The 2017 Audie Awards were announced last night by the Audio Publishers Association.

Hamilton: The Revolution by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, narrated by Mariska Hargitay with the authors (Hachette Audio), took top honors as the Audiobook of the Year.

In giving the prize the judges call it “a must-have insider’s guide to the making of the musical” and write:

“Read by super-fan Mariska Hargitay, the audio takes listeners on a journey from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s pool-side reading of Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton to Broadway success and propulsion into the zeitgeist. Fans will especially appreciate Miranda’s reading of his annotations, from the very first revelation that the distinctive three-note intro mimics a squeaky door. Just as the musical has expanded the audience for musical theatre, this audiobook has won new fans to the world of audiobooks, thanks in no small part to Miranda’s devoted social media following.”

The AudioFile review calls the work “fascinating listening for Broadway aficionados and an essential deep dive for HAMILTON fans” and says that “Mariska Hargitay takes on the role of warm documentarian.” Of the footnotes read by Miranda, they write “it’s SO much fun hearing them lift off the page, by turns serious and playful.”

Audiobooks are enjoying a surge in popularity, making the Audies (both winners and nominated titles) a great resource for RA librarians looking for a guide to the best narrators and seeking sure bet suggestions. The lists can also be mined for popular and easy displays. There are plenty of titles to choose from as awards are given out in over two dozen categories.

The full list of winners is online. The ceremony is on YouTube (the video begins at 12:26):

io9 co-founder Charlie Jane Anders wins the Nebula award for Best Novel for her genre-stretching book All the Birds in the Sky (Macmillan/Tor; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample).

It received attention in advance of publication in January 2016,  got three prepub stars and was a Feb. Indie Next pick. It went on to being picked as a best book of the year by Amazon, Kirkus, The Washington Post, and Time, where it was #5 on their list of “Top 10 Novels” of 2016. Critics praised the novel’s story, characters, and writing, but were particularly taken with Anders was re-working of the genre. NPR wrote “With All the Birds in the Sky, Anders has given us a fresh set of literary signposts — and a new bundle of emotional metaphors — for the 21st century, replacing the so many of the tired old ones. Oh, and she’s gently overturned genre fiction along the way.”

Seanan McGuire wins Best Novella for Every Heart a Doorway (Macmillan/Tor.com; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample).

The opening of the Wayward Children series was a LibraryReads selection in April 2016 (the second, Down Among The Sticks and Bones, is a LibraryReads pick for this June). In a literary loop, Charlie Jane Anders sets up an excerpt that ran in io9, writing in the headline that it “Is So Mindblowingly Good, It Hurts.” NPR’s reviewer wrote, “Tight and tautly told, Every Heart grabs one of speculative fiction’s most enduring tropes — the portal fantasy, where a person slips from the real world into a magical realm somewhere beyond — and wrings it for all the poignancy, dark humor, and head-spinning twists it can get.”

David D. Levine wins the Andre Norton Award For Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy for Arabella of Mars (Macmillan/Tor.com; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Having won a Hugo for his short stories, this is his debut novel. Locus said “It is a straight-up tale of incredible yet believable adventures fit to have flowed from the quill of Robert Louis Stevenson. It is old-school Planet Stories SF without snark, smarm or apologies. At the same time it is utterly state-of-the-art, 21st-century in its sensibilities and technics. It’s an intriguing counterfactual slightly reminiscent of Novik’s Temeraire series. It’s nuts-and-bolts gadgetry SF that John Campbell would have proudly adopted. It has gravitas and humor, romance and battle, sacrifice and victory in large measures. In short, I can’t see this book—and its intended successors, since it’s labeled Volume 1—as being anything but a huge triumph.” The reviewer was spot on. Book 2, Arabella and the Battle of Venus, comes out July 18th.

Both Anders and McGuire are also finalists for the other two important SF/Fantasy awards still to be given, the Hugo and the Locus. Levine is a finalist for the Locus.

The Locus Awards will be announced the weekend of June 23-25; the Hugo on August 11.

Edgar Allan Poe would marvel that there is an award for outstanding mystery fiction given in his honor, and even more that the Edgar Awards,  awarded by the Mystery Writers of America, is now in its 71st year.

There was unexpected drama at the Awards banquet on Thursday, reports Publishers Weekly, when Jeffery Deaver halted in the midst of presenting an award. He was taken to the hospital, and happily, tests showed he was OK.

Among this years winners are:

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley (Hachette/Grand Central; OverDrive Sample; pbk. coming June 2017) wins the top prize, for Best Novel.

Librarians got to know this author when he spoke at last year’s AAP Librarians lunch held at BEA. His fight novel arrived with enviable buzz. In a NYT Sunday Book Review, author Kristin Hannah called it “a complex, compulsively readable thrill ride of a novel.” It debuted at #2 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction list, remaining on the list for 13 weeks and appeared on several year-end best books lists. A film deal was announced well in advance of publication, and appears to still be in development, but Hawley has been occupied with his other gig, as the creator of the popular FX seres Fargo.

The winner for Best First Novel was a LibraryReads pick last June, Under the Harrow by Flynn Berry (PRH/Penguin, pbk original; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample). Below is the LibraryReads annotation from Kimberly McGee, Lake Travis Community Library, Austin, TX,

“Nora leaves London to visit her sister, Rachel, in the countryside often. But this trip is different – a silent house, a dead dog hanging from the railing and so much blood. Nora stays, trying to help the police solve the case. She thinks it might have something to do with the unsolved attack on Rachel when she was just a teen but it could be someone new. This story is thrilling and quietly gripping. We become as obsessed as Nora in finding her sister’s killer and what if he strikes again?”

Kate Summerscale, shortlisted before for The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, wins the Best Fact Crime category this year for The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer (PRH/Penguin; OverDrive Sample; pbk. comes out July 2017). It re-tells the story of Robert and Nattie Coombs who killed their mother in 1895. The Atlantic wrote that Summerscale “expertly probes the deep anxieties of a modernizing era. Even better, she brings rare biographical tenacity and sympathy to bear.” PW said it “reads like a Dickens novel, including the remarkable payoff at the end.”

A full listing of all winners and nominees is online, a great resource for both RA and creating displays.

The 2017 James Beard Media Awards have been announced.

The Book of the Year, as well as the winner in the American Cooking category, is Victuals: An Appalachian Journey, with Recipes by Ronni Lundy (PRH/Clarkson Potter; OverDrive Sample).

Several notable books on Southern cooking were published this year, but Lundy’s guide to the foodways of the Mountain South won out over all the others. A book rich in essays and history and as much about sharing a sense of the culture as providing recipes, it already won the IACP Award for best American cookbook, and could be called “the Hillbilly Elegy of the food world.”

Dorie Greenspan wins the Baking and Dessert category for Dorie’s Cookies (Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; OverDrive Sample), her first all-cookie cookbook made critics drool.

Dessert fans will want to follow Greenspan in her new column for NYT Magazine. which kicks off this week with Buttermilk-Biscuit Shortcakes.

Taste of Persia: A Cook’s Travels Through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and Kurdistan by Naomi Duguid (Workman/Artisan; OverDrive Sample) won the International category, which continues the recent fascination with that cuisine. Like Victuals, it is a double winner, having also topped the IACP Culinary Travel category.

The full list of winners is online.

The new Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, Lisa Lucas has worked tirelessly, as she told PW last year, to “get the media to pay more attention to books.”

Profiled on today’s CBS This Morning, she spoke about the mission of the National Book Foundation to expand reading and her dream to make the foundation’s National Book Awards as eagerly anticipated as the Oscars or the Emmys.

The shortlist for the International Dublin Literary Award has just been announced. Billed as “the world’s most valuable annual literary award for a single work of fiction published in English,” the winner receives €100,000, equivalent to $106,000 US.

Begun in 1995, Dublin City Libraries manage the process and libraries from all over the world submit nominations. Each year over 400 systems in 177 countries are invited to participate. In the US, the Chicago Public Library, Denver PL, Miami-Dade PL, NYPL, and The Seattle Public Library are among those submitting titles.

To accomodate the nominations process, the award has a longer time-frame than others. Eligible titles were first published in English, or English translation, in 2015.

As a result, many of the finalists have already received major awards, including the 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press). Others have another shot after having lost out on other awards, such as National Book Award finalist A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (RH/Doubleday), and The Green Road by Anne Enright (W. W. Norton), which was long listed for both the Man Booker and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Our spreadsheet lists currently available editions of the finalists, 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award, Shortlist.

A five member international judging panel will select the winner, to be announced on June 21.

Fulfilling predictions, Colson Whitehead has won this year’s Pulitzer prize in fiction for The Underground Railroad (PRH/Doubleday; RH Audio; BOT).

it’s been quite a year for Whitehead, who went from doubting that anyone would read the book to its becoming a surprise Oprah pick, landing on nearly every best books list, as well as on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Seller list where it still remains after 33 weeks.

The other books winning Pulitzers this year, below.

History — Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, Heather Ann Thompson, (PRH/PantheonRandom).
EarlyWord coverage here.

Biography or Autobiography — The Return, Hisham Matar, (PRH/Random House, just released in trade paperback). Note: Whitehead lost out to Matar earlier this year for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

EarlyWord, NYT Critic’s Top Books of 2016

Poetry — Olio, Tyehimba Jess, (Wave Books, distributed by Consortium).
EarlyWord, NYT Critic’s Top Books of 2016

General Nonfiction –– Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond (PRH/Crown; recently released in trade paperback). Note: this title also won the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award For Nonfiction

EarlyWord, Titles to Know and Recommend, Week of February 29, 2016

Click her for the full list of winners as well as finalists in all categories.

Imbolo Mbue is the 2017 winner of the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award for her debut novel, Behold the Dreamers (Random House; PRH Audio/BOT; trade pbk to be published in late May OverDrive Sample). The Faulkner honors a work of literary fiction by an American author and claims to be “the largest peer-juried award in the country,” awarding $15,000 to the winner and $5,000 to each finalist. While some of the awards from the separate PEN America Foundation come with more money, as high as $75,000, the juries include non-writers.

The novel, about an immigrant from Cameroon trying to become a U.S. citizen, set during the recession, got some strong press when it was published an appeared on several best of the year lists, but did not receive the level of recognition that Colson Whitehead did for The Underground Railroad, which won  the National Book Award.

It was a People magazine’s “Book of the Week,” described as a “page-turner about race, class and the Wall Street meltdown … Mbue’s writing is warm and captivating, but her message is pointed: American dreams can and do turn into nightmares.”

The Washington Post chief critic, Ron Charles, said that it comes at the right time, as it “illuminates the immigrant experience in America with the tenderhearted wisdom so lacking in our political discourse.”

The NYT covered it in the Sunday Book Review, calling it “a capacious, big-hearted novel.”

The award was founded in 1980 by Mary Lee Settle who donated her National Book Award prize money to begin the award in support of a group of authors who felt the NBA had become too commercial. The name of the award honors William Faulkner, who similarly donated the money from his 1949 Nobel Award to create the  Faulkner Foundation to give awards to authors. It was dissolved in 1970.

When this year’s finalists were announced, Ron Charles praised the selections as being a “sign of new diversity in books,” moving away from a time when “all the stars of American literature seemed to be straight white guys named John.”

The other finalists are:

After Disasters, Viet Dinh (Amazon/Little A)

LaRose, Louise Erdrich (HC/Harper; HarperLuxe; Harper Audio; OverDrive Sample)

What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell (Macmillan/FSG; OverDrive Sample)

Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, Sunil Yapa (Hachette/Lee Boudreaux; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample)

The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction has announced its shortlist for 2017. The six titles include a past winner and a debut novel:

Stay with Me, Ayobami Adebayo (PRH/Knopf; RH Audio/BOT), the debut, publishes on August 22

The Power, Naomi Alderman (Hachette/Little, Brown) publishes on October 10

The Dark Circle by Linda Grant, who has won the prize before, is the only shortlist title without a US edition

The Sport of Kings, C.E. Morgan (Macmillan/FSG; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample)

First Love, Gwendoline Riley (PRH/Melville House; OverDrive Sample)

Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeleine Thien (Norton; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample)

Just released in the US, Riley’s First Love has gotten little attention here thus far. In the UK, critics were impressed.

The Spectator calls it “a hilarious send-up of chick lit … the meat of First Love is in its rich character depictions, from which Riley teases out a series of painful but exquisitely comedic episodes.”

The Guardian calls it “an exquisite and combative piece of news from nowhere – which is everywhere, too … Riley’s emphasis is on the quotidian experience of her characters – unbearable yet ordinary.”

The Evening Standard says it is “compelling from the beginning,” and The Scotsman says “This is, in a truly wonderful way, a perfectly horrible little novel. I read it in a kind of perpetual squirm, in a series of flinches and gasps. It is exact and exacting, and has the nasty pleasure of testing an unhealed abrasion.”

The two novels that received the most attention in the states are Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Norton; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample) and C.E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings (Macmillan/FSG;Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Thien swept Canada’s literary awards, taking the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the highly prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. The NYT called her novel “a beautiful, sorrowful work.” While C.E. Morgan’s novel initially was not reviewed widely when first released, it went on to win the Kirkus Prize and was selected for the Carnegie Medal longlist for fiction.

The winner will be announced on June 7, 2017.

It’s not a headline one might expect to see on the Nobel site, but yesterday a post appeared titled, “Good news about Dylan.”

In a few days Bob Dylan will visit Stockholm and give two concerts. The Swedish Academy is very much looking forward to the weekend and will show up at one of the performances. Please note that no Nobel Lecture will be held. The Academy has reason to believe that a taped version will be sent at a later point. (Taped Nobel lectures are presented now and then, the latest of which was that of Nobel Laureate Alice Munro in 2013.) At this point no further details are known.

The good news is that the Swedish Academy and Bob Dylan have decided to meet this weekend. The Academy will then hand over Dylan’s Nobel diploma and the Nobel medal, and congratulate him on the Nobel Prize in Literature. The setting will be small and intimate, and no media will be present; only Bob Dylan and members of the Academy will attend, all according to Dylan’s wishes.

Why has Dylan remained silent so long? NPR Music Editor Andrew Flanagan theorizes, on somewhat thin evidence, that the singer has been “revisiting his own development.”

UPDATE: Several news sources, including Vanity Fair  report that the “small private gathering” took place on Saturday, April 1.

The Romance Writers of America announced on Tuesday the finalists for the RITA Awards for romance fiction.

There are 13 categories include over 80 nominees (a good opportunity for displays, see The Romance Dish for useful descriptions of all 13 classifications).

Among the finalists are popular authors such as Sabrina York, Tessa Dare, Elizabeth Hoyt, Sabrina Jeffries, J R Ward and Loretta Chase, whose Dukes Prefer Blondes (HC/Avon; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample), part of her Dressmakers series, appears in the Historical Romance: Long category.

Attesting to the growing reach of self-published novels, 11 of the nominees come from the authors’ own imprints, including  Always a Bridesmaid by Lizzie Shane (Create Space; OverDrive Sample), in the Contemporary Romance: Long category.

RWA’s the Golden Heart award nominees for unpublished manuscripts were also released.

All the winners will be announced on July 27.

Announced Wednesday, International Women’s Day, as it has been since its founding in 1996, is the longlist of 16 titles for the Womens Prize for Fiction sponsored by Bailey’s.

As The Guardian points out, it is a list of established authors rather than new voices, “including three previous winners, four second novels and only three debuts, compared with 11 last year.” The full list is online.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Award, Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Norton; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample) swept Canada’s literary awards, taking the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, an award worth $100,000 dollars, as well as the highly prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.

The NYT calls it “a beautiful, sorrowful work. The book impresses in many senses: It stamps the memory with an afterimage; it successfully explores larger ideas about politics and art (the mind is never still while reading it); it has the satisfying, epic sweep of a 19th-century Russian novel, spanning three generations and lapping up against the shores of two continents.”

C.E. Morgan won the Kirkus Prize for The Sport of Kings (Macmillan/FSG;Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample), a title that was also a Carnegie Medal longlist selection.

Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare (PRH/Pantheon; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample) racked up holds in libraries and was widely reviewed.

On Fresh Air, Maureen Corrigan said, “Mary Gaitskill writes tough … You have to write tough — and brilliantly — to pull off a novel like The Mare … a raw, beautiful story about love and mutual delusion, in which the fierce erotics of mother love and romantic love and even horse fever are swirled together.”

The New York Times Magazine featured Gaitskill in a lengthy profile, as did The New Yorker.

Other well-known authors on the list are Annie Proulx for Barkskins (S&S/Scribner; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample), Margaret Atwood, Hag-Seed, (PRH/Hogarth; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample), as well as past winners, Eimear McBride, for The Lesser Bohemians, (PRH/Hogarth; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample), and Rose Remain, The Gustav Sonata, (Norton; HighBridge Audio; OverDrive Sample)

Two titles have yet to be published in the US, one of the three debuts on the list, Midwinter by Fiona Melrose and The Dark Circle by Linda Grant, who has won the prize before.  Several others will arrive later this year:

First Love, Gwendoline Riley (Melville House) comes out on March 28

Stay with Me, Ayobami Adebayo (PRH/Knopf; RH Audio/BOT) arrives on August 22; a debut

The Power, Naomi Alderman (Hachette/Little, Brown) publishes on October 10.

The prize was created in 1996 by a group of U.K. reviewers, librarians and others in the book world, to address the fact that a disproportionate number of men won literary prizes.

The short list of six titles is expected in April. The winner will be announced on June 7th.

Attached is our spreadsheet of the titles, for use in ordering and creating displays, Bailey’s Longlist, 2017.

An unemployed Australian poet who lives in a camper just learned that she has won a Windham Campbell Prize. One of the world’s most lucrative literary prizes, it awards poet Ali Cobby Eckermann the equivalent of $165,000 (via NPR).

The news came out of the blue. Eckermann tells The Guardian Australia that “It’s going to change my life completely.”

Of Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha heritage, Eckermann suffered under Australia’s assimilation policies that created what is known as “the Stolen Generations.” She was forcibly taken from her mother when she was a just a baby, just as her own mother had been.

Eckermann says the money will provide stability for her family. “My son and my grandsons are moving back to South Australia in the next few months, and it will just allow us some stability to grow up together under the one roof … I haven’t really had that option before in my life. Just the thought of maybe being able to purchase a home or rent a home, and for us to be together and have that stability is something pretty new to me.”

Just one of her books has been published in the US, the verse novel Ruby Moonlight, (Flood Editions, 2015, avail. to backorder). Her first book of poetry was Little Bit Long Time, published by Australian Poetry as part of their New Poets series in 2009. Other works include the collection Inside My Mother and her memoir Too Afraid to Cry.

In the constellation of literary prizes, the Windham Campbell operates far under the radar. Nominees do not know they are being considered, nominators and judges are kept confidential, and there is no publicly announced shortlist. Winners only know they were in the running once they win.

The award is administered by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and was founded by the author Donald Windham and honors his lifelong partner Sandy M. Campbell. It is designed to “to call attention to literary achievement and provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns.”

The other winners this year are:

André Alexis (Canada/Trinidad and Tobago) for Fiction

Erna Brodber (Jamaica) for Fiction

Marina Carr (Ireland) for Drama

Ike Holter (US) for Drama

Carolyn Forché (US) for Poetry

Maya Jasanoff (US) for Nonfiction

Ashleigh Young (New Zealand) for Nonfiction

EDITORS NOTE:

We’re pleased to welcome back Lisa Von Drasek as EarlyWord‘s Kids Correspondent, now that she has completed her responsibilities on the Caldecott committee. Below, she gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the YMA announcement day at Midwinter.

Nora, EarlyWord: Welcome back, Lisa! We’d love to know everything you can tell us about the Caldecott committee discussions.

Lisa: Nice try, Nora, but the work of the committee is confidential. I can’t tell you the titles we discussed, how we came to our short list, or anything about the specific votes.

Nora, EarlyWord: Got it. Let’s try something else. You were in the room when the winners were announced. What was it like as people began to realize John Lewis was about to make history by winning an unprecedented four awards for March, Book 3 (IDW/Top Shelf)?

(more…)

The Academy Awards ceremony often confounds expectations, no more dramatically than it did last night when, just as the La La Land producers were celebrating their win for Best Picture, it was announced that the winner was actually Moonlight.

Expectations that books would take center stage were also confounded. In spite of multiple nominations for films adapted from published material, only Fences, based on the August Wilson play, won a major award, for Viola Davis as Best Supporting Actress.

Even the category of adapted screenplay did not net a win for books. In fact the winner isn’t even  based on a published work, but on an unpublished play that was written as a drama school project, Moonlight.

Despite five nominations, including Best Director, Arrival, based on a story by Ted Chiang, won just one Oscar, for Sound Editing and the books that showed the largest sales boosts from the nominations, Hidden Figures, Lion, and A Man Called Ove, went home empty-handed.

Those books are still doing well, however. The memoir that is the basis for Lion, A Long Way Home, continues to rise on Amazon’s sales rankings as a result of pre-Oscars attention, including People magazine’s “The True Story Behind Lion: How Lost Child Saroo Brierley Found His Birth Mother More Than 20 Years Later.”

The two book-based nominees for Best Animated Feature lost out to the original screenplay, Zootopia. It does, however, have several tie-ins.

Hollywood shows no signs of falling out of love with books, announcing new adaptations each week. As they say in show business, “There’s always next time.”