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.

The Story Sisters Alice Hoffman Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Shaye Areheart Books – (2009-06-02) ISBN / EAN: 0307393860 / 9780307393869

Also available in audio from Books on Tape:

• Format: 9 CDs; Unabridged
• ISBN: 9781415963883
• Price: $100.00

And downloadable from OverDrive.

Francine Fialkoff, LJ Editor-in-Chief, announces a revolutionary change in LJ reviews in an editorial  (hint: no more “recommended for large libraries.”) – The “Verdict” on Reviews

Also in the issue is John Berry’s incisive selections from the thousands of programs on offer at the upcoming ALA Annual Conference in Chicago

I’ve been wondering why Tina Brown’s news site, The Daily Beast doesn’t have a book section. Brown, former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair and founder of the short-live Talk magazine, has always had a keen interest in books, or at least, authors and the site’s very name is a somewhat obscure literary reference, so it seemed odd that it didn’t have a section devoted to books.

This week, the other shoe drops as The Book Beast debuts.

But, oh, that name! Wasn’t he a Muppet’s character?

How influential the section will be may be a function of how well the overall Daily Beast does (on the other hand, as NPR discovered, the book section is their site’s biggest draw, so maybe this is being added to help the overall site). A New York Observer piece yesterday, works hard to prove that the Beast is not doing as well as Michael Wolff’s Newser, but real stats seem hard to come by. 

In comparison to other online book sections, The Book Beast is already more lively than most and takes a greater advantage of what the Web offers. Since it’s not based on a print model, it doesn’t have to be beholden to the print source, like the New York Times site, with its confusing mix of the daily reviews and the Sunday Book Review (never recognizing that the same book is often reviewed in each and quite differently).

Of the newspaper online sections, the Wall Street Journal site tries the most consistently to add new elements beyond the print, like slide shows and video author interviews, but the section ends up feeling tacked together, with no overall editorial strategy.

The Book Beast is much more coherent, with various formats well integrated. It gives the sense that books are relevant and even, gasp, fun. I like the “Xtra Insight” post-its next to the articles. It’s a device the Beast uses for other sections, but it seems to work particularly well for books. Take a look, for instance, at the Cheat Sheet on the “hot debut novel,” The Vagrants, by Yiyuan Li.  

In just a few lines, it makes the case for the book’s hotness, while the “post-it” lets you link to the reviews. The post-its aren’t limited to print sources; many include links to online video and audio.

How “hot” The Vagrants will be with readers is another question. Library ordering for the book, which PW called a  ”magnificent and jaw-droppingly grim novel,” is light, with holds ranging from none to 24 in large libraries I checked.  

The Vagrants

Li, Yiyun 

• Hardcover: $25; 352 pages
• Publisher: Random House (February 3, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 1400063132
• ISBN-13: 978-1400063130

The cover of the NYT BR is Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, reviewed by Jonathan Lethem:

Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novel is not only a capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what’s possible for the form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world.

Childrens books get attention, with a special section of reviews and the Times selection of the best illustrated children’s books of 2008, presented online in a slide show.

Of the adult titles reviewed, the following two show high reserve to copy ratios in several large library systems:

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China

Leslie T. Chang

• Hardcover: $26; 432 pages
• Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (October 7, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0385520174
• ISBN-13: 978-0385520171

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The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga

• Hardcover: $24; 288 pages
• Publisher: Free Press;  (April 22, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 1416562591
• ISBN-13: 978-1416562597

People does not make their book coverage available online, so each Wednesday we report on what is in the issue that just hit the stands (for the other weeklies, we link to their reviews). This week’s issue was delayed until today, probably due to a bit of breaking news late Tuesday, which became the cover story.

In book coverage, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy is the featured review, getting 3.5 stars out of four. Two titles are excerpted in the issue:

The Daily Coyote

Shreve Stockton 

• Hardcover: $23; 304 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (December 2, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 1416592180
• ISBN-13: 978-1416592181

American Prince : A Memoir

by Tony Curtis, Peter Golenbock

• Hardcover: $25.95; 384 pages
• Publisher: Harmony; (October 14, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0307408493
• ISBN-13: 978-0307408495

If you want an “inside baseball” look at book reviewing, check the New York Observer’s story from Monday on Dwight Garner, who is moving from the NYT Book Review to the Arts Section of the daily NYT.

The Observer quotes from an unflattering piece Garner wrote ten years ago for Salon about his future colleague on the daily reviews, Michiko Kakutani. In an email to the New York Observer, Garner says the piece makes him cringe today, but he can’t shake it, because it “clings to me on Google like a vampire bat.”

It may make him cringe, but he did make some trenchant comments on book reviewing, 

Daily critics, with the Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley as a possible exception…calcify quickly…it almost doesn’t matter whether they’re writing pro or con; the tone doesn’t vary. (Their earnest, straight-on, eight-paragraphs-of-plot-summary prose is the equivalent of what used to be called, in football, “three yards and a cloud of dust.”) No one’s regularly throwing sparks. Anywhere.

Personally, I wish reviewers would be more interested in expressing the joy of reading. Carolyn See, whose reviews appear on Fridays in the Washington Post, dares to show her enthusiasm, as in this quote from her review of Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner,

…a pure treat from the cover to the very last page. It’s the kind of thing you should stock up on to give sick friends as presents; they’ll forget their arthritis and pneumonia, I promise, once they walk into a land that’s gone now, but not yet quite forgotten: Cuba in the last few years before Fidel Castro took over.

This week, Salon reviewer, Laura Miller, is clearly excited about Booker Finalist (but not winner), Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh, and manages to pinpoint its appeal,

…on the side of entertainment, it is a nautical yarn, brimming with enough fo’c’sles and jibs and fife rails to satisfy the salty cravings of the Patrick O’Brian crowd…its characters are brightly, if broadly drawn; there are good guys to root for and bad guys to hiss, yet none of them are too crudely rendered. 

But rarely do book reviewers communicate the pure fun of reading (why, I wonder, is this not a problem for movie reviewers?). They could learn from Nancy Pearl, who is not just an advocate for the books she loves, but for reading in general (that’s the reason we post Nancy’s latest reviews for KUOW on the top right of our home page).

What about you? Are there reviewers you turn to as your own readers advisors? What makes them reliable?

Our Consumer Book Coverage links keeps you up to date with the reviews your customers are reading. Unfortunately, People’s reviews are not online, so here is a rundown of the book coverage in this week’s issue (Sept. 1, Cover: “Ellen & Portia’s Wedding!”):

People Pick; Four (out of four) stars, Nonfiction

After the Fire: A True Story of Friendship and Survival 

Robin Gaby Fisher

• Hardcover: $24.00
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (August 25, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0316066214
• ISBN-13: 978-0316066211

The true story of two friends who friends supported each other during agonizing recoveries from severe burns suffered during a fire at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.  People calls it “Unimaginably moving — readers will want to kep a box of tissues at hand — an deeply compassionate.”

Oprah, anyone?

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Three (out of four) stars, Fiction:

A Stopover in Venice

Kathryn Walker

• Hardcover: $24.95
• Publisher: Knopf; (August 19, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0307267067
• ISBN-13: 978-0307267061

Now that the NYT has spilled the beans on the author’s past, she is identified in the review’s first line as “an actress divorced from folk singer James Taylor.” The story is about an unhappy musician’s wife who escapes to Venice while her husband is on tour. People likes the book’s “racy, voyeuistic quality,” but finds the plot “labored.”

It’s also been reviewed in The New York Daily News and the Boston Globe (in a review so much more positive, that you have to wonder if they read the same book).

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Three (out of four) stars, Fiction:

Confessions of a Contractor

Richard Murphy

• Hardcover: $24.95
• Publisher: Putnam Adult (August 14, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0399155074
• ISBN-13: 978-0399155079

I’ve been enjoying the book’s ads on Shelf Awareness (”The First Thing a Woman needs to know about home renovation is simple: Do not…under any circumstances…sleep with your contractor.”) and the book’s elaborate Web site (even though it’s difficult to see how the “video testimonials” relate to the book).

About a contractor’s interactions with wealthy Angelenos, People finds it “sexy and filled with enough decor details to keep any HGTV addict happy.” USA Today recently intereviewed the author, an LA contractor himself.

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The One Hundred

Nina Garcia

• Hardcover: $21.95
• Publisher: Collins Living (August 26, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0061664618
• ISBN-13: 978-0061664618

People quotes from the Project Runway judge’s selection of 100 fashion classics, with such practical hints as “You’re going to see a lot of [tuxedos on women] since Yves Saint Laurent has passed away. It’s a bold woman who can wear a tuxedo rather than a cocktail dress.”

PW today confirms what has been rumored for the last week, the LA Times is folding its standalone book review section and laying off two of the section’s five editors. Book review coverage will now be part of the calendar section. The final standalone section will appear this coming Sunday.

Four previous editors recently sent a letter of protest to the LAT; they urge others to join them. 

PW also reports that Hartford Courant books editor, Carole Goldberg was laid off yesterday. The book review section will now be overseen by staff from the features department.

Just can’t get enough reviews? Then check out the newly revamped New Haven Review. On their Web site, they post one review every Monday of an “unfairly neglected book” (unfortunately, their RSS feed isn’t working yet). It feels like a joke — the good news is that your book got reviewed, the bad news is that it was reviewed because it was “unfairly neglected.”

The Review’s definition of “neglected” is idiosyncractic. One of the four reviews up now is of Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs Pollifax on the China Station (Ballantine Books, 1983). The reviewer, a literary agent, found it necessary to first explain what a “cozy” is:

Cozies are often set in small towns and there is little graphic sex or violence. People die, but there isn’t much grief; no one close to the protagonist ever seems to die. The protagonist is usually a female amateur detective who relies on her nosy demeanor to solve the crime. There is sometimes a kitschy hook that ties the series together, be it knitting, crossword puzzles, crime-solving pets, whatever. You know a cozy from other mysteries because you’re not afraid or disturbed while you’re reading it and because the reading experience is, well, cozy.

The reviews are worth a look. The books do sound, well, unfairly neglected and some of the reviews give insight on current genres (like the discussion of the meme in the review of Wormwood Forest).