Year: 2021

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Here are the 2021 Kirkus Prize winners

This evening, at a virtual ceremony hosted from the Austin Central Library, Kirkus Reviews announced the winners of its eighth annual Kirkus Prizes in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature. Each of the three winners, chosen from the 1,531 books that received Kirkus stars this year, and narrowed down from the list of finalists announced in September, will receive a cash prize of $50,000. Read more

 

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Gary Shteyngart’s Pandemic Novel Is His Finest Yet

To read this novel is to tally a high school yearbook’s worth of superlatives for Shteyngart: funniest, noisiest, sweetest, most entertaining. To those I will add a few superlatives that were not celebrated at my own high school: most melancholic, most quizzical, most skilled at vibrating the deepest strings of the anthropoid heart. Read more

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An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed by Helene Tursten

Tursten effectively juxtaposes a cozy, Agatha Christie–like tone against the often surprisingly dark nature of Maud’s recollections, which are rife with clever satirical jabs and delicious ironies. This absorbing dive into the mind of a ruthless pragmatist posing as a Swedish Miss Marple will please psychological-thriller fans, once they realize that Maud isn’t nearly as cozy as she looks. Read more 

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Nebraska native author’s controversial deep dive into unsolved killing now a Showtime series

By day, native Nebraskan Harry MacLean helps settle conflicts as an arbitration attorney. On nights and weekends, he ruminates over methods and motives of killing. The true-crime author’s book “Once Upon a Time: A True Story of Memory, Murder and the Law” examined a controversial case when a daughter’s playmate went missing. Decades later, the daughter, now an adult, reported a vivid memory: She had watched her own father kill her friend. The 1990 case that sparked a national conversation about repressed memory is now being retold in a new four-part Showtime documentary series. Read more

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No Mere Oddity: On Lafcadio Hearn’s “In Ghostly Japan”

BRAM STOKER, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lafcadio Hearn. In this list, Hearn — a contemporary of the other writers — stands out. Unlike the rest, his is no longer a household name. Yet, at the end of the 19th century, he was one of the most well-known authors in the West. “Lafcadio Hearn has been forgotten,” Romanian American poet Andrei Codrescu wrote in 2019, “with two remarkable exceptions: in Louisiana and in Japan.” Read more

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Authors pull out of Frankfurt book fair over presence of far-right groups

At least four writers have pulled out of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the biggest book fair in the world, citing concerns over the presence of far-right publishers. Writer and activist Jasmina Kuhnke, who was slated to make an appearance at the fair Friday to promote her debut novel, “Black Heart,” posted a statement Monday on Twitter saying she decided to withdraw after learning that far-right books were being promoted at the event. Read more