Previews, Reviews, and Collection Development
This March saw the debut of IDW’s Womanthology: Heroic, known already for having raised more than $100,000 through Kickstarter. The collection rated good words from Publishers Weekly, which noted the wide variety of talent on display in its pages: “The reader is left wanting a lot more from the contributors…and that was undoubtedly the goal.” Now IDW [...]
Ball, Edward. The Tycoon and the Inventor: A Gilded Age and the Birth of Moving Pictures. Doubleday. Nov. 2012. 448p. ISBN 9780385525756. $29.95; eISBN 9780385535496. Downloadable: Random House Audio. BIOGRAPHY Originally scheduled for April 2012 and featured as a Pick last October, this is the story of how photographer Eadweard Muybridge invented stop-motion photography—the first [...]
When I arrived at Library Journal in 1986, most works of historical fiction, with high-end exceptions like E.L. Doctorow’s oeuvre, were passed to the review editor handling popular rather than literary fiction (that’s my bailiwick). Such works were seen as strictly genre fiction, either adventure-filled saga or rosy romance. That wasn’t always true—Tolstoy’s War and [...]
Alexie, Sherman. Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories. Grove. Oct. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780802120397. $25. SHORT STORIES Winner of the PEN/Faulkner and PEN/Malamud awards—not to mention a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian—Alexie writes sculpted prose that lands like a punch. His stories, especially, are knockouts. [...]
Butler, Robert Olen. The Hot Country: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller. Mysterious Pr: Grove Atlantic. Oct. 2012. ISBN 9780802120465. $25. THRILLER Having ranged from fine-tuned accounts of the Vietnamese immigrant experience in the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain to the wicked fun of Hell, Butler now tries something completely different: a [...]
Barofsky, Neil. Bailout: How I Watched Washington Rescue Wall Street While Abandoning Main Street. Free Pr: S. & S. Oct. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9781451684933. $26. CURRENT EVENTS In 2008, Barofsky was appointed Special United States Treasury Department Inspector General to oversee the Troubled Assets Relief Program. But he resigned his post in 2011, citing family [...]
If you have never heard of Count Axel von Fersen, you are perhaps in the majority. While everyone can picture the tragic Marie Antoinette, who lost her head to the guillotine in the midst of the French Revolution, only the more thoroughgoing students of history know much about her lover—an influential Swedish nobleman in his [...]
So many books, such little space. October is always a boom month for publishing, and this year is no different. A quick rundown of this week’s coverage. In Picks, I range from big, big fiction titles by Louise Erdrich, Mark Helprin, Dennis Lehane, and Tom Wolfe to two juicy, artsy nonfiction titles, Timothy Egan’s Short Nights [...]
Erdrich, Louise. The Round House. Harper: HarperCollins. Oct. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780062065247. $26.99; eISBN 9780062065261. lrg. prnt. LITERARY FICTION Erdrich continues the trilogy begun with The Plague of Doves—not to mention her luscious, long-standing oeuvre—with the story of an Ojibwe woman named Geraldine Coutts who is ruthlessly attacked one summer morning in 1988. Because she [...]
DeMille, Nelson. The Panther. Grand Central. Oct. 2012. 600p. ISBN 9780446580847. $27.99; lrg. prnt. CD: Hachette Audio. THRILLER The author’s most recent novel, The Lion, which featured his popular hero John Corey, debuted in a tie for the top spot on the New York Times Best Sellers list in 2010. So readers will rejoice that [...]
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