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.”

In the Kitchen: A Novel Monica Ali Retail Price: $26.99 Hardcover: 448 pages Publisher: Scribner – (2009-06-16) ISBN / EAN: 141657168X / 9781416571681

Michael Thomas’s debut novel, Man Gone Down, has won the Impac Dublin Literary prize, according to the Associated Press. Thomas, a teacher at New York City’s Hunter College, edged out writers like Joyce Carol Oates and Phillip Roth for the world’s richest literary prize, which carries a purse of $140,000. The Irish award, which is open to any novel published in English, is already sparking media attention and has prompted the publisher to start planning an author tour. Libraries interested in hosting events with Thomas can contact Deb Seager at dseager@groveatlantic.com. Libraries we checked showed 7-15 copies of the book on hand.

Man Gone Down received major publicity when first published as a paperback original in 2007, including a New York Times Book Review cover essay, which described Thomas’s protagaonist as “a black man living in Brooklyn and struggling to write while supporting his blue-blooded white wife and their three children,”  and also as a man “fighting a fate preordained as much by his genes as by his country.”

Named one of 2007’s 10 best books by the New York Times, Man Gone Down also received other major reviews in the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, and was on the IndieBound list of “great reading group books.”

Man Gone Down: A Novel Michael Thomas Retail Price: $14.00 Paperback: 432 pages Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat – (2006-12-07) ISBN / EAN: 0802170293 / 9780802170293

Available from Recorded Books:

• CD, unabridged, $123.95
• Playaway, $61.75

Released just over a month ago, Sarah Waters’ fifth novel, the stylish ghost story The Little Stranger, has steadily gained  critical attention. Reserve activity is pretty strong at libraries we checked, but orders are low.

The New York Times Book Review declared that Waters “magnificently” renders the grand old house where the novel is set, and that its inhabitants “sparkle like chandeliers in the damp, peeling rooms” as their way of life fades amid the Second World War. The review also notes that the members of the artistocratic Ayres family “are such lovingly depicted and realistic characters that it becomes hard to accept their gothic fates.” 

NPR’s “Books We Like” columnist Maud Newton observes, “Although her past works have focused on lesbian characters, repressed desire has always been Waters’ terrain. In her hands these hidden longings incite turmoil and even blur into the occult. . . . Hundreds Hall serves as a perfect symbol of the postwar erosion of Britain’s class hierarchies, but it also, increasingly, transforms into a scheming, deadly character.”

The Washington Post wonders, “What are we dealing with here? Hysteria? Evil spirits? A jealous doctor? Waters teases us with clues that send us running off in every direction: psychological, paranormal and socioeconomic. But the story’s sustained ambiguity is what keeps our attention, and her perfectly calibrated tone casts an unnerving spell over these pages.”

The Little Stranger Sarah Waters Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 480 pages Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover – (2009-04-30) ISBN-10: 1594488800 ISBN-13: 9781594488801

Avaiilable from Penguin Audiobooks

• CD; $39.95; 0143144804

Also available as a downloadable audio on Overdrive

Novelist and independent publisher Dave Eggers has been compared to P.T. Barnum more than once — and true to form, there’s a bit of a publishing circus springing around up his two recent forays into the world of film.

Eggers and wife Vendela Vida wrote the screenplay for Away We Go, a film about soon-to-be parents in search of a more meaningful life. Vintage Books has just released a paperback edition of the script for the movie, directed by Sam Mendes, which opens today. Early reviews have been mixed, with USA Today declaring that the screenplay is “sharply observed” and that the film “strikes an artful balance between satirical comedy and heart-wrenching drama,” while the Village Voice says that the social misfits visited by the couple add up to ”a gallery of grotesque family portraits” that the movie encourages us to sneer at. None of the libraries we checked had copies.

Away We Go: A Screenplay  Dave Eggers, Vendela Vida Retail Price: $14.00 Paperback: 208 pages Publisher: Vintage – (2009-06-02) ISBN / EAN: 0307475883 / 9780307475886

Also coming from Eggers is The Wild Things, a book for adults that the publisher says is “based loosely on the storybook by Maurice Sendak (coming October 1), which ties into the movie of Where the Wild Things Are (coming Oct. 16),  which Eggers cowrote with director Spike Jonze. 

We’re trying to figure out how Eggers has expanded the original work for grown-up readers, but information is scant beyond the publisher’s description:

[The book] is about the confusions of a boy, Max, making his way in a world he can’t control. His father is gone, his mother is spending time with a younger boyfriend, his sister is becoming a teenager and no longer has interest in him. At the same time, Max finds himself capable of startling acts of wildness: he wears a wolf suit, bites his mom, and can’t always control his outbursts. During a fight at home, Max flees and runs away into the woods. He finds a boat there, jumps in, and ends up on the open sea, destination unknown. He lands on the island of the Wild Things, and soon he becomes their king. But things get complicated when Max realizes that the Wild Things want as much from him as he wants from them. Funny, dark, and alive, The Wild Things is a timeless and time-tested tale for all ages.

The Wild Things Dave Eggers Retail Price: $19.95 Hardcover: 300 pages Publisher: McSweeney’s – (2009-10-01) ISBN / EAN: 1934781614 / 9781934781616

Blackstone is publishing it in audio:

• 7 Tape; 1-4332-9732-8; $59.95
• 1 MP3CD; 1-4332-9736-6; $29.95
• 8 CD; 1-4332-9733-5; $90.00

It will also be available on Playaway: 1-4332-9739-7; $59.99

Barnes and Noble lists a fur-covered edition of The Wild Things (we’re assuming it’s faux fur).  

In childrens tie-ins, HarperFestival is publishing a coloring book and a puzzle book as well as:

Where the Wild Things Are: The Movie Storybook 

Barb Bersche, Michelle Quint

• Reading level: Ages 9-12
• Hardcover: $12.99; 48 pages
• Publisher: HarperFestival (September 8, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 0061656860
• ISBN-13: 978-0061656866

May 17 was a banner day for books on CBS Sunday Morning, which launched three featured titles into Amazon’s top 350 bestsellers. T.C. Boyle’s novel The Women, about the loves of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, moved to #100, while The Ashley Book of Knots by Clifford Ashley jumped to #295, and organization guru Julie Morgenstern’s SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life: A Four-Step Guide to Getting Unstuck leapt to #336. 

Libraries we checked favored Morgenstein’s self-help guide, with an average of 10 copies and signficant reserves. Quantities were more mixed and reserves more modest on Boyle’s novel, which came out in February, and The Ashley Book of Knots.

The Women: A Novel T.C. Boyle Price: $27.95 Hardcover: 464 pages Publisher: Viking Adult – (2009-02-10) ISBN-10: 0670020419 ISBN-13: 9780670020416

An audiobook version is available in three formats from Blackstone Audio:

• 15 CDs; $100; ISBN 978-1-4332-6061-2 
• 2 MP3CD; $29.95; ISBN 978-1-4332-6064-3    
• Playaway; $69.99; ISBN 978-1-4332-6068-1

Ashley Book of Knots Clifford Ashley Price: $80.00 Hardcover: 640 pages Publisher: Doubleday – (1944-06-21) ISBN-10: 0385040253 ISBN-13: 9780385040259

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SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life Julie Morgenstern Price: $15.00 Paperback: 288 pages Publisher: Fireside – (2009-03-03) ISBN-10: 0743250907 ISBN-13: 9780743250900

An audiobook is available in three formats from Tantor Media

• 9 CDs; $24.99 (Retail Pkg); EAN: 9781400107872       
• 9 Audio CDs (Library Binder Pkg); $69.99; EAN: 9781400137879
• Mp3-CD; $24.99; EAN: 9781400157877

Precious, an upcoming film based on Sapphire’s 1996 novel Push, got a big boost yesterday when Oprah interviewed Mo’Nique, the actress who plays the snarling mother of the movie’s tragically abused 16 year-old protagonist. “I saw Mo’Nique’s performance in this film and was so blown away,” Oprah said. “She is giving the performance of a lifetime.”

Set for release November 6, the film has already won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award. On viewing the trailer, Entertainment Weekly declared:

Precious actually looks like it’s about something. Namely, a teenage girl (newcomer Gabourey Sidibe) wrestling with pregnancy, economic hardships, and a monstrous mother (Mo’Nique) who berates her every chance she gets. This is a side of America most of us rarely see, especially in the movies.”

Libraries we checked showed reserves on Push, with fewer than 10 copies on hand. But here’s some justification for buying more: Oprah is likely to continue her drumbeat for the film, which will be distributed in cooperation with her own Harpo Productions and Tyler Perry’s 34th Street Productions.

 Here’s the trailer:

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Push: A Novel Sapphire Price: $12.95 Paperback: 192 pages Publisher: Vintage – (1997-04-29) ISBN-10: 0679766758 ISBN-13: 9780679766759

A movie tie-in edition is also forthcoming from Vintage, but the jacket art is not yet available.

An audiobook version will be released on July 28, 2009 by Books On Tape :

• Narrator: Bahni Turpin
• ISBN: 9781415967171
• $60; 6 CDS; Unabridged

When a 29 year-old author’s first novel jumps to #112 on Amazon the day after it goes on sale, it’s time to call it “a precocious debut.” The rise of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larson appears to have been sparked by an excerpt in Vanity Fair magazine and a Boston Globe writeup that focuses as much on the $900,000 advance paid for the book by Penguin Press as it does on the book’s 12 year-old narrator, Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet. The book follows the Montana rancher’s son on a journey to Washington (without his parents’ knowledge) to collect an award for the maps he obsessively makes, which are reproduced in hand-drawn marginalia that spills over the pages of Larsen’s book.

So far, library orders are on the low side (most in the 4-8 copy range) with reserves ranging from 17 to 30. That may be because early reviews of the novel have varied, with Booklist giving it a star, Library Journal fairly positive and PW and Kirkus more mixed. The book has also attracted publishers in two dozen other countries, and recently drew praise from the Times Online (UK), which called the writing “redolent of Mark Twain’s Roughing It in the rhythms of its humour and the picaresque deviations of its storytelling,” while also observing that the book “loses its poise” in the final chapters.

The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet Reif Larsen Price: $27.95 Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The – (2009-05-05) ISBN-10: 1594202176 ISBN-13: 9781594202179

UPDATE; We just learned that Spivet is also available in audio:

• Publisher: Penguin Audio; Unabridged edition (May 5, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 0143144650
• ISBN-13: 978-0143144656

In today’s New York Times, staff reviewer Michiko Kakutani sounds like Virginia Kirkus in high dudgeon (”Unrepentant and Telling of Horrors Untellable”). What’s got her going? The winner of France’s highest literary award, the Prix Goncourt, Les Bienveillantes, just published here in English as The Kindly Ones.

Reflecting the kind of internationalism that we saw at the Academy Awards, the book is written in French about a German Nazi officer by American-born Jonathan Littell (he’s the son of acclaimed American spy novelist Robert Littell, who lives in France).

Kakutani has nothing good to say about it,

The novel’s gushing fans…seem to have mistaken perversity for daring, pretension for ambition, an odious stunt for contrarian cleverness. Willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent, The Kindly Ones … is an overstuffed suitcase of a book, consisting of an endless succession of scenes in which Jews are tortured, mutilated, shot, gassed or stuffed in ovens, intercut with an equally endless succession of scenes chronicling the narrator’s incestuous and sadomasochistic fantasies.

The prepub reviewers were split. Kirkus, called it a tour de force that is “very long, but with not a wasted word.” Booklist starred it, but Library Journal said,

…it’s not clear that American readers will want to struggle through almost 1000 pages of unresolved moral conflict about the Holocaust. Because the book has received considerable press, however, most large libraries will want to own a copy.”

Publishers Weekly was even harsher,

Littell’s strung together many tens of thousands of words, but many tens of thousands of words does not necessarily a novel make. As the French say, tant pis.

Most libraries have it on order in fairly high quantities for a literary title; some are showing reserves; the highest at 2 to 1.

The Kindly Ones Littell, Jonathan Price: $29.99 Hardcover: 992 pages Publisher: Harper – (2009-03-01) ISBN-10: 0061353450 ISBN-13: 9780061353451

Barry Unsworth’s new novel, Land of Marvels, was featured on Saturday’s All Things Considered and in the NYT Book Review. It rose in Amazon’s sales rankings to 319 from 1,075.

The book is owned in small quantities in large libraries (one each for the largest branches). Reserves are heavy where NPR is influential.

Land of Marvels

Unsworth, Barry

• Hardcover: $26; 304 pages
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese (January 6, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 0385520077
• ISBN-13: 978-0385520072

It’s possible that Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road has had more reviews in the past few months than when it was first published in 1961. Now his short novel, Easter Parade is also getting attention.

The Modern Library edition of the book was just released. Included in the volume is a story collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Easter Parade, reviewed on Slate this week.

Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness 

by Richard Yates, Introduction by Richard Price

• Hardcover: $26; 696 pages
• Publisher: Everyman’s Library (January 6, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 0307270890
• ISBN-13: 978-0307270894

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.”