SWEET, SOFT, PLENTY RHYTHM by Laura Warrell was longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The finalists will be announced in March, and the winner will be announced in April. Pantheon published the book on September 27, 2022.

DECENT PEOPLE by De'Shawn Charles Winslow received a fantastic review from The Wall Street Journal, where reviewer Tom Nolan praises the book as a “hard-hitting novel,” adding: “DECENT PEOPLE is an intriguing murder puzzle—and a good deal more. Thanks to richly detailed chapters that switch between multiple points of view, readers are drawn into the lives and memories of several West Mills citizens.” The novel was also featured on The Wall Street Journal’s roundup of “14 Books We Read This Month,” and Winslow appeared on the LARB Radio Hour podcast to discuss the book. Bloomsbury Publishing published DECENT PEOPLE on January 17, 2023.

THE HIGH DESERT by James Spooner received the American Library Association's Alex Award, which honors “books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18.” Harper published the book on May 17, 2022.

Ramona Ausubel’s THE LAST ANIMAL received a starred Kirkus review. They rave: "Deadpan gems […] sparkle in just about every scene of Ausubel’s fourth volume of highly original fabulist fiction, which marries an extraordinary and slightly bananas scientific adventure with a deeply felt portrait of a mother and daughters healing from terrible loss...An amazing amount of humor, pizazz, wisdom, and wonder packed into a story that is essentially about processing grief." The book was also featured in Orion Magazine’s “The Most Anticipated Books of 2023 – as Flowers,” and Library Journal’s “Annual Books Preview.” Riverhead Books will publish the novel on April 18, 2023.

AN IMMENSE WORLD by Ed Yong is the Nonfiction Winner of the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. Stephen Sposato, chair of the selection committee, said: “[S]tanding out even during a recent golden age of nature writing, Ed Yong dazzles with a deeply considered exploration of the many modes of sensory perception that life has evolved to navigate the world, written with exhilarating freshness.” The book was also selected as a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. Winners will be announced at a ceremony at the New School in New York City on March 23. Random House published AN IMMENSE WORLD on June 21, 2022.

STRANGERS TO OURSELVES by Rachel Aviv was selected as a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Winners will be announced at a ceremony at the New School in New York City on March 23. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published the book on September 13, 2022.

HOUSE OF COTTON by Monica Brashears received a wonderful review from Publishers Weekly. They rave: "[A] haunting and macabre debut...Magnolia is a wonderfully complex character...Brashears skillfully portrays the ease with which Magnolia pivots from her interventions in the spirit world to her interactions with Cotton and Eden’s paying customers. This is a fine testament to resilience.” Flatiron Books will publish HOUSE OF COTTON on April 4, 2023.

The New York Times included Joseph Earl Thomas' SINK in their roundup of “13 New Books Coming in February,” praising the memoir as “a brilliant coming-of-age story.” The Washington Post also featured the book on its list of “10 Noteworthy Books for February,” praising: “For the reader, third-person narration creates a buffer to a brutal coming of age, and perhaps allows Thomas enough distance from his trauma to bravely expose the vulnerability and resilience of his youth.” Grand Central Publishing will publish the book on February 21, 2023.

THE FURROWS by Namwali Serpell was selected as a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. Winners will be announced at a ceremony at the New School in New York City on March 23. It was published by Hogarth on September 27, 2022.

David Graeber’s PIRATE ENLIGHTENMENT, OR THE REAL LIBERTALIA, the final posthumous work by the co-author of THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING, published this week to critical acclaim. Peter Frankopan calls it a “slim, feisty book,” in his review for The New York Times, adding: “Graeber’s challenge is to try to make sense of a set of sources that are unreliable or obtuse, and often written either many decades after events they describe or many thousands of miles away — or both…[He] is heroic to try to square a series of circles…David Graeber was a highly original thinker and a wonderful writer. Most of all he was someone who sought out challenging problems and set about trying to solve them.” Meanwhile, a review from Jatin Dua for Science/AAAS praises the book as an “elegantly breezy treatise [that] takes readers on a journey to the monsoonal waters of the Indian Ocean and the verdant landscape of Madagascar,” adding: “In his academic writing and political commitments, David Graeber exemplified an ethos of action and conversation. There is a certain bittersweetness to this text, one that ends with an exhortation toward the arts of speaking and conversation. Graeber himself is no longer around to speak, to debate, or to inspire protest and action. As anthropologists have noted, gifts are inalienable—they contain within them something of the giver. Graeber’s final book is certainly such a gift.” Farrar, Straus and Giroux published PIRATE ENLIGHTMENT, OR THE REAL LIBERTALIA on January 24, 2023.