No surprise, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is on the cover of the upcoming Sunday New York Times Book Review, with Editor Sam Tanenhaus taking the prerogoative to review it (keywords: “masterly”, “majestic”, “a masterpiece”).

Another title that has already received plenty of attention, and  has the second-most holds of the titles under review, is covered two months after publication, Alan Furst’s Spies of the Balkans (Random House; June 15, 2010). The review, while positive, refuses to grant it the status of literature, reinforcing Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner’s points about the NYT BR’s approach to popular genres,

Thrillers require plot above all else, which makes it all too easy for them to avoid heroes with any depth or believability. The genre makes a point of satisfying readers’ expectations. In other words, thrillers are by their nature anti-literary, because literature is about, among other things, ambiguity. And as it happens, Furst is a master of plot; the story moves neatly and inexorably to its climax, as Costa, his family and friends leave Salonika, already under bombardment, for a new life. It is this mastery that explains Furst’s success.

A nonfiction title that has been covered widely (including NPR’s Talk of the Nation), The Pain Chronicle: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering by Melanie Thernstrom (FSG; August 17, 2010), also gets attention here.

A May title that hasn’t had received enough attention to date, The Eyes of Willie McGee, (Harper; May 11, 2010) about a man who was electrocuted after being accused of raping a white woman in 1945 in Mississippi, is called, “..a wrenching story, but a rich narrative.”

There’s no surprises on the best seller lists. Below are the new arrivals to the Hardcover Fiction list (all were covered in our preview of the week’s big titles).

#1 James Patterson, Postcard Killers, Little, Brown, 8/16

#4 Frederick Forsyth, The Cobra, Putnam, 8/17

#7 Martin Cruz Smith, Three Stations , S&S 8/17, (cover NYT BR, 8/15),

#9 Lauren Weisberger, Last Night at Chateau Marmont, Atria/S&S 8/17

#11 Dick Francis, Crossfire, Putnam, 8/17

#16 Laura Lippman’s I’d Know You Anywhere, Morrow/HarperCollins, 8/17) falls just short of the main list, arriving at #16 on the extended list in its first week of publication.

The man who has the temerity to call Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom less than the Great American Novel in today’s Washington Post, Ron Charles, also steps from behind the curtain with a video review of a book he looks on much more kindly, Mona Simpson’s My Hollywood (Knopf, 8/3/10).

He also reviewed it in print in the Washington Post.

In the midst of all the bad news about book coverage in newspapers, there is at least one bright spot.

The blog GalleyCat just posted a job listing for a books editor for NPR.org, saying, “According to our sources, the organization is working on building up the books section…”

NPR.org’s books section already rivals many newspaper’s; we look forward to an even stronger one.

Proving the many nay-sayers in the press wrong, Reed Business has found a buyer for Publishers Weekly.

The new owner, George Slowik, is familiar to several on the PW staff; he was the publisher from 1990 to 1993.

Slowik outlined his vision for the magazine in interviews with Crain’s New York Business and the New York Times “Media Decorder” blog. He plans to digitize the PW archives, particularly the reviews (which now go back to 1997). The magazine licenses its current reviews to various companies such as Amazon and book wholesalers; he sees an opportunity in the older reviews when Google clears the way to publishing digitized OP titles. He also plans to sell versions of the magazine in other languages, using Google’s translation tool and some human intervention, to further reach the international audience.

He did not directly address whether the magazine would continue as both a print and digital publication, but presumably it will, since he said that all art and editorial staff will make the transition, as well as sales staff.

The magazine will be transferred to the new ownership beginning June 1 (UPDATE: The new ownership is effective immediately. Publishers Weekly will be moving to new offices effective June 1).

It’s been a long and tortuous road, but it was announced today that Library Journal, School Library Journal and LJ Hotline have been sold to Media Source, which also owns The Horn Book and Junior Library Guild.

Horn Book Editor-in-Chief, Roger Sutton celebrated the acquisition by posting a photo of himself and LJ/SLJ Editorial Director, Brian Kenney at MidWinter with a typically wry Suttonesque headline, Many men have tried to mix us up but no one can.

Kenney continues as editorial director of both magazines, with Francine Fialkoff as editor-in-chief of Library Journal. Ron Shank continues as publisher.

LJ and SLJ were originally put up for sale, along with 45 other magazines, by owner Reed Business Information back in 2008. Unable to find buyers, in what is widely considered a bungled attempt, Reed took them off the table. This past July, they announced they were trying it again. Since then, they’ve sold off several magazines, including Electronic Design News (EDN) and Broadcasting & Cable, and closed others, including Video Business. The magazines were formerly part of Cahners, which published over 150 magazines at its height.

Noticeably missing from the sale is sister publication Publishers Weekly. Some news sources see this as a sign that Reed has been unable to find a buyer for the magazine and predict it will be closed, a step Reed said they would take with any magazines they were unable to sell by mid-year.

It would be a shame if PW was closed, not just because it’s been covering the publishing business since 1872, or because I am one of the former editors-in-chief. Despite a drastic reduction in staff over the past few years, it still has the largest number of reporters and editors focused on all aspects of the business, from printing to bookselling. Several online publications have challenged PW’s coverage, most notably Publishers Marketplace and Shelf Awareness (which, ironically, had its first incarnation as PW Daily for Booksellers; when the management laid off editor John Mutter and closed the publication, they effectively set up a competitor), but PW still does more original reporting than any of them. Successful PW online publications Children’s Bookshelf and Cooking the Books point to opportunities to create other niche publications.

And, with all the magazines Reed is trying to sell off, they simply may not have had the time to work with potential buyers of single publications. The outlook may be murky, but don’t write PW off just yet.

The last-minute buyer for Kirkus has been revealed; it’s Herb Simon, owner of the Indian Pacers. The New York Times’ Motoko Rich reports the story in the “Media Decoder” blog.

Simon, who made his money as a shopping mall developer, including the Mall of America, is a voracious reader and longtime subscriber who thought it would be a “shame” if the publication folded.

It was also announced that editor Elaine Szewcyzk and managing editor Eric Liebetrau will  continue in their positions and Kirkus will continue as a print publication, with expanded digital offerings.

The new chief executive of the renamed Kirkus Media, Marc Winkelman, told the NYT,

Over the years librarians have submitted a lot of comments to Kirkus about things they would like to see enhanced. We hope to do that and make Kirkus even more relevant in the world of book buying and book reading.

Still on the block, with no potential buyers named, are Library Journal, School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly, all owned by Reed Business Information.

Kirkus will continue publishing. Managing editor Eric Liebetrau sent out an email to colleagues today, saying that there may be a buyer after all and they are restarting publication.

Certain editors and agents who expressed delight that Kirkus was being shut down may be facing a dinner of crow.

(via Sarah Weinman at Daily Finance)

What books get the fewest consumer reviews?

No, not midlist titles — books by bestselling authors. Most reviewers feel they don’t need the attention (with the notable exceptions of People and Entertainment Weekly).

The Daily Beast is jumping into the breach. William Book has begun a new column that sorts through the bestsellers to identify “which, if any, are readable” (I guess that assumes people buy the books, but don’t read them?)

Here’s how he describes his brief:

I’ll render the kind of blunt verdict you get when reading about toasters in Consumer Reports. I’ll tell you which of the bestsellers, if any, are readable. If they’re semi-readable, I’ll tell you which pages to skip. With any luck, you’ll know which one to pack for the flight to Jakarta. If you want a different approach, try The New York Review of Books.

The first up is Sue Grafton’s U is for Undertow. True to his word, he recommends that if you want to “cut straight to the whodunnit … skip over pages 25-26, 226-233, and 253-260,” although, “that’s not recommended, because U is for Undertow isn’t much of a mystery.”

Does he recommend reading it, “Absolutely,” although he doesn’t present a convincing case for doing so.

It’s a good idea for a column, but, generally, the prepub reviewers, who are not allergic to covering potential bestsellers (all four reviewed this one), were more articulate in their recommendations.

U is for Undertow (Kinsey Millhone Mystery) Sue Grafton Retail Price: $27.95 Hardcover: 416 pages Publisher: Putnam Adult – (2009-12-01) ISBN / EAN: 039915597X / 9780399155970

Random House Audio, UNABR CD; 9780739323212; $45
Large Print; Thorndike; 9781410420374
Book and audio downloadable from OverDrive

For the second time in two months, a potential bestseller appears on the cover of the Book Review; this Sunday’s issue gives the cover treatment to Stephen King’s Under the Dome. It is, however, difficult to decipher whether the reviewer likes the book. While King’s “continued and slightly frenzied commerce with his muse has been one of the more enthralling spectacles in American literature,” his prose is “not all smooth sailing. Given King’s extraordinary career-long dominance, we might expect him at this point to be stylistically complete, turning perfect sentences, as breezily at home in his idiom as P. G. Wodehouse.” (P.G. Wodehouse? Really?)

But, wait, there’s even more potential bestseller coverage. King’s unwitting cohort in the WalMart/Amazon/Target price wars, The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, is also reviewed (“breathtaking”) as well as a book that appears on the nonfiction list for the first time this week, at #15, William Shawcross’s The Queen Mother (“more a document replete with data than a book designed to entertain”). Even more surprising, the #13 NF bestseller, My Life Outside the Ring, by Hulk Hogan is also reviewed; he “can be a lively, breezy narrator,” but “his compulsive confessing feels more like an effort to pre-empt the Us Weeklys and TMZs of the world than an authentic attempt at soul-searching.”

Adding to a string of acclaim for BEA librarian favorite,  Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, Kate Christensen (Trouble) declares that she “loved” Rhoda Jantzen’s book.

This issue also features children’s books, including the Best Illustrated Childrens Books of 2009, plus reviews of several childrens and YA titles:

• Young Adult Novels About Fairies
• ‘14 Cows for America’
• ‘Leviathan’
• ‘Purple Heart’
• Books About the Dust Bowl
• ‘Tales From Outer Suburbia’
• Picture Books About Winter
• Picture Books About Colors
• Animal Books
• Books About Trucks, Cars and Traffic
• ‘The Lion and the Mouse’ (reviewed by Roger Sutton)
• ‘White Noise’ — many libraries have not purchased this pop-up, probably because, as the reviewer says, it’d difficult “not to tear its intricate feats of paper engineering.”
• ‘All the World’

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

————————————————

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?