Finalists for the 2019 Kirkus Prize have been announced. Nominees include Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Colson Whitehead’s The NIckel Boys, Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain, and Naja Marie Aidt’s When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back: Carl’s Book. Winners will be announced in a ceremony this October.
Naja Marie Aidt’s book is also on the longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, along with Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and more.
This year’s Festival Albertine will focus on climate change. Festival curator and The End of Nature author Bill McKibben told the New York Times that the event would allow participants to overcome issues like language barriers in an effort to understand the problem better. “If one can do things like get out data about the French soil law into the information bloodstream where other people can pick it up and think about it, that seems like a useful way to spend a day or two,” he said.
In its first week on shelves, Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments has already sold over 200,000 copies in the US and UK.
At BuzzFeed, Scaachi Koul profiles Lauren Duca, whose first book, How to Start a Revolution, will be released next week. “Duca’s nascent career is filled with missteps, ones that in isolation aren’t really a huge deal for your average millennial, but certainly have larger consequences when you’re a representative for a larger movement advocating for better political (and personal) behavior,” she writes. “If Duca wanted to get young people to rally together in the pursuit of a cause, she was successful. It just managed to be against her rather than some other common enemy.”