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Awards & Book News

The Canada Reads 2025 longlist arrives.

Poets & Writers publishes its 20th annual look at debut poets.

Longlists are announced for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, United States and Canada, which honors books published by small presses.

Sustainable Marketing: The Industry’s Role in a Sustainable Future by Paul Randle & Alexis Eyre (Kogan Page) wins the Leonard L. Berry Marketing Book Award.

Publishing Perspectives has coverage of the 2024 audiobook purchasing and circulation survey by LJ and SLJ, in partnership with the Audio Publishers Association.

Harlequin, a division of HarperCollins, is eliminating its Canary Street Press and Graydon House imprints, Publishers Weekly reports.

Page to Screen

January 17

I’m Still Here, based on the Brazilian-language memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva. Sony Pictures. Reviews | Trailer

Wish You Were Here, based on the novel by Renée Carlino. Lionsgate. Reviews | Trailer

January 23

Marked Men: Rule & Shaw, based on Rule: A Marked Men Novel by Jay Crownover. Voltage Pictures. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

NYT reviews Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems by Maria Zoccola (Scribner): “In her first book of poems, Helen of Troy, 1993, Maria Zoccola has beautifully and resourcefully reimagined this mythic material and relocated it to Sparta, Tenn., which is a real town between Nashville and Knoxville. By doing so she has provided a witty and acute anatomy of small-town life and of our own American cultural and spiritual barrenness”; Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies by Manuel Betancourt (Catapult): “All of this amounts to a persuasive and well-researched disquisition on the edifying and seductive potential of those we don’t yet know, and how ‘brief encounters can be sites of endless possibilities.’ But Betancourt’s approach feels leaden with reference and citation, too often leaning on a catalog of cultural properties to advance an argument that is, at its heart, empirical”; and We Do Not Part by Han Kang, tr. by e. yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth; LJ starred review): “The translation too sometimes veers into melodrama…. But how petty it seems to quibble about overwrought verbiage in a work of fiction so deeply freighted with real tragedy that its heaviness can scarcely be overstated. And when the translated prose is at its most theatrical, it’s usually in the context of personal feeling and gesture rather than the ravages of war.”

LA Times reviews Save Me, Stranger: Stories by Erika Krouse (Flatiron): “Krouse’s narrators are far from perfect; they’re messy, problematic and human, and all the more interesting for their contradictions. Save Me, Stranger is the kind of collection whose stories stick around even after they’re done, inviting you to sit with the questions they raise, the discomfort they provoke and the beauty on which they shine a light.”

The Guardian reviews Quarterlife by Devika Rege (Liveright): “An acutely portrayed and ambitious reckoning with contemporary Indian sociopolitics and ethics, Quarterlife joins recent debuts such as Megha Majumdar’s A Burning and Rahul Raina’s How To Kidnap the Rich not only in speaking truth to the saffron power, but in articulating greater existential truths about the youth of India.”

LitHub gathers the best-reviewed books of the week.

Briefly Noted

NYT profiles singer/songwriter Neko Case, whose memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, will be published by Grand Central on Jan. 28.

LA Times talks to Lou Mathews, author of Hollywoodski (Tiger Van).

Elizabeth Gilbert will publish a new memoir about addiction and loss; All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation is due out from Riverhead on Sept. 9, People reports.

Aria Aber, author of Good Girl (Hogarth), shares her “Annotated Nightstand” with LitHub.

Hisham Matar, author of My Friends (Random), shares “The Books of My Life” with The Guardian.

USA Today offers a guide to all of Rebecca Yarros’s books.

NYT has “5 New Books We Recommend This Week.”

For LitHub, Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, author of Elita (TriQuarterly), puts together a reading list of “the wild girls of literature.”

CrimeReads rounds up “9 books combining the gothic and the glamorous.”

Reactor gathers five SFF works about rivers.

Filmmaker David Lynch, coauthor (with Kristine McKenna) of the memoir/biography Room To Dream: A Life, has died at age 78. NYT has an obituary. Vulture republishes a 2018 interview with Lynch about his book.

“Queen of Southern cooking” Nathalie Dupree has died at 85; NYT has an obituary.

Authors on Air

NPR’s Fresh Air interviews Pagan Kennedy, author of The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story (Vintage).

NPR’s Bullseye with Jesse Thorn speaks with Jesse David Fox, author of Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work (Farrar).

LitHub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast talks to Charles Baxter, author of Blood Test: A Comedy (Pantheon).

There’s a new episode of The LitHub Podcast, talking about TikTok, David Lynch, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

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