Book Awards Season Begins With a Win for JAMES

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

Kirkus Prizes Kick Off Awards Season

The winners of the 2024 Kirkus Prizes were announced last night, kicking off book award season with what I expect is the first of many wins for Percival Everett. Everett’s James, a reimagining (and then some) of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of enslaved person Jim, took the prize for fiction. It is also a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, for which it is the clear frontrunner, and the Booker Prize. The Kirkus Prize for nonfiction went to Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger, about the 1986 space shuttle explosion that resulted in the death of seven crew members. Kenneth M. Cadow received the prize for young people’s literature for his novel Gather, which explores the opioid crisis through the lens of one family’s story.

Audiobooks for Your Election Anxiety

Pause your doom-scrolling and press play on an audiobook that will help you get your head around the upcoming election. I second the recommendation for Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized and would add The Other Divide by Yanna Krupnikov, which addresses the biggest political division we don’t talk about nearly enough: the one between the small minority of citizens who pay attention to politics and…everyone else. 19 days to go, friends. Hang in there.

Just Beachy

Emily Henry’s next rom-com, Great Big Beautiful Life, will be released April 22, 2025.

Per an exclusive reveal in People, the novel “will follow two writers as they vie ‘for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve.'” They’ll meet, they’ll banter, they’ll smooch.

Great Big Beautiful Life will be Henry’s sixth contemporary romance. Her five preceding titles, beginning with 2020’s breakout Beach Read, have sold a combined 7 million copies and have all been optioned for film or TV. Rom-coms are big business, and Henry is quickly becoming a household name. I wouldn’t be surprised to see news of an adaptation deal before Great Big Beautiful Life even hits shelves.

The Book That Helped Me Beat Burnout

This one is personal. A couple years ago, I had one of those rare, beautiful right-book-at-the-right-time moments. I return to it often, and it remains a powerful resource. Maybe it can be one for you, too.