MORE THAN ENOUGH author Elaine Welteroth has been announced as the new host of CBS’s The Talk, replacing Marie Osmond and Eve to join Amanada Kloots, Sharon Osbourne, Sheryl Underwood and Carrie Ann Inaba. Welteroth also interviewed President Barack Obama on Instagram Live to promote his presidential memoir, A PROMISED LAND. Penguin Books published MORE THAN ENOUGH on April 28, 2020.

Investigative journalist Becky Cooper’s true-crime debut, WE KEEP THE DEAD CLOSE, launched with a splash last month, becoming an Indie Bestseller in its first week of sale. Excerpts were featured on pub day in Crime Reads, Town & Country and AARP.com, while Vogue.com, Salon, Shondaland, and The Daily Beast all published interviews with Cooper. The book also received glowing reviews from The Wall Street Journal, Air Mail Weekly, and the Washington Post, and the New Yorker featured the book in its “Briefly Noted” section in its December 7 issue. Redbook, Marie Claire, and Fresh Air’s Maureen Corrigan named it a “Best Book of 2020,” and Cooper has held virtual events in conversation with Ron Chernow, Patrick Radden Keefe, Emma Copley Eisenberg, and Paige Williams, among others, to discuss the decade of research that went into her account of Jane Britton’s murder. Grand Central Publishing published the book on November 10, 2020.

Gabriela Garcia’s OF WOMEN AND SALT has been named by Forbes as one of the "10 Most Anticipated Books of 2021 According to Independent Bookstores.” Stephanie Skees, director of operations at The Novel Neighbor, praises: “It's a masterfully written debut novel exploring one family's matriarchal choices and the legacy those choices create. A sweeping tale ranging from 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers it will leave the reader equal parts haunted and moved.” Flatiron Books will publish the novel on March 30, 2021.

Dawnie Walton’s THE FINAL REVIVAL OF OPAL & NEV earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly. They write: "Walton’s spectacular debut pulls off a polyphonic oral history of a fictional proto-Afro-punk performer and her white musical partner. Walton pumps up the volume with a fresh angle on systemic racism and freedom of expression. This is a firecracker." PopSugar also featured the novel as one of the "42 Books Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2021.” 37 Ink will publish the novel on April 20, 2021.

Rachel Aviv, author of STRANGERS TO OURSELVES, is a recipient of the 2020 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. The grant is awarded to writers in the process of completing a book of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction. The grant jury describes the book as a "potent and timely exploration of how psychiatry, its diagnostics, and its pharmaceuticals have woven themselves deeply into our personal and cultural lives charts completely new territory." The book will be published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

THE PROPHETS by Robert Jones Jr. has been chosen as the #1 Indie Next Pick for January 2021. The novel has also received a starred review from BookPage. They write: "[W]hat is most notable about THE PROPHETS is that, like James Baldwin or Toni Morrison, Jones gets to the root of some of our culture’s thorniest problems through specific, accurate storytelling, drawn with insight and great skill." Lastly, Harper's Bazaar and Vanity Fair both features the novel as a highly anticipated 2021 read. G.P. Putnam’s Sons will publish the book January 5, 2021.

The first trade review for Jakob Guanzon’s ABUNDANCE, from Kirkus, calls the book an “impressive debut” and a “compelling picture of poverty, desperation, and pain.” Meanwhile, Soft Punk praises Guanzon’s prose as “surprising and dreamy, stuffed with longing and tenderness,” and the book’s “lyrical and respectful handling” of a story about a Filipino-American single father and son on the margins as “urgent and necessary.” Graywolf Press will publish the book on March 2, 2021.

Angie Thomas’s CONCRETE ROSE has its first starred review from Kirkus. They write: “A literary DeLorean transports readers into the past, where they hope, dream, and struggle alongside beloved characters from Thomas’ THE HATE U GIVE… A resounding success.” It has also been named one of Forbes’ “10 Most Anticipated Books of 2021.” Balzer + Bray will publish the book on January 12, 2021.

Daniel Hornsby’s VIA NEGATIVA continues to pull in glowing praise. Chapter 16 calls the book “a remarkable performance in narrative voice, a convincing rendition of late-life wisdom captured in evocative sentences,” while Englewood Review applauds it as simultaneously “humorously quirky” and “hauntingly spiritual.” A Buzzfeed list of “46 Books Our Indie Booksellers Were Grateful For This Year” names VIA NEGATIVA “a hidden gem,” and Hornsby “a writer to pay attention to.” Knopf published the book on August 11, 2020.

Harvard Review favorably compared Maxim Loskutoff’s debut novel RUTHIE FEAR about “the hardscrabble way of life common to the often-overlooked rural communities of the American West” to his debut collection of short stories, COME WEST AND SEE, commending how he “neither divides his characters into villains and victims nor presents them as objects of condescension or condemnation. His focus is rather on the ways in which conditions that produce despair create and maintain the kind of collective psychic inflammation that can incite the impulse to violence—even rampage—in any of us.” W.W. Norton & Company published the novel on September 1, 2020.