Danielle Steel’s latest novel, THE WHITTIERS, debuted on The New York Times Bestsellers list for the week of December 11, 2022, appearing at #7 on Hardcover Fiction and #8 on Combined Print and E-Book Fiction. Delacorte Press published the book on November 22, 2022.

Rachel Aviv’s STRANGERS TO OURSELVES was selected as one of The New York Times’ “10 Best Books of 2022.” They praise it as a “rich and nuanced book,” adding: “[Aviv’s] personal history made her especially attuned to how stories can clarify as well as distort what a person is going through. This isn’t an anti-psychiatry book — Aviv is too aware of the specifics of any situation to succumb to anything so sweeping. What she does is hold space for empathy and uncertainty, exploring a multiplicity of stories instead of jumping at the impulse to explain them away.” Farrar, Straus and Giroux published the book on September 13, 2022.

Namwali Serpell’s THE FURROWS was selected as one of The New York Times’ “10 Best Books of 2022.” They praise: “This richly layered book explores the nature of grief, how it can stretch or compress time, reshape memories and make us dream up alternate realities.” Hogarth published the novel on September 27, 2022.

Ed Yong’s AN IMMENSE WORLD was selected as one of The New York Times’ “10 Best Books of 2022.” They praise: “Yong certainly gave himself a formidable task with this book — getting humans to step outside their ‘sensory bubble’ and consider how nonhuman animals experience the world…Yong is a terrific storyteller, and there are plenty of surprising animal facts to keep this book moving toward its profound conclusion: The breadth of this immense world should make us recognize how small we really are.” Random House published the book on June 21, 2022.

The Hollywood Reporter announced that the film adaptation of A SPY BY NATURE, the first book in Charles Cumming’s Alec Milius Spy Series, will be directed by Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald and will star NORMAL PEOPLE and AFTERSUN actor Paul Mescal. Macdonald said: “I’ve wanted to make A SPY BY NATURE for many years — and when I met Paul Mescal, with his beguiling mixture of intelligence, skill and youth, I knew I’d found the perfect star…This is a very modern spy story — sexy, dangerous, morally ambivalent — and only an actor of Paul’s talent could pull it off.” St. Martin’s Press originally published the book on July 10, 2007.

It’s been an incredible week of praise and recognition for Ed Yong’ stellar AN IMMENSE WORLD. The book was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal in Excellence for Nonfiction. The medal winners will be announced at the Reference and User Services Association’s Book and Media Awards event during LibLearnX on January 29 at 4:30pm CT. Meanwhile, AN IMMENSE WORLD has been featured on 2022 best-of lists from TIME (“fascinating fare”), Amazon, Goodreads, and BookPage (“an immersive, page-turning reading experience”). Random House published the book on June 21, 2022.

Namwali Serpell’s THE FURROWS was featured on TIME’s list of “The 100 Must-Read Books of 2022.” Annabel Gutterman writes: “In her follow-up to her 2019 debut THE OLD DRIFT, Namwali Serpell unravels a haunting narrative full of mystery. But it’s Serpell’s unsparing depiction of C’s grief that makes THE FURROWS so affecting. As C is forced to relive the most traumatic moment of her life, over and over again, Serpell creates a wrenching portrait of a woman reckoning with loss.” The book was also featured on best-of lists from Kirkus and BookPage, the latter of which praises: “Serpell’s award-winning debut novel, THE OLD DRIFT, was a genre-defying epic about three generations of Zambian families, and her purposely disconcerting follow-up will reinforce readers’ appreciation of her daring experimentation and keen talent.” Hogarth published the novel on September 27, 2022.

Eileen Myles’ anthology PATHETIC LITERATURE published this week to critical acclaim. David L. Ulin wrote a stunning review of the book for The Los Angeles Times, raving: “PATHETIC LITERATURE is an anthology rich in allusions: One piece speaks to another across geography and time. Moving fluidly from Jorge Luis Borges, Chester Himes and Victor Hugo to contemporary figures such as Michelle Tea, Justin Torres and Layli Long Soldier (whose poem ‘38’ is a vivid tour de force), the book is arranged alphabetically by first name, as if to turn our preconceptions inside out…The weave is so all-encompassing, the associations so multilayered, that I feel like fireworks are popping off inside my head. I want to think about these lines of communication: Kafka to Weil to Chantal Akerman, all writing on parents; Maggie Nelson also quoting Shōnagon: ‘Whatever people may think of my book, … I still regret that it ever came to light.’ I want to think about all this pathos, this emotion taking place between the lines and across the centuries. I want to think about these writers in conversation not only with one another but also within the imagination of the editor. More than anything, of course, the echoes belong to Myles, which is what gives PATHETIC LITERATURE a sensibility that is authorial as much as curatorial…PATHETIC LITERATURE represents not so much a collection as it does an ethos: ‘almost a poem,’ its creator observes. These texts and voices take us someplace unexpected, beyond the individual and into the realm of a collective, a tapestry of words that add up to a way of being in the world.” Meanwhile, Oprah Daily featured the anthology on its 2022 Holiday Gift Guide. The citation reads: “For the quirky and the weird—and who among us is not?—this singularly unexpected assemblage curated by Lambda Award–winning poet and writer Eileen Myles is an anthology like no other. This melange of work from writers of widely varying genres and forms—from Jorge Luis Borges to Rumi to Djuna Barnes—is ‘pathetic’ in the sense of being linked to pathos. In her introduction to the volume, Myles writes: ‘Each of these writers has a discomfort or a restlessness’ and has produced work that ‘acknowledges a boundary and then passes it.’ What Myles has captured here is simply this: the power of literature.” Grove Press published the anthology on November 15, 2022

Joseph Earl Thomas’ forthcoming memoir SINK is one of Vulture’s most-anticipated reads for this winter. Isle McElroy writes: “Essayist and fiction writer Joseph Early Thomas’s SINK pushes back against the expectations of coming-of-age memoirs. Eschewing the ‘I’ to instead tell the story of Joey in third person, Thomas writes about his family’s flawed attempts to show love and the hardship he faced overcoming his tumultuous childhood — and the community he later found in nerd culture, once he gave up on the urge to fit in. Thomas is a skilled prose stylist, and Sink is loaded with arresting imagery and insights into the eerie space between claustrophobia and freedom unique to childhood.” Grand Central Publishing will publish the memoir on February 21, 2023.

TIME Magazine and BookPage featured Rachel Aviv’s nonfiction debut STRANGERS TO OURSELVES on their respective best-of lists for 2022. Angela Haupt of TIME calls the book “a deeply reported exploration of mental illness…writ[ten] with empathy and nuance,” while BookPage praises it as “stunning.” Farrar, Straus and Giroux published the book on September 13, 2022.