Rupi Kaur Responds to Banning of Her Book

Reese Witherspoon has picked Sadeqa Johnson’s The House of Eve as the latest selection for her popular book club. Johnson’s novel, published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster, tells the story of a teenage girl and a young woman in mid-20th century America whose lives collide after both become pregnant. A critic for Kirkus called the book “an empathetic and sobering look at the price women of the 1950s sometimes paid for desire.”

Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother author, will make her fiction debut with a novel coming out this summer. Minotaur will publish Chua’s The Golden Gate, the Macmillan imprint announced in a news release. The press describes the novel as “a sweeping, evocative, and compelling historical thriller that paints a vibrant portrait of a California buffeted by the turbulent crosswinds of a world at war and a society about to undergo massive change.”

Hello, gorgeous! Barbra Streisand will share the memories—misty watercolor memories—of her life in a long-anticipated memoir coming this fall. Viking will publish the legendary singer, actor, and director’s My Name Is Barbra, a book that’s been in the works for years, the Penguin Random House imprint announced in a news release.

Last month, an Alabama school district canceled three planned visits by Derrick Barnes after a parent complained that the children’s author had posted “controversial ideas” on social media. Now, some residents of Hoover, Alabama, are doing all they can to make sure Barnes’ books get into the...

Dax Tejera, an ABC News producer known for his work with George Stephanopoulos, reportedly choked to death while intoxicated in New York City last December, contradicting a previous statement by his network that he’d suffered a heart attack. Tejera, 37, died of “asphyxia due to obstruction of airway by food bolus complicating acute alcohol intoxication,” the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner told the Daily Mail. The exact timeline of the events of Dec. 23 remains unclear, with the Mail’s report failing to address earlier claims that Tejera “collapsed” only after leaving the Park Avenue steakhouse where he’d been dining that night. Complicating what Tejera’s widow called a “terrible tragedy” is the fact that, hours later, she was charged with child endangerment after it emerged that the couple had left their young daughters alone in a hotel room to dine out that evening. “While the girls were unharmed, I realize that it was a poor decision,” Veronica Tejera said in a statement at the time. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dax Tejera (@daxtejera) Read it at Daily Mail

The longlist for the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award, given annually to an outstanding work of fiction by an American permanent resident, has been revealed. The PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced the nominated books in a news release Tuesday. Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose, which was previously longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal...

Stephen King’s Billy Summers is headed to the big screen, Deadline reports. King’s novel, published in 2021 by Scribner, follows a hitman who only takes jobs if he thinks the victims deserve to be killed. He decides to retire from a life of crime but agrees to take a final job, which doesn’t turn out the way he planned. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the novel as “murder most foul and mayhem most entertaining” and “another worthy page-turner from a protean master.”

Viola Davis won the Grammy Award for best audio book, narration, and storytelling recording for her memoir, Finding Me, on Sunday evening. With the win, Davis became the latest person to earn “EGOT” status, meaning that she has won the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards. The last artist to achieve the EGOT was actor and singer Jennifer Hudson, who completed the superfecta last year.

One of the real pleasures of assembling our 90th Anniversary Issue was combing through the archives to see what Kirkus Reviews had to say about the classics as well as some lesser-known books. You’ll find excerpts from those archival children’s reviews below. We didn’t aim to represent every major title of the past 90 years but to highlight the ones that were most entertaining or illuminating today. Allhave been condensed and lightly edited, when necessary, for clarity.

The House of Eve (Simon & Schuster, Feb. 7) is the fifth novel by Sadeqa Johnson and her second work of historical fiction, after Yellow Wife, the story of an enslaved woman who was forced to bear her enslaver’s children. House of Eve is set in the 1940s and ’50s and tells the stories of Ruby and Eleanor, two young Black women who both become pregnant outside marriage and see their lives go in very different directions. This week the novel was selected by Reese Witherspoon as the February pick for her popular book club.

Fourteen was an age of extraordinary change for Lamya H: It was the year she first read the Surah Maryam, the story of the only woman named in the Quran, the virgin mother of the prophet Isa. It was the year she started wearing hijab. And it was the year she realized she had a crush on the female economics teacher at her all-girls school.