Books Briefing: National Book Award finalists

October 6, 2020

This year’s National Book Awards finalists include, from left: Charles Yu (fiction), Claudio Saunt (nonfiction), Don Mee Choi (poetry), Pilar Quintana (translated literature) and Candice Iloh (young people’s literature).Rozette Rago for The New York Times; Andrew Zawacki; Jay Weaver; Danilo Costa;, via National Book Awards

Hi readers,

Here’s your weekly catch-up on everything you need to know going on in the book world.

The news:

The National Book Foundation announced this year’s finalists, honoring writers in five categories. Winners will be named at a virtual award ceremony next month.
The beloved crime novelist Tana French is back with a new mystery, “The Searcher,” which comes out today. “I’ve realized how much of this gig is your subconscious,” she tells us, “and my subconscious, like everybody else’s in the world, is a smoking crater right now.”
With his latest novel, “Snow,” the Irish novelist John Banville has killed off his pseudonym, Benjamin Black. (“Why do I need this rascal anyway?” Banville, a self-admitted perfectionist, asked himself after rereading past books by Black and deeming them acceptable.)
Over the past 50 years, Bob Woodward has become one of the most enduring chroniclers of the White House. His latest book about the Trump administration, “Rage,” was an instant best seller, but he has also attracted criticism for holding back potentially newsworthy material. We talked to him about President Trump, the pandemic and what kept Woodward up at night.
The writers Tressie McMillan Cottom, N.K. Jemisin and Jacqueline Woodson are among this year’s MacArthur “genius” grant winners.
Fiction out today: “The Searcher,” by Tana French; “Earthlings,” by Sayaka Murata; “Snow,” by John Banville; “Missionaries,” by Phil Klay; “Leave the World Behind,” by Rumaan Alam; “The Hole,” by Hiroko Oyamada; “Magic Lessons,” by Alice Hoffman; “Cuyahoga,” by Pete Beatty.
Nonfiction out today: “Bland Fanatics,” by Pankaj Mishra; “Mad at the World,” by William Souder; “The Zealot and the Emancipator,” by H.W. Brands; “Eleanor,” by David Michaelis; “Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World,” by Fareed Zakaria; “What Were We Thinking,” by Carlos Lozada; “Trump on Trial,” by Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan; “The Lenin Plot,” by Barnes Carr; “Grieving,” by Cristina Rivera Garza; “Losing the Long Game,” by Philip H. Gordon; “The Blessing and the Curse,” by Adam Kirsch; “The Tangled Web We Weave,” by James Ball; “Nothing Like I Imagined,” by Mindy Kaling.

The critics:

Parul Sehgal reviews a new audiobook biography of Dr. Anthony Fauci by Michael Specter, a staff writer at The New Yorker. “Specter’s own voice — a bit breathless, a bit reedy — rather surprisingly turns out to be one of the book’s most effective instruments,” Sehgal writes. “On the page, he can be as professionally impassive as Fauci at a news conference. But in the recording, there is no tamping his emotion and exasperation.”
Janet Maslin reviews Tana French’s new mystery, “The Searcher,” calling it “unusually contemplative and visual, as if she literally needed this breath of fresh air.”

That’s all for now. Please stay in touch and let me know what you think — whether it’s about this newsletter, our reviews, our podcast, our literary calendar, our Instagram or what you’re reading. We on the Books desk read all of it, and I’ll make every effort to write back. You can reach me at books@nytimes.com.

All my best,

Joumana Khatib

Books at The New York Times

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