We noted last month the amazing reviews stacking up for The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Two weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal declared it a hit. And the accolades keep coming. Laura Miller, in Friday’s Salon, called it “well-positioned to step into the niche pioneered by Cold Mountain: the chewy yet suspenseful literary bestseller.”

Yesterday’s USA Today celebrates its success, with both a story and an interview with the author. While the WSJ story credits Amazon with making the book happen, USA Today sees a combination of breathless reviews and a blurb from chief fan Stephen King as the mothers of its success.

The first printing was 26,000 copies; USA Today says it is now up to 170,000.

The book rose to #2 on Amazon on Sunday (probably as a result of customers seeing its rise on print bestseller lists). It remained in that position through Monday is now at #4. It’s been on the New York Times list for two weeks, rising from #14 to #9. It’s #2 on the Denver Post list (the author lives in Colorado, although the book is set in his home state of Wisconsin).

Note there is an audio version; none of the libraries I checked have it on order yet.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

David Wroblewski

• Hardcover: $25.95
• Publisher: Ecco (June 10, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0061374229
• ISBN-13: 9780061374227

• Audio CD: Unabridged
• Publisher: Recorded Books
• ISBN-13: 9781436149587

• Large Print Paperback: $25.95
• Publisher: HarperLuxe; (August 19, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0061691623
• ISBN-13: 978-0061691621

Ethan Canin, whose America, America is on nearly all of the critics summer reading lists, was one of the featured speakers at the Random House/LJ Author Breakfast for Collection Development Librarians at BEA.

Reviews are beginning to hit this week, including a 2,378 word near-rave from John Updike in The New Yorker (”a complicated, many-layered epic of class, politics, sex, death, and social history”) and a MUCH shorter B+ from Entertainment Weekly’s Tina Jordan (”the satisfying, compulsively readable saga of a northeastern coal dynasty.”)

The book even makes People’s list of 14 “Sizzling Summer Reads” this week (unfortunately, the list is not posted on the People Web site. Guess they had to give priority to their list of “Single & Sexy Men of ‘08“). Eerily echoing Updike, the VERY short People review says “status, money and politics intersect in this ambitious tale.”

So far, library holds to copy ratios are comfortable.

• Hardcover: $27.00
• Publisher: Random House; (June 24, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0679456805
• ISBN-13: 978-0679456803

• Audio CD: Unabridged, $44.95
• Publisher: Random House Audio; (June 24, 2008)
• Reader: Robertson Dean
• ISBN-10: 0739368494
• ISBN-13: 978-0739368497

A 1946 novel rose from #72,910 in Amazon sales to #194 as a result of a piece on NPR’s “All Things Considered” last night. The book is Ann Petry’s The Street, about a single mother raising a son in urban America after WWII. Some have called it “an urban To Kill a Mockingbird — minus any redemption and hope.” Author Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina says the book is particularly relevant today;

…the upcoming presidential election..makes us think about what it was like to be a single mother raising a black son to believe he was worthy of all the best this country can offer. I can’t think of a better place to start a national conversation about the audacity of hope than with this undiscovered classic, as fresh and moving now as the day it was published.

The Street

Ann Petry

• Paperback: $12.95
• Publisher: Mariner Books (March 15, 1998)
• ISBN-10: 0395901499
• ISBN-13: 978-0395901496

I mentioned in an earlier post that I have high hopes for Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them.

Entertainment Weekly indicates my hopes will be fulfilled. Reviewer Jennifer Reese says that the stories are “so ravishing and sad that I regret ever wasting superlatives on fiction that was merely very good.” Needless to say, she gives it an “A” rating.

I won’t waste your time with a synopsis; read the review, order more copies, and put it in the hands of as many readers as possible.

If you need more convincing, you can read one of the stories, which was published in the New Yorker two years ago.

Say You’re One of Them

Akpan, Uwem

• Hardcover: $23.99
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (June 9, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0316113786
• ISBN-13: 978-0316113786

The first reviews of Salman Rushdie’s new book, Enchantress of Florence were fairly ecstatic. Dierdre Donahue, in today’s USA Today, however, is not enchanted. She calls it “tiresome and confusing.”

Nonetheless, it hits the newspaper’s bestseller list this week at #126 (it’s at #56 on Amazon).

The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani weighed in, also negatively, on Tuesday, calling it a ” a weary, predictable parody of something by John Barth.”

This seems to prove what Steve Almond says in the Boston Globe, “Whether or not you enjoy this new novel… will very much depend on your tolerance for the author’s distinct brand of narrative exuberance.”

Like many of you, I’m getting ready for BEA. So, rather than round up ALL the reviews of Memorial Day holiday, in today’s posts, I’ve been focusing on just the ones that appear the most significant. You can go to our RSS fed reviews roundup in the Book Reviews page for links to others.

Saving the big news for last, Netherland finally gets a bad review (well, it’s probably more accurate to call it “mixed”) The LA Times dares to go against the critical mass;

It’s an incredible novel that doesn’t work…O’Neill’s writing is unendlingly beautiful. If it were enough to go from startling observation to startling observation, this would be a masterpiece. It’s not. There are dime-store novels and half-baked MFA theses written with one-twentieth the skill that work better because something gets loved and something gets lost. No matter how sharp your perceptive knives, without warmth, no blood will flow.

Formidable critic James Wood reviewed it in the New Yorker last week, calling it “masterly.”

It’s now at #45 on the Amazon Top 100 list (last week, it was at #21). It has just been received in most libraries I checked, with significant holds in some areas (100 to 5 copies in one library).

Netherland

Joseph O’Neill

• Hardcover: $23.95
• Publisher: Pantheon; (May 20, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0307377040
• ISBN-13: 978-0307377043

In one of the first print reviews of Salman Rushdie’s Enchantress of Florence, the Washington Post Book World’s Michael Dirda makes it sound like a beach book:

…it may come as a surprise that he has produced a book that is the equivalent of a summer fling. Set during the 16th century, The Enchantress of Florence is altogether ramshackle as a novel — oddly structured, blithely mixing history and legend and distinctly minor compared to such masterworks as The Moor’s Last Sigh and Midnight’s Children– and it is really not a novel at all. It is a romance, and only a dry-hearted critic would dwell on the flaws in so delightful an homage to Renaissance magic and wonder.

Alan Cheuse, of the Chicago Tribune, waxes poetic over it:

…it’s fact that allowed Rushdie to construct this great dream-palace of a novel. To build his twin story of life in the grand city of Florence, his hero’s home, and Sikri, the Mongol capital to which he has traveled, the novelist had to digest a library wall of volumes (an extensive bibliography follows the story). In a world in which many readers seem to crave fact after fact after fact—the tiresome legacy of our Puritan ancestors—the novelist, the last alchemist, miraculously turns fact into something greater, and as if transforming clay bricks into gold, gives facts life.

In a separate story, the NYT reports:

In Britain, where it has already been released, most reviewers have been smitten. John Sutherland, who has twice been a judge for the Man Booker literary prize, wrote in The Financial Times that if it “doesn’t win this year’s Man Booker I’ll curry my proof copy and eat it.”

The article notes that while Rushdie was working on the book, he and his third wife Padma Lakshmi, host of the cooking reality show, “Top Chef” split and finds an echo in the themes of the book; “Beauty and betrayal are both elements of Enchantress.”

• Hardcover: $26.00
• Publisher: Random House (May 27, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0375504338
• ISBN-13: 978-0375504334

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Recorded Books
• Reader: Firdous Bamji
• ISBN-10: 1436148707
• ISBN-13: 978-1436148702

• Large Print:
  
• Publisher: Random House Large Print Publishing (May 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0739328158
• ISBN-13: 978-0739328156

The book is currently at #69 on the Amazon Top 100. All libraries I checked have it on order, with comfortable holds to copy ratios.

Note: Title Confusion Alert. The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston releases in a couple of weeks. The Wall Street Journal highlighted it in their preview of the forthcoming books that publishers, authors and booksellers are most looking forward to.

The Monster of Florence
by Douglas Preston

• Hardcover: $25.99
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (June 10, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0446581194
• ISBN-13: 978-0446581196

• Audio CD: Unabridged edition, $39.98
• Publisher: Hachette Audio; (June 10, 2008)
• Reader: Dennis Boutsikaris
• ISBN-10: 160024209X
• ISBN-13: 978-1600242090

• Large Print, Hardcover: $27.99
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (June 10, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 044650534X
• ISBN-13: 978-0446505345

Joseph O’Neill won raves from both Michiko Kakutani in the daily NY Times on Friday (comparing him favorably to Fitzgerald) and from Dwight Garner, Senior Editor of the NYT BR on Sunday. Garner calls his book, Netherland:

the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.

and still manages make you want to read it

O’Neil was born in Ireland and lived in the Netherlands before moving to New York (prompting the Atlantic to call his book “The Great Irish-Dutch-American Novel“).

All libraries I checked show it on order in modest quantities. Holds are building in a few areas. It is currently at #21 on Amazon’s Best Seller List and at #1 in the category of Literary Fiction.

Netherland

Joseph O’Neill

• Hardcover: $23.95
• Publisher: Pantheon; (May 20, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0307377040
• ISBN-13: 978-0307377043

Yesterday, we did a Frey review mashup and compared the wild analogies that reviewers are using to describe the book. Today brings the most outrageous one yet, from Dierdre Donahue of USA Today:

Morning reads like a saccharine-sweet Hallmark Special that Oliver Stone wrote and Quentin Tarantino directed.

Whereas Time magazine’s Lev Grossman finds the book is “reminiscent of the socially conscious early 20th century naturalism of John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck,” Donahue invokes the same authors to make the opposite point;

Alas, Frey is no John Steinbeck or Dos Passos. Morning is a gusher, too often spouting bad prose, predictable plot turns, and one-dimensional characters (the poor ones are good, the rich one evil)

Looks like you may have some fun discussion at the New Books shelves!

It was expected that the poster boy for fake memoirists would get a critical raking over the coals for his new book, released yesterday, his “first” novel, Bright Shiny Morning.

But, surprisingly, there is as much love as hate.

If reviewers hated the “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces, they love the novel, Bright Shiny Morning (New York Times’s Janet Maslin and Time magazine’s Lev Grossman). For some, the novel makes the memoir look better ( the L.A. Times’s David Ulin; “It’s just one of the ironies of [Frey's] new book that his fictionalized memoir is a better novel than Bright Shiny Morning could ever hope to be.”)

Or, maybe there’s an East Coast/West Coast thing going on. Ulin, the L.A. Times book editor, hates Morning and its portrayal of L.A.:

Frey seems to know little about Los Angeles and to have no interest in it as a real place where people wrestle with actual life…this is Los Angeles, in the way a cheap Hollywood movie is Los Angeles: superficial, a collection of loose impressions that don’t add up.

while the New York Times Janet Maslin sees it quite differently:

…more like Carl Sandburg in love hate thrall with great maddening Chicago than like the usual tough gritty moody chronicler of California’s broken dreams

It’s a big book, with many characters, plot lines and subplots, as most of the critics point out, including Newsweek’s Malcolm Jones. He uses a fitting term for a book about L.A., calling it “sprawling” and says succinctly, “the novel’s no good.” It’s amusing to watch other critics search for analogies to describe it:

Imagine the movie Crash rewritten as a pastiche of Tom Wolfe, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jackie Collins — and you get a sense of the frustrating experience of reading this slack, self-indulgent mess. Entertainment Weekly, D-

…a refreshingly archaic affair, an old-fashioned book written in an old-fashioned style. It’s less a novel about Los Angeles than it is Los Angeles…reminiscent of one of Tom Wolfe’s billion-footed beasts, but it’s even more reminiscent of the socially conscious early 20th century naturalism of John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck. — Lev Grossman, Time

Written as an Altman-esque collage, it follows several parallel story lines that never coalesce. — David Ulin, LA Times

Time magazine’s Lev Grossman makes a comparison to a more recent book:

Compare Bright Shiny Morning with, say, Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children, a novel of similar proportions and ambitions (it’s about Las Vegas) that was published in January to great critical acclaim. Children drips with nuance and high purpose and psychological complexity, but in all honesty, I would far rather spend an evening (or a morning) with Morning than with Children. The worst bits of Morning are probably worse than anything else you’ll read this year, but Frey is such a relentlessly entertaining storyteller that you just won’t care

But none of this addresses whether people will read the book. For that, turn to Buzz Sugar’s poll. 61% of respondents said they plan to, with another 21% replying they might. Only 15% replied “No. I was so outraged by his lies I will not support this author again.”

The sales ranking on Amazon backs this up — it is now at #23.

A few libraries have received their copies and most, except for those who ordered extremely conservatively, have comfortable holds to copies ratios.

• Hardcover: $29.95
• Publisher: Harper (May 13, 2008
• ISBN-10: 0061573132
• ISBN-13: 978-0061573132

• Audio CD: Unabridged, $44.95
  
• Publisher: HarperAudio, (May 13, 2008)
• Reader: Ben Foster
• ISBN-10: 0061575526
• ISBN-13: 978-006157552

• Audio Cassette: Unabridged; $85.95
• Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks, (May 1, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 1433247437
• ISBN-13: 978-143324743

• Large Print: $26.95
• Publisher: HarperLuxe, (July 29, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0061649449
• ISBN-13: 978-0061649448

Amazon also lists a limited edition title Brigtht Shiny Morning: Wives Wheels, Weapons, ($150) also by Frey with photographer Terry Richardson and published by JMC & GHB Editions. This imprint is the publishing arm of NYC rare books dealer, John McWhinnie, who was covered in the April ‘08 issue of Men’s Vogue.