Barack Obama’s Next Memoir Could Publish in November | Book Pulse

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Awards

Nina Stibbe wins the Comedy Women in Print Prize for Reasons to Be Cheerful (Little, Brown: Hachette). The Guardian reports. The Bookseller also has a report, including the graphic novel winners.

The American Book Award winners are announced. Lit Hub has a report.

The winners of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards are announced.

The shortlist for the Edge Hill Prize is announced.

Reviews

The NYT reviews Runaway: New Poems by Jorie Graham (Ecco: Harper): “She knows how to get your attention.” Also, Fighting Words by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley (Dial: Penguin; SLJ starred review): “this is a novel about trauma and the scars it leaves on bodies, minds and hearts. But more than that, it’s a book about resilience, strength and healing.” The Abstainer by Ian McGuire (Random House): “This is Dickens in the present tense, Dickens for the 21st century.” Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre (Crown: Random House; LJ starred review): “Macintyre, the author of numerous books on spies and espionage, has found a real-life heroine worthy of his gifts.” A Better Man: A (Mostly Serious) Letter to My Son by Michael Ian Black (Algonquin: Workman): “Black’s writing is modest, clear, conversational.” If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore (Liveright: W. W. Norton): “fascinating but flawed.” The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin (Penguin): “a history without a center. A collage in which pigheaded Texan oil men, aspiring tech whizzes, Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi — dead in a drain pipe — Xi Jinping and his guy-pal Vladimir Putin, Saudi dynasts and vast arctic gas plants pass in review. The chronology is similarly helter-skelter.” The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War by David Nasaw (Penguin; LJ starred review): “Much of what makes the book so absorbing and ultimately wrenching is his capacity to maneuver with skill between the nitty-grittiest of diplomatic (and congressional, military, personal) details and the so-called Big Picture. In cinematic terms, he’s adroit at surveying a vast landscape with a soaring crane shot, then zooming in sharply for a close-up of a single face as it crumples.” The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel (FSG: Macmillan): “So now’s a good time for both sides to sit down for a very serious talk, with “The Tyranny of Merit” required reading for all.” The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future by Chris Whipple (Scribner: Macmillan): “genial, engaging portrait of the men and one woman who have run the C.I.A. over the past six decades. Whipple’s spymasters come across as more beleaguered than omnipotent, stumbling more often than swaggering.” Greyboy: Finding Blackness in a White World by Cole Brown (Arcade: S. &  S.): “A book like this should open minds, but it stumbles whenever Brown keeps his closed.” Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth (Verso Fiction: Random House): “a brilliant study of the mundane, full of unexpected detours and driving prose.” The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge (HarperVia): “presented as a rapid response to the coronavirus pandemic, which the authors describe as a timely reminder of the importance of government, and as a test that has highlighted a growing gap in government performance between Asian nations and the West.” One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias (Portfolio: Penguin): “This book, then, often feels as though it’s making the weakest possible argument for otherwise good ideas.” A dual review about college admissions and a dual review of two memoirs by Latina reporters. Lastly, a list of new and noteworthy audiobooks.

NPR reviews If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore (Liveright: W. W. Norton): “Lepore weaves her narrative across continents and through time with engaging, conversational prose.”

The L.A. Times reviews Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury USA: Macmillan; LJ starred review), calling it “even more magically immersive” than her debut.

The Washington Post reviews Here We Are by Graham Swift (Knopf): “transports us to a seaside theater in Brighton, England, during the summer of 1959. It’s about young love and the little acts of chance and villainy that realign lives.”

Briefly Noted

BookPage picks their most anticipated books for the fall.

EarlyWord posts its September GalleyChat Roundup.

BuzzFeed gathers “38 Great Books To Read This Fall, Recommended By Our Favorite Indie Booksellers.”

The Washington Post picks the best audiobooks of the month.

Popsugar picks its best romance novels of 2020.

Amazon suggests book club picks.

Electric Lit has a list of “10 Books about Doomed Love.”

Bustle picks the best books for the week.

In forthcoming book news, Page Six suggests a new Barack Obama memoir could publish in mid-November, and writes that a release date will be announced this Thursday.

Ken Liu announces that the last book in The Dandelion Dynasty trilogy will actually be two books, The Veiled Throne and Speaking Bones, to be published a few months apart from Gallery: Saga Press: S. & S. Thus far the only bib. information out is for part one, which will publish on June 29, 2021.

Two forthcoming books get sales bumps, Home Body by Rupi Kaur (Andrews McMeel Publishing: S. & S.) and You Will Get Through This Night by Daniel Howell (Dey Street).

Chrissy Teigen announces she is working on a new cookbook. People has some details.

In what Deadline calls “a dazzling double deal,” the debut novel Skandar and the Unicorn Thief by A. F. Steadman sells worldwide rights to S. & S. and screen rights to Sony Pictures.

NPR features The House by the Lake: The True Story of a House, Its History, and the Four Families Who Made It Home by Thomas Harding, illustrated by Britta Teckentrup (Candlewick Studio).

USA Today showcases The Magic Misfits: The Fourth Suit by Neil Patrick Harris (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers: Hachette).

Bitch Media has “Queer Pressure#OwnVoices and What We Demand of Queer Authors.”

Vanity Fair writes that the new J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith book, Troubled Blood (Mulholland Books: Hachette), “Proves Her Commitment to Transphobia.”

Entertainment Weekly excerpts the forthcoming Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon: Game of Thrones and the Official Untold Story of the Epic Series by James Hibberd (Dutton: Penguin).

Entertainment Weekly has a conversation between Laurie Halse Anderson and Tiffany Jackson about YA books and the Me Too movement.

Authors on Air

NPR’s Fresh Air interviews Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown: Hachette; LJ starred review).

NPR's All Things Considered interviews Susanna Clarke, Piranesi (Bloomsbury USA: Macmillan; LJ starred review).

PBS NewsHour interviews Steven Greenhouse, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor (Knopf).

PBS will air a film about Hemingway by Ken Burns next April.

Eric Bernat’s The Dancer sells screen rights. Deadline reports.

Vanity Fair writes about Concrete Cowboy, which is based on Ghetto Cowboy by Greg Neri.

Chasten Buttigieg, I Have Something to Tell You: A Memoir (Atria: S. & S.), will be on The View today.

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