Below are the winners of the Newbery, Caldecott,  Michael L. Printz and Coretta Scott King Awards. For the winners of the rest of the awards, go to the  official ALA Press Announcement.

Newbery Award

Medal Winner:

The Crossover, Kwame Alexander, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, (also a Coretta Scott King Honor Book)

Honor Books (2):

. 

El Deafo, Cece Bell, Abrams/ Amulet

Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson, Penguin/Nancy Paulsen (also winner of the Coretta Scott King Author Award, a Sibert Honor and of the National Book Award for Young Peoples Literature).

Caldecott Award

Medal Winner:

The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend, Dan Sentat, Hachette/Little, Brown

(more…)

Among the six nominees for an Edgar in the Best Novel category, one stands out as a pleasant surprise. Although it contains elements of suspense, Wiley Cash’s This Dark Road to Mercy (HarperCollins/ Morrow; HarperLuxe).  is not primarily a mystery.

It was a LibraryReads pick last year, with the following recommendation,

“Cash’s second novel is as good as his first [A Land More Kind than Home]. In this story, we meet Easter and her sister Ruby, who have been shuffled around the foster care system in Gastonia, North Carolina. Then their ne’er-do-well father whisks them away in the middle of the night. I was on the edge of my seat as I followed the girls’ tale and hoping for a safe outcome.” — Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus, OH

The full list of nominees in the Best Novel category:

This Dark Road to Mercy by Wiley Cash (HarperCollins/ Morrow; HarperLuxe)

Wolf  by Mo Hayder (Grove/Atlantic; Thorndike)

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King (S&S/Scribner; S&S Audio; Thorndike)

The Final Silence by Stuart Neville (Soho Press)

Saints of the Shadow Bible by Ian Rankin (Hachette/Little, Brown; Thorndike)

Cop Town by Karin Slaughter (RH/ Delacorte)

Several LibraryReads picks were nominated in other categories:

Dry Bones in the Valley, Tom Bouman, Norton; Thorndike) — Best First Novel

“A body has been found in an elderly recluse’s field, neighbors are fighting over fracking, and meth labs and heroin dealers have settled deep in the woods of Officer Henry Farrell’s Wild Thyme Township. Bouman’s prose reveals not only the beauty of northeastern Pennsylvania, but also abject poverty and despair. A startling debut rich in setting and character with an intricate plot that will stay with readers after the last page.” — Jennifer Winberry, Hunterdon County Library, Flemington, NJ

The Life We Bury, Allen Eskens, (Prometheus/Seventh Street Books) — Best First Novel

“In this well-crafted debut novel, Joe Talbert has finally left home, but not without guilt over leaving his autistic brother in the care of his unreliable mother. A college assignment gets the young man entangled in a cold case, racing to clear the name of a Vietnam veteran. Characters with layers of suppressed memories and emotions only add to the suspenseful plot. Looking forward to more from this Minnesotan author!” — Paulette Brooks, Elm Grove Public Library, Elm Grove, WI

World of Trouble: The Last Policeman Book III, Ben H. Winters, (Quirk Books)  — Best Paperback

“Still the last policeman, Detective Hank Palace tirelessly pulls together clues from crime scenes and interrogates witnesses to find his missing sister. Winters paints a believable picture of a world awaiting its end thanks to an asteroid on a collision course. A great series for mystery and science fiction lovers, as well as anyone looking for a pre-apocalyptic tale without a single zombie.” — Jenna Persick, Chester County Library, Exton, PA

The Black Hour by Lori Rader-Day, (Prometheus/Seventh Street Books) — Mary Higgins Clark Award

“This first novel about two broken people is a psychological thriller like the best of Alfred Hitchcock. Amelia Emmet is a professor desperately trying to recover from a gunshot wound, and Nathaniel Barber is a student struggling to come to grips with his mother’s death and a lost love. Their journey, told in alternating chapters, is riveting and full of surprising discoveries. Highly recommended.” —Mattie Gustafson, Newport Public Library, Newport, RI

The new NPR Morning Edition book club wrapped up today with a discussion of the first selection, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free by Hector Tobar (Macmillan/FSG; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample; Oct), picked in December by bookstore owner and author Ann Patchett.

The book, which has hit the lower rungs of the NYT best seller list as a result of the selection, is also one of five finalists for the NBCC Nonfiction Award, announced yesterday and  has been made into a movie, titled The 33, starring Antonio Banderas, Juliette Binoche and Gabriel Byrne. Currently in post-production, the release date has not yet been announced.

The next title in the club will be announced soon; we will let you know when it is.

Appropriately, since he has  featured so authors on his show,  now that The Colbert Report is ending, Stephen Colbert’s final guest was the winner of National Book Award in fiction, Phil Klay (The Report‘s  final episode  is actually tonight, but it does not feature a human guest).

Klay’s book Redeployment, (Penguin Press; Penguin Audio; Thorndike, OverDrive Sample) is a series of short stories about serving in Iraq. He chose to portray the war through fiction, he told Colbert,  because it made him feel less constrainted than nonfiction would have, “I don’t think I could be, in a weird way, as truthful as I wanted to be in trying to chase down the experiences I was trying to articulate on the page.” To that, the master of “Truthiness” lit up and deadpanned, “You can be more truthful by making things up?”

The UK’s Folio Prize, now in its second year, announced its longlist and it certainly lives up to its name, with a field of 80 fiction titles selected by the Folio Prize Academy, a group of writers and critics whose members read like a who’s who of literary fiction super stars.

The Prize was created in response to the 2011 Man Booker Prize shortlist, considered by some in the UK book scene as more “readable” than “literary.” Here is the entire 2011 Man Booker Prize list (long, short, and winner), in case you want to speculate on which titles triggered the debate.

Given the fuss, the Folio Prize longlist is remarkably similar to this year’s Booker longlist and includes the winner, Richard Flanagan’s
The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Also included are many of the titles that appeared on this year’s National Book Awards fiction longlist, but not the winner, Redeployment by Phil Klay.

The Folio shortlist will be announced on Feb. 9 and the winner on March 23, 2015. Last year’s winner was George Saunders for Tenth of December.

When French author Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize this year, only a handful of his 30 books were available in the U.S. in English.

In a press release, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced today that they have acquired the rights to the author’s latest novel, So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood (French title, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier). They did not announce an anticipated release date.

As the Washington Post reports, this is not happy news for the founder of one of Modiano’s long-time U.S. publishers, David Godine, who tells the Post, “Money is what this business is all about, There is no venality that exists more than the venality that exists after the Nobel Prize is awarded.” He also notes that the company has done well with Missing Persons, one of the few books available in the U.S. at the time of the Nobel announcement, adding, “if you’re going to read a Modiano, that’s the one to read.”

Last month, the University of California Press, reprinted Dora Bruder, one of Modiano’s more well-known books. In addition, Yale University Press released Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas, (reviewed recently in the Washington Post).

Most libraries are showing holds on the winner of the National Book Award in Fiction, Phil Klay’s Redeployment, (Penguin Press; Penguin Audio; Thorndike, OverDrive Sample)

Holds are likely to increase when Klay gets the Colbert Bump on Wednesday (which is the next to last day of the show. Here’s hoping Colbert continues to cover books when he takes over David Letterman’s chair on the Late Show in January).

Last month, Klay appeared on the PBS NewsHour:

In an Op-Ed piece in today’s New York Times, Jacqueline Woodson proves that a thoughtless comment can be answered thoughtfully and poignantly,

Responding to Daniel Handler’s “joke” at the National Book Awards about her being allergic to watermelon, she notes that she does indeed have an aversion to watermelon, a fact Handler knows because they have been friends for years.

By bringing it up, though, Handler reminded the audience of the way watermelons have been used to ridicule African Americans. “In a few short words, the audience and I were asked to take a step back from everything I’ve ever written … By making light of that deep and troubled history, he showed that he believed we were at a point where we could laugh about it all. His historical context, unlike my own, came from a place of ignorance.”

Jacqueline Woodson, in an interview with the Guardian, says she is “trying to figure out how to think about” Daniel Handler’s comments at the National Book Awards last week.

Finding a good moderator for an awards event seems to be challenging. Many were hopeful that Handler would bring the right mix of humor and respect to the National Book Awards this year. Unfortunately, he kicked off the event with tired comments about the lack of glamour in bookish events, saying the National Book Awards are “like the Oscars if nobody gave a shit about the Oscars.”

Most of the rest of  his “humorous” comments were weak, but the lowest point occurred when, after Woodson gave a moving acceptance speech for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for her memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, (Penguin/Nancy Paulsen), Handler made a strange racist comment that Woodson is “allergic to watermelon.” Earlier, he mentioned that one day he hopes to win a Coretta Scott King Book Award.

Handler quickly apologized for his “ill-conceived attempts at humor” and followed up with a pledge of $10,000 as well as matching donations up to $100,000, to the We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) Indiegogo campaign.

Marine and debut author Phil Klay won this year’s National Book Award in fiction at a ceremony in New York last night for his short story collection, Redeployment, (Penguin Press; Penguin Audio; Thorndike, OverDrive Sample).

Covering the event, NPR noted that it was “packed as much with jabs at Amazon as with jazzy entrance music.” The video of the full event, hosted by Daniel Handler is below (be patient, it takes a while to load, then it requires you to register and the actual event doesn’t begin until 20 minutes in to the video).

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

In nonfiction, the winner is a familiar name in publishing, Evan Osnos son of Peter Osnos, former Washington Post reporter and founder of Public Affairs (now an imprint of Perseus), for Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, (Macmillan/FSG, Brilliance Audio; OverDrive Sample), based on his reporting on China for the New Yorker.

Jacqueline Woodson’s memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, (Penguin/Nancy Paulsen; Listening Library;  OverDrive Sample) won the award for Young People’s Literature. Woodson has won many ALA awards for her work, including 3 Newbery Honors, a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Medal and 4 Honors.

Audio Sample:

The winner ins poetry is former Nobel laureate and 1993 Pulitzinr Prize winner Louise Glück for  Faithful and Virtuous Night, (Macmillan/Farrar, Straus and Giroux,  OverDrive Sample).

Anthony Awards
Best Children's or Young Adult Novel:

THE TESTING by Joelle Charbonneau,
(HMH Books for Young Readers)

Anthony Awards
Best Critical or Non-Fiction Work:

THE HOUR OF PERIL by Daniel Stashower,
(Macmillan/Minotaur)

Anthony Awards
Best Paperback Original Novel:

AS SHE LEFT IT by Catriona McPherson
Midnight Ink)

Anthony Awards
Best Audio:

THE CUCKOO'S CALLING by Robert Galbraith,
read by Robert Glenister
(Hachette Audio)

Anthony Awards, Best Novel

ORDINARY GRACE,
William Kent Krueger, (S&S/Atria)

Anthony Awards
Best First Novel:

YESTERDAY'S ECHO, Matt Coyle,
(Oceanview Publishing; Brilliance Audio)

After already winning an Edgar Best Novel award for his standalone title, Ordinary Grace, (S&S/Atria;  released in trade paperback in March; Thorndike), William Kent Krueger added an Anthony Best Novel award last night for the same title.

This is Krueger’s fourth Anthony, including Best First Novel in 1999 for Iron Lake and back-to-back Best Novel Awards for Blood Hollow (2005) and Mercy Falls (2006). in 2005 and 2006, all of which are in his Cork O’Connor series,

The other Anthony award winners  the in book categories are:

Best First Novel:

Matt Coyle, Yesterday’s Echo, Oceanview Publishing; Brilliance Audio)

Best Children’s or Young Adult Novel:

Joelle Charbonneau, The Testing,( HMH Books for Young Readers,  trade paperback coming 1/6/15),

Best Critical or Non-Fiction Work:

Daniel Stashower, The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War  (Macmillan/Minotaur)

Best Audio Book:

Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo’s Calling, read by Robert Glenister, (Hachette Audio)

Best Paperback Original Novel:

Catriona McPherson, As She Left It, (Midnight Ink)

The winner of the Booker, announced Oct 14, The Narrow Road To The Deep North, by Richard Flanagan (RH/Knopf), arrives on the 11/2/14 NYT Hardcover Fiction list at #10.

It’s the ninth Booker winner in a row to hit the list, as the NYT BR‘s “Inside the List” column notes (the most successful of those, of course is Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, followed by Anne Enright’s The Gathering).

The award has had a major impact on the author’s life. Flanagan recently told the Telegraph that the prize money saved him from turning to a “life down the mines,” adding, “I’m not a wealthy man. This means I can continue to write.”

Based on reviews, it may be difficult to find a way to recommend the book. Even fan Ron Charles warned in the Washington Post that this “story about a group of Australian POWs during World War II will cast a shadow over your summer and draw you away from friends and family into dark contemplation the way only the most extraordinary books can,” hardly a way to encourage potential readers.

Wendy Bartlett, head of collection development at Cuyahoga P.L, Ohio, offers another way to look at it:

If your readers engaged with Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, or are fans of the timeless love story in Garcia Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera, they will absolutely love The Narrow Road To The Deep North, one of the most readable and emotionally available Booker winners in years.

It follows the story of an Australian doctor, Dorrigo Evans, who served in WWII and was captured, surviving several years in a POW camp. Through flashbacks, we learn about Evans’ long marriage as well as his true love. The latter part of the book reveals the fates of the various people from the POW camp — the story of which is the crux of the narrative.

It’s amazing and wonderful, and your customers will thank you. Book groups who don’t mind the shifting time periods will find much to talk about here, particularly if they’ve read Unbroken.

As part of its first year celebration, LibraryReads has released a list of the Top Twenty-Five favorites from the first years worth of picks, as voted on by hundreds of librarians around the country.

Now, you can vote on this shortlist (even if you’ve never voted before). A final list of the top ten vote getters will be released on  December 1st (voting ends on November 15th).

Also, remember to nominate your favorite upcoming books for future lists (Dec/Jan nominations are due by Nov. 20).

Announced on NPR’s Morning Edition today, the finalist for the National Book Awards (winners to be announced on Nov. 19). Listen here, or see the list below:

Fiction

Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman, (Grove Press, Brilliance Audio), OverDrive Sample

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, (S&S/Scribner; S&S Audio; Thorndike), OverDrive Sample— Both a LibraryReads and an IndieNext pick

Phil Klay, Redeployment, (Penguin Press; Penguin Audio; Thorndike), OverDrive Sample

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (RH/Knopf; RH Audio; Thorndike), OverDrive Sample — LibraryReads pick

Audio Sample:

Marilynne Robinson, Lila (Macmillan/FSG; Macmillan Audio; Thorndike), OverDrive Sample — IndieNext pick

Nonfiction

Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Macmillan/Bloomsbury), OverDrive Sample

Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes
(Macmillan/Holt; Highbridge), OverDrive Sample

John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, (Norton; Brilliance), OverDrive Sample

Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (Macmillan/FSG, Brilliance Audio), OverDrive Sample

Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence, (Norton/Liveright)

Young People’s Literature

Threatened, Eliot Schrefer, (Scholastic Press), OverDrive Sample — The author’s previous book, Endangered, was a 2012 finalist

The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights, Steve Sheinkin, (Macmillan/Roaring Brook; Listening Library), OverDrive Sample  — The author’s Bomb: The Race to Build and Steal The World’s Most Dangerous Weapon was a 2012 finalist

Audio Sample:

Noggin, John Corey Whaley, (S&S/Atheneum; S&S Audio), OverDrive Sample — The author’s Where Things Come Back, was a Printz Award Winner

Revolution: The Sixties Trilogy, Book Two, Deborah Wiles, (Scholastic Press; Listening Library) — The author’s Each Little Bird That Sings, was a National Book Award Finalist

Audio Sample:

 

Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson, (Nancy Paulsen Books/ Penguin Group; Listening Library), OverDrive Sample — The author was a finalist for both Locomotion and Hush

Audio Sample:

Poetry

Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night, (Macmillan/Farrar, Straus and Giroux),  OverDrive Sample 

Fanny Howe, Second Childhood, (Graywolf Press)

Maureen N. McLane, This Blue, (Macmillan/Farrar, Straus and Giroux),  OverDrive Sample 

Fred Moten, The Feel Trio, (Letter Machine Editions)

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric, (Graywolf Press)