Hot News This Week
January 5, 2023
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In addition to a bathroom floor appearance in Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion film, Cain’s Jawbone was recently featured in a Washington Post story about its journey from literary obscurity to massive TikTok sensation. Thanks to Unbound’s reissue and a chance encounter at Green Apple Books, the murder mystery puzzle by Edward Powys Mathers has sold hundreds of thousands of copies after going viral in November 2021. To date, only four people have solved the mystery since the book’s original release in 1934.
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“Perhaps my favorite book of poetry from 2022, Barrois/Dixon doesn’t miss. Each of these poems has range and a voice that’s dynamic and intriguing. Some of the poems are funny in the best way possible, yet never cheap, corny, or played out.”—Kyle François, City Lit Books (Chicago, IL)
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Read This Next: a Biography of Legendary Writer Jan Morris
Jan Morris: Life From Both Sides received a lovely full review in the New York Times Book Review on December 18. “Paul Clements, a journalist and travel writer who knew Morris for 30 years, has produced a lovely and scrupulous biography,” writes critic Alexandra Jacobs. “It’s a book that properly situates Morris in the literary canon while also acknowledging her status as a ‘transgender pioneer,’ another term she would have probably loathed.” Clements’s biography of Morris has also garnered media attention from Air Mail, The Guardian, TLS, Geographical Magazine, and more.
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Editors’ Choice Picks in the New York Times Book Review
Two Consortium books appeared as Editors’ Choice picks in the January 1 edition of the New York Times Book Review. One book was May-lee Chai’s short story collection Tomorrow in Shanghai, praised in writer Weike Wang’s NYTBR review for Chai’s “remarkable skill for building tension, masterfully arranging all the pieces on the board to hook the reader,” and the second was Julie Cimafiejeva’s Motherfield: Poems & Belarusian Protest Diary, translated by Hanif Abdurraqib and Valzhyna Mort. A full review of Motherfield ran in the Book Review on December 25, with Times essayist Jennifer Wilson writing that Cimafiejeva “balances a commitment to Belarusian writing with a mistrust of nationalism” and “wields her flexed, forceful verses like that mightiest of muscles—the tongue.”
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Two Acclaimed Illustrated Books for YA Readers
Also in the New York Times Book Review on December 25, writer Kelly Barnhill reviewed Beatrice Alemagna’s You Can’t Kill Snow White, “lucidly translated” by Karin Snelson and Emilie Robert Wong. “Alemagna’s strange, organic paintings recreate the brutal envy that underpins the original Brothers Grimm story,” says Barnhill. “Maximizing the unsettling emotionality of each image, Alemagna explores the heart and mind of the ‘evil’ queen, from whose point of view this version of the tale is told.”
On December 18, Alte Zachen / Old Things by Ziggy Hanaor was written up in the NYTBR: “The book’s art, by Benjamin Phillips, is sensational,” says writer Marjorie Ingall in the piece. “With luscious washes of watercolor, he renders the present in layers of gray and the past in warm pinks, greens, yellows.” The review coincides nicely with Alte Zachen being named a best children’s book of 2022 by the Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal.
You Can't Kill Snow White
by Beatrice Alemagna, trans. Karin Snelson and Emilie Robert Wong
Enchanted Lion / Unruly • October 2022 • 9781592703814
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 Click here for more top titles publishing next Tuesday, Jan. 10.
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★ “Sure to beguile speculative fiction fans—and anyone who appreciates a well-crafted story . . . This remarkable collection of 12 speculative shorts from Pinsker places celebrated favorites and hidden gems side by side.”—Publishers Weekly
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“The actor’s first novel is a quintessential New York story: A teenager moves from Queens to Manhattan, discovering a world populated with drugs, sex, a witch, and Lou Reed. It’s like a vivid walk through the city and adolescence, reveling in their grit and pathos.”—New York Times
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| | Solenoid
by Mircea Cartarescu, trans. Sean Cotter
Deep Vellum Publishing • October 2022 • 9781646052028
“The great fun of this teeming hodge-podge is the way that Mr. Cărtărescu tweaks the material of daily life, transmuting the banal into the fantastical.”—Wall Street Journal
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“Out of the many ideas that Newman explores in his well-executed publication Shadows of Emmett Till, one tangential idea rings loudly: the past is always present and can never be avoided or escaped—not truly.”—LENSCRATCH
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New Digital Review Copies
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“The Dug-Up Gun Museum confronts the issue of gun violence in a series of questioning and imaginative poems that hold up a mirror to this tragic piece of history and culture in the United States.”—Shelf Awareness
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Last month, Publishers Weekly spoke with Sarah Gorham, founder of Sarabande Books, and Kristen Renee Miller, Gorham’s successor as Sarabande executive director and editor-in-chief.
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MIBA Bestseller
Book of Questions
by Pablo Neruda, illus. Paloma Valdivia, trans. Sara Lissa Paulson
Enchanted Lion Books • April 2022 • 9781592703227
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