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Awards, Book Clubs & News

Oprah selects Go Gentle by Maria Semple (Putnam) for her book club. CBS shares an excerpt and a reader’s guide. Semple gives an interview on Oprah’s Book Club podcast. 

Winners of the Xingyun Awards for Chinese science fiction are announced, Locus reports. 

The Commonwealth Short Story Prize announces its 2026 shortlist.

The Jhalak Prize shortlists are announced. The Bookseller has coverage.

The finalists for the Locus Awards are revealed. 

Penguin Random House urges lawmakers to reject book banning bill HR 7661, Publishing Perspectives reports. 

Reviews

NYT reviews Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham (Random): “Famesick dispenses with such pleasantries and—refreshingly, at a moment when some are all too coy—with most pseudonyms. It has a whiff of the old Hollywood tell-all, indie edition, with trash bags for curtains in an Eagle Rock group house”; See You on the Other Side by Jay McInerney (Knopf): “A lot happens in See You on the Other Side beyond the existential crises of overindulged New Yorkers, but little of it sinks in”; RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise by Isabel Vincent (Morrow): “It’s not clear that Kennedy has a political future beyond 2028, but as Vincent shows, over and again, he has always managed to fail upward. And despite all the theories, at the end of the book, the self-image that propels this ascent remains a mystery”; Where the Music Had To Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other—and the World by Jim Windolf (Scribner): “Where the Music Had to Go begins and (except for the coda) ends with a pilgrimage that Bob Dylan made to John Lennon’s childhood home in 2009. There’s something very moving about it that makes us feel a sense of gratitude for the work of these extraordinary talents—and to Jim Windolf for putting it all together”; and Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult by Jonathan Cheng (Knopf; LJ starred review): “This is a brilliant history of North Korea, but my greatest reservation about it is not minor. In his emphasis on Christianity, I worry that Cheng shortchanges the enormous influence on North Korea of two other traditions: thousands of years of monarchy, and centuries of Neo-Confucian thought.”

The Guardian reviews My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy (Farrar): “We are not to assume that the narrator is Levy—this is ‘a fiction’, after all—but of one thing we can be certain. Eva may announce that the essay on Stein will never get written, but here it is—odd, inventive and wonderfully entertaining—triumphantly proving her wrong.”

Briefly Noted

LitHub highlights 22 new books for the week. 

CrimeReads suggests five mysteries for Jane Austen lovers.

LA Times shares 101 book club reads. 

USA Today reveals key takeaways from RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise by Isabel Vincent (Morrow). 

People talks with Rainbow Rowell, author of Cherry Baby (Morrow; LJ starred review), and highlights the new book Blush: Contemporary Makeup Artists by Linda Evangelista (Phaidon). Plus, John Mellencamp announces a forthcoming lyric book, John Mellencamp: The Songbook; 50 Years of Song and Poetry (Rizzoli), due out September 29. 

People also highlights memoirs from Lena Dunham, Carlos and Alexa PenaVega, and Lil Jon, plus a biography of RFK Jr. 

Jay McInerney, See You on the Other Side (Knopf), writes an essay for T&C. 

Vox explores “how fan fiction went mainstream.”

Vogue highlights a new book on Audrey Hepburn, Intimate Audrey: An Authorized Biography by Wendy Holden & Sean Hepburn Ferrer (Grand Central). 

Authors on Air

NPR’s Fresh Air asks Namwali Serpell, author of On Morrison (Hogarth), “Have we been reading Toni Morrison all wrong?”

Meryl Wilsner’s queer sports romance Cleat Cute (St. Martin's Griffin) will get a series adaptation from Amazon MGM, Deadline reports. 

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