Virginia Beach author Joe Jackson is up for two prestigious book awards. His “Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary,” published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in biography and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. Winners will be announced March 16 and Feb. 22, respectively.

The NBCC is a group of 1,000 book reviewers and editors; PEN America, a group of writers and editors.

Other nominees include Nigel Cliff, “Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story” ; Ruth Franklin, “Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life” ; Jane Kamensky, “A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley”; and Arthur Lubow, “Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer.”

Jackson also has written, among other books, “Atlantic Fever: Lindbergh, His Competitors, and the Race to Cross the Atlantic” and “The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire.”

Books by U.S. Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights icon, sold out on Amazon in the midst of his spat with President-elect Donald Trump, says The Washington Post. One, “Walking With the Wind,” was written with Norfolk’s Mike D’Orso.

A comics tribute to the victims of the mass shooting last June at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, is now a Publishers Weekly best-seller. Hundreds of collaborators responded to a call by comic book writer Marc Andreyko. Proceeds from “Love Is Love,” which opened at 22nd on the list, will support survivors and families. (PW)

 

Hype alert: The movie adaptation of E.L. James’ “Fifty Shades Darker” (sequel to “Fifty Shades of Grey”) is due in theaters Feb. 10.

In case you missed it: William Peter Blatty, author of “The Exorcist,” has died. … Sales of “What the (Bleep) Just Happened?” were halted by HarperCollins after CNN found that the author, Monica Crowley, had plagiarized chunks of it. Politico found that she’d plagiarized parts of her Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia. Crowley last week decided to decline a National Security Council position .

Honors and awards: Jewish Book Council award winners include “But You Did Not Come Back,” Marceline Loridan-Ivens (Sandra Smith, translator) and “Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food,” Roger Horowitz.

new and recent Danielle Steel’s “Mistress” is this week’s top hardcover in fiction on The New York Times best-seller list. The mistress of a nefarious Russian oligarch – saved by him because of her beauty – falls for an artist. Also: Olympic gymnast Simone Biles’ memoir, “ Courage to Soar” … James Patterson and Candice Fox, “Never Never” … a Patterson BookShot, “Hidden: a Mitchum Story” … “The Best of the Harvard Lampoon: 140 Years of American Humor,” with an introduction by Simon Rich.