

Washington Post reviews Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City by Elyssa Maxx Goodman (Hanover Square: Harlequin; LJ starred review): “Goodman is by turns a chronicler of queer history, an excavator of personal expression, and a pedagogical surveyor of an art form that’s been embraced and vilified during the approximately 160 years covered in the book”; Omega Farm: A Memoir by Martha McPhee (Scribner): “McPhee’s prose is steady, her tone thoughtful. She examines events of the past from all angles. She is amazingly generous, loving her mother deeply”; and The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright (Norton): “Ireland is the ever-present soul of every story Enright tells in The Wren, the Wren.”

The Millions reviews The Fraud by Zadie Smith (Penguin Pr.; LJ starred review): “Smith has adapted and filled in Bogle’s life without really integrating it or its telling into Eliza’s, but the material is intriguing enough—and Eliza’s interest in it credible enough—that it works.”

Slate reviews Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career by Kristi Coulter (MCD): “Tempting as it is to view Exit Interview as an indictment of Amazon, its relevance is broader. Coulter’s memoir is a document of the rise-and-grind hustle culture of the 2010s.”

LitHub rounds up the best-reviewed books of the week.

Briefly Noted

NYT lists “9 New Books We Recommend This Week.”

NYPL’s blog shares cookbooks that “celebrate Latin and Hispanic culture through food” and new and classic works by authors of Mexican descent. 

“If You Like The Other Black Girl, You’ll Love These Books About Working While Black,” The Root writes.

Kirkus recommends “4 Great Indie Books on the Jewish Experience.”

LitHub rounds up “A Reading List of Fantasy Tropes Reimagined.”

CrimeReads has “5 international action thrillers from Afghanistan to Shanghai,” thrillers set in remote island locations, crime novels in which a character’s dishonesty is justified, and an essay about “the dark humor of millennial crime capers.”

HipLatina profiles Melania Luisa Marte, whose new poetry collection, Plantains and Our Becoming (Tiny Reparations), “explores Afro-Latinidad, ancestry, and self-love.”

LA Times has the rare interview with Kate Atkinson, about her new short-story collection, Normal Rules Don’t Apply (Doubleday).

Novelist Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch (Knopf), answers NYT’s “By the Book” questionnaire, while Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie answers The Guardian’s “The Books of My Life” survey.

Washington Post talks to Lucy Score about “the epic success” of her “Knockemout” series, whose most recent installment is Things We Left Behind (Bloom: Sourcebooks).

LitHub hosts a conversation between A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest To Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (S. & S.), and Andy Borowitz, author of Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber (Avid Reader/S. & S.; LJ starred review).

“Prolific street-lit author Quan Millz’s X-rated books went viral on TikTok. Many believed he was a white writer profiting off Black culture. That was just the beginning,” reports Wired.

NYT shares “Six Takeaways From Mitt Romney’s Tea-Spilling Biography,” Romney: A Reckoning by McKay Coppins (Scribner). The Atlantic publishes an excerpt.

EW reveals the stories behind new never-before-seen punk photos, found in Just a Minor Threat: The Minor Threat Photographs of Glen E. Friedman (Akashic).

“Shelley Parker-Chan’s Newest Book Brings Emo to 14th-Century China,” Gizmodo writes. He Who Drowned the World (LJ starred review) was published by Tor in August.

Gizmodo also shares an excerpt from the first book in A.K. Mulford’s new romantic fantasy trilogy, A River of Golden Bones, due out from Harper Voyager on Dec. 5.

Deesha Philyaw, author of the PEN/Faulkner-winning story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (West Virginia Univ.), signs a two-book deal with Mariner. Her first novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, will be published in 2025. Kirkus has the news.

Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro will publish a collection of song lyrics, The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent, due out from Knopf in March 2024, The Guardian reports.

Drag icon and comedian Murray Hill will release a memoir, Showbiz! My Unexpected Life as a Middle-Aged Man, to be published in 2025 by Gallery. Hollywood Reporter has the news.

Éva Fahidi, a Holocaust survivor who late in life began writing about her experiences (including in The Soul of Things: Memoir of a Youth Interrupted), has died at age 97. NYT has an obituary.

Authors on Air

LitHub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast talks to Leila Aboulela, author of River Spirit (Grove; LJ starred review); and The Maris Review podcast interviews John Manuel Arias, author of Where There Was Fire (Flatiron). The Keen On podcast interviews Naomi S. Baron, author of Who Wrote This?: How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing (Stanford Univ.), and Mike Rothschild, author of Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories (Melville House).

Today Show cohost Jenna Bush Hager is launching a podcast focusing on author interviews, called Read with Jenna, which is also the name of her monthly book club. Kirkus has the news.

The graphic novel Heart Attack by Shawn Kittelsen, illus. by Eric Zawadzki and Mike Spicer (Image Comics) will be adapted into a sci-fi TV series, Deadline reports.

Deadline shares a new trailer for The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, Wes Anderson’s adaptation of a 1977 short story by Roald Dahl.

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