In today’s NYT, Chip McGrath profiles debut thriller writer, Attica Locke, whose Black Water Rising has received strong review coverage.
Large libraries own it in modest quantities.
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Also in audio:
And downloadable eBook from OverDrive.
In today’s Book Buzz column, USA Today point out that The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson, just published in trade paper, re-enters their list at #11. In hardcover, its highest spot was #32. The second book in the series, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo pubs at the end of the month.
Many libraries still have significant levels of reserves on Dragon Tattoo. In fact, in several libraries, reserves on Tattoo are running ahead of Fire.
The release of Fire will bring even more attention to the first book; it’s a good time to consider picking up additional copies in trade paper.
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I was browsing the ALA program listings, when I discovered, somewhat buried in a list of panelists, the name Charlaine Harris. Yep; the author of the Sookie Stackhouse series (the basis for HBO’s hit True Blood) is on the paranormal panel. Below is the program description.
Sunday 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
McCormick Place West, W-190A
Things That Go Bump in the Stacks:
Whole Collection Advisory for Paranormal Fiction
Come discuss best practices for helping patrons find paranormal materials they can really sink their teeth into. This program focuses on understanding the appeal of the genre and helping fans find materials throughout the library. Event panel moderated by Neil Hollands includes genre authors Charlaine Harris, Charlie Huston and Marjorie Liu.
Harris will also be at the Penguin booth #2020 on Sunday from 1:30 to 2:30 (see full Penguin booth schedule).
For more insight on the genre, check out Penguin’s “Project Paranormal.” It includes “What’s Next with Cindy Hwang,” Executive Editor, Berkeley Books, one of the pioneers in the genre, talking trends in the genre and several authors she regards as future stars.
We’ve been writing about The Help for quite a while, so we were pleased to see it break in to the top ten on Amazon this week, almost five months after publication.
Several libraries are showing heavy holds. Given the book’s slow and steady climb, it looks like word of mouth is still building, so it may not be too late to order more copies.
Those of you going to ALA will have a chance to hear from author Kathryn Stockett, who will be at the ALTAFF Gala Author Tea (Monday, 2 to 4 p.m.) along with Lisa Scottoline, Jill McCorkle, Gillian Flynn and Jane Stanton Hitchcock.
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Also on audio:
Large Type:
And downloadable eBook and audio from OverDrive.
You may have been reading about Alice Hoffman Twitter slapping a reviewer (she’s since apologized) for the Boston Globe review of Hoffman’s new book, Story Sisters. Salon puts the story in context; while authors generally try to “stay classy” about negative reviews, Hoffman is not the only author who has ever lashed out.
The great twist? As a reviewer Hoffman herself has been on the receiving end of author fury.
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Also available in audio from Books on Tape:
And downloadable from OverDrive.
One of the few new books in Newsweek’s “What to Read Now. And Why.” is #23 on the list of 50, Colm Toíbín’s Brooklyn because it,
Captures the experience of homesickness and, in deceptively unadorned prose, builds to a heart-wrenching conclusion about the impossibility of getting everything you want.
Today’s issue of USA Today is almost lyrical about this story of a young Irish woman who moves to New York in 1952; it “creates the purest form of fiction, a small world that employs few references to the real world. It transcends time and place.”
The book has received a chorus of strong reviews in the consumer press, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Some large libraries we checked are showing reserve ratios of 4 to 1 on modest ordering.
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It is also available in unabridged audio from Blackstone:
And on Playaway; 1-4332-9194-4;$59.99
The Locus winners were announced last week. Neal Stephenson’s Anathem won for best science fiction novel, Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia for best fantasy, and Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book for best young adult.
The full list of winners is available on the Locus site.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón is a double winner this week. Not only does his new novel, Angel’s Game, hit the list at #3, but his previous title, Shadow of the Wind, goes back on the Trade Paperback Fiction Extended list at #21.
Two titles mark their author’s debuts on the fiction list. Links are to our earlier coverage:
#23 Extended – Commencement, J. Courtney Sullivan, Knopf, 6/16
#30 Extended – A Short History of Women, Kate Walbert, Scribner, 6/16
Authors returning to the list with their new titles are:
#1 Knockout, Catherine Coulter, Putnam
#9 The Neighbor, Lisa Gardner, Bantam
#14 Dune Road, Jane Green, Viking
Libraries are showing substantial holds on 20 copies or less of Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen, but critics are ambivalent about her third novel, after Alentejo Blue and her popular debut Brick Lane, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The new book focuses on the metal breakdown of the head chef in a fading London hotel with a multinational staff of immigrants and refugees that’s a metaphor for the cultural crisis of modern Britian.
The Wall St. Journal published a respectful profile of Ali yesterday that made the book sound enticing, but the newspaper’s review of her new book was more scalding:
Ms. Ali brings a lively intelligence to her work, and her account of Gabriel’s mental breakdown, set against shifting scenes of London, is vivid and well done. “In the Kitchen” is ambitious, but with its one-dimensional characterizations and laggardly pace—it’s too long at 436 pages—this novel is, ultimately, hard to digest.”
Time was a bit more generous in its brief mention of Ali’s novel in a piece on books about the restaurant world, declaring that Ali ”gets the kitchen just right: the crushing pace, the fistfights, the grills and griddles and salamanders, the guy who’s always walking around with a leek hanging out of his fly.”
The Cleveland Plain Dealer review balanced criticism of the “oddly-neutralizing, drama-killing” effect of watching the main character go bonkers with appreciation for the “tender, psychologically-charged” flashbacks of that character’s boyhood, which lingered with the reviewer “long after the big social issues were digested and forgotten.”
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The lead review in the July 6 issue of People magazine, is of thriller Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo, making the switch from romance novels. People gives it 3.5 of a possible four stars. It features a “tough complicated cop,” a former Amish woman who becomes the police chief in the town she grew up in. People says that Castillo, who grew up near Amish country, balances “chilling suspense and a nuanced portrait of the English-Amish divide.”
Libraries show reserve ratios of 5 to 1 in some cases, against generally low orders.
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Also available in audio:
Publisher: Macmillan Audio; Unabridged (June 23, 2009). $39.95
ISBN-10: 1427206686
ISBN-13: 978-1427206688
And in large type:
Hardcover: $31.95; 620 pages
Publisher: Thorndike Press (June 23, 2009)
ISBN-10: 1410416615
ISBN-13: 978-1410416612
And, downloadable eBook and audiobook from OverDrive.
The Daily Beast extolls Gregg Hurwitz as the “best thriller writer you never heard of,” calling his new book Trust No One “not only his best [book] yet, but one of the best thrillers of the year.” Libraries we checked had four or fewer copies of Trust No One, with up to 20 reserves.
Here’s what The Daily Beast liked most about the book:
Trust No One has action and suspense and all the good stuff readers look for in a thriller, but it also has smarts. Hurwitz clearly put a lot of thought into crafting his plot, and it pays off with a story that is satisfying on both a cerebral and visceral level. It combines the sharp political twists of a book like Robert Ludlum’s The Chancellor Manuscript or James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor with the white-knuckle pacing of a Joseph Finder thriller.
Hurewitz is the author of 2007’s The Crime Writer, which the reviewer also loved.
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Large Print available from Center Point, 7/01/2009
Audio available from Brilliance Corporation
Commencement, the debut novel by J. Courtney Sullivan is being compared to Mary McCarthy’s classic The Group, in some cases favorably (Janet Maslin, NYT and Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly) and in other cases, not so favorably (Maria Russo, NYTBR and Marisa Meltzer, The Book Beast).
But the naysayers are not putting off library customers. Reserves are growing in all the libraries we checked, averaging ten to one. The book reached a high of #26 on Amazon last week and is now at #67, making it a likely candidate for the upcoming best seller lists.
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Also available as downloadable eBook from OverDrive.
Mystery maven Sarah Weinman reports on her binge reading of Richard Stark’s (aka Donald Westlake’s) Parker novels, newly-reissued by the University of Chicago Press, on her blog Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind today. She says it wasn’t until she read the forthcoming graphic novel based on the first book in the series that she felt she understood the main characte.
Wonder if people will make similar comments about R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis?
Parker: The Hunter is one of the titles on the Graphic Novel Reporter’s “Hottest Graphic Novels” for Summer 2009.
Libraries we checked are not showing it on order.
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New York Times book critic Janet Maslin brings out the laurels for Ron Currie Jr.’s debut novel Everything Matters! It’s an unusual title and prepub reviewers clearly didn’t get it. The book follows a strange young man from his Maine childhood, in which other kids and his teachers shun him, to his Forrest Gump-like adulthood wandering perilously close to places like Oklahoma City around the timing of the bombing. Libraries show modest reserves against low numbers of copies, but several libraries have up to 20 copies on order.
Maslin calls Currie,
“a startlingly talented writer whose book will pay no heed to ordinary narrative conventions. His thoughts on cosmic doom somehow take the form of a joyride. He survives the inevitable, apt comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and writes in a tenderly mordant voice of his own. He seems equipped to succeed at almost anything, in fact, except giving his books decent titles.”
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Atria (S&S) came up with a brilliant solution for those who weren’t able to get their galleys at BEA; a “Galley Grab” Web site, where librarians, booksellers and reviewers can request ARC’s of upcoming books.
Good news for those of you hoping for a followup to Dog On It, Spencer Quinn’s charming book about detetective Bernie Little and his partner, Chet (who happens to be a dog); one of the ARC’s being offered is the next title in the series, Thereby Hangs a Tail, coming in January.
And, yes, the author is at work on a third Chet and Bernie title.
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