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Awards & Book News

Karen Leeder’s translation of Durs Grünbein’s Psyche Running: Selected Poems, 2005–2022 (Seagull) wins the Griffin Poetry Prize; CBC has coverage.

Valérie Bah’s Subterrane (Esplanade) wins the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, CBC reports.

The shortlist for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year is announced.

New Circana BookScan research shows the growth over the last year of “romance with a dark twist,” including paranormal and anti-hero themes, Publishing Perspectives reports.

Publishers Weekly reports on layoffs at the New Press due to decreased sales and funding, which the publisher partly attributes to book bans targeting progressive titles.

Tomorrow is Teach Truth Day of Action, a planned nationwide day to fight bans on books and on teaching certain subjects in schools, USA Today reports.

After choosing James Frey’s novel Next to Heaven (Authors Equity) as one of its latest selections, Book of the Month responds to criticism about Frey’s use of generative AI; Publishers Lunch has the news.

Page to Screen

June 6

The Life of Chuck, based on the novella of the same title in If It Bleeds by Stephen King. Neon. Reviews | Trailer

Predator: Killer of Killers, with associated titles. Hulu. Reviews | Trailer

The Ritual, based on 1935 book Begone, Satan!: A Soul-Stirring Account of Diabolical Possession by Carl Vogl. XYZ Films. Reviews | Trailer

Reviews

Washington Post reviews Damion Searls’s new translation of Charlotte Beradt’s 1966 book The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation (Princeton Univ.): “Drawing on more than 300 ‘unintentional and unedited poems written by citizens in their sleep,’ as the Iraqi American poet Dunya Mikhail calls them in her foreword, Beradt’s study casts an eerie, mesmeric spell. Reading it feels like scanning the dial of a shortwave radio late at night, picking up spooky transmissions from the collective unconscious of those who knew the Nazi horror firsthand”; and Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li (Farrar): “This lack of a precise descriptor does not prevent Li from beautifully narrating her nonlinear, never-ending odyssey of pain. Tracing her ‘new knowledge of reality’—a reference to Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself’—Li quietly guides us through the devastation of living, and mothering, after death.”

LA Times reviews So Far Gone by Jess Walter (Harper; LJ starred review): “Walter is a slyly adept social critic, and has clearly invested his protagonist with all of the outrage and heartbreak he himself feels about the dark course our world has taken. He’s also invested his protagonist with a self-deprecating sense of humor that keeps his pessimism from veering into maudlin territory.”

NYT reviews The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich by Evan Osnos (Scribner): “There are constant reminders that the various yacht owners, tech disrupters and hedge funders profiled lead a more lavish lifestyle than does the author—but it’s clear to the reader that he can pass. Osnos is not a hater of success or even privilege; he’s more an anthropologist of unseemly excess”; The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West by Amitav Acharya (Basic) and The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury): “Yet, by the same token, these books are unlikely to alleviate anxieties in Kyiv, Islamabad, Ottawa or Taipei. The problem with making history the handmaiden of moral examples is that history is always liable to dish up an equal number of counterexamples”; and new crime fiction “filled with dark passages and dark hearts”: Nightswimming by Melanie Anagnos (High Frequency), Proof by Jon Cowan (Gallery), A Murder for Miss Hortense by Mel Pennant (Pantheon), and The Black Swan Mystery by Tetsuya Ayukawa, tr. by Brian Karetnyk (Pushkin Vertigo).

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

Briefly Noted

A new book by Michelle Obama will chronicle her style evolution, People reports; The Look is due out from Crown on Nov. 4.

Susan Choi, author of Flashlight (Farrar), answers NYT’s “By the Book” questionnaire.

Geoff Dyer, author of Homework (Farrar), shares “The Books of My Life” with The Guardian.

Washington Post recommends new books to read during Pride Month.

CBC highlights 25 works of Indigenous literature.

LitHub suggests “seven books to scratch that Pride and Prejudice itch.”

NYT offers “10 new books we recommend this week.”

Kirkus notes 20 SFF novels to read now.

People selects the best books of May.

LitHub gathers “five novels that dangle family secrets before the reader.”

USA Today shares the best celebrity memoirs to read this summer.

U.S. spiritual publisher Inner Traditions is partnering with Spanish mind-body-spirit press Grupo Gaia to make Grupo Gaia’s Spanish-language titles available in the U.S. and Canada, Publishers Weekly reports.

Reactor rounds up all the new horror, romantasy, and other SFF crossover books arriving in June.

Author, film director, and “chronicler of the French condition” Philippe Labro has died at age 88; NYT has an obituary.

Authors on Air

NPR’s Fresh Air speaks with Ocean Vuong, author of The Emperor of Gladness (Penguin Pr.).

NPR’s Consider This interviews former New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern, author of A Different Kind of Power (Crown).

There’s a new episode of The LitHub Podcast, featuring an interview with Kate McKean, author of Write Through It: An Insider’s Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life (S. & S./Simon Element).

Today, NPR’s Fresh Air will talk to Charan Ranganath, author of Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power To Hold on to What Matters (Vintage).

Ang Lee will direct a film adaptation of C. Pam Zhang’s 2020 novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold (Riverhead; LJ starred review), Shelf Awareness reports.

Lars Kepler’s Inspector Joona Linna novels are being adapted as an Apple TV series, Kirkus reports.

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