Paperback Fiction:1. Pryme Knumber, by Matthew Flynn
2. Open City, by Teju Cole
3. Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter
4. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain
5. Stoner, by John Williams
6. The Middlesteins, by Jami Attenberg
7. The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey
8. The Barbarian Nurseries, by Hector Tobar
9. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, by Tom Franklin (appearing with Beth Ann Fennelly for his new novel on Thursday, October 24)
10. The Silver Sparrow, by Tayari Jones
11. The Silent Wife, by A.S.A. Harrison
12. The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson
13. Microtones, by Robert Vaughan
14. Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles
15. Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow
One of our larger book clubs has a good percentage of attendees who like to buy their books all at once, and this makes a week of very nice numbers for the selected titles. You'll recognize that I've talked about most of them at one point on the blog. Our interest with Stoner predates Boswell, when a number of booksellers went crazy selling the recently released New York Review of Books edition when Carol Grossmeyer saw it and bought it off a staff rec at Elliot Bay. Now it's said to have become a bestseller in a number of European countries, and that has energy has translated back into very large sales at a number of American bookstores. In non book club action, The Silent Wife is the newest book getting the "read this after Gone Girl" buzz. The author is, alas, also getting the "Rent" slash Girl with the Dragon Tattoo backstory. She died after completing this novel.
Paperback Nonfiction:1. The Sixteenth Rail, by Adam J. Schrager
2. Orange is the New Black, by Piper Kerman
3. Futurism's Bastard Son, by Billy X. Curmano
4. Wild, by Cheryl Strayed
5. Hallucinations, by Oliver Sacks
Adding book items to our website database causes me no end of problems. I never quite got Futurism's Bastard Son to load quite right, and now I'm trying to add Robert Vaughan's Microtones. Sometimes I get the text up but no image file. When you search for it, you see the cover image, but when you pull up the item, you don't. I'll keep working on it.
Hardcover Fiction:1. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman
2. Babayaga, by Toby Barlow
3. The Cuckoo's Calling, by J.K. Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith
4. Inferno, by Dan Brown
5. And the Mountain's Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini
We've now got too reads on Babayaga and with Stacie's window also intriguing passers by, we're feeling a bit better prepared for our event with Toby Barlow on Wednesday, August 21, 7 pm. He got the book preview in the Shepherd Express, sharing the spotlight with Reuben Eisenstein's Date Certain, whose review from Paul McComas highlighted our event on Monday, August 19, 7 pm
Hardcover Nonfiction:
1. Zealot, by Reza Aslan2. The Making of Milwaukee, by John Gurda
3. The Telling Room, by Michael Paterniti
4. Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo
5. Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg
Alas, Nick's dreams of hosting Michael Paterniti for The Telling Room are not likely to come to pass at this point. The first time you get an Indie Next quote, it seems like anything can happen, but there are still pre-designated book tours and budgets and the like. That said, he can watch an interview with Paterniti on Portland's WCSH television here. It's the best I can do at this point!
Books for Kids:1. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs
2. The School for Good and Evil, by Shoman Chainani
3. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
4. The Surprise Attack of Jabba the Puppet, by Tom Angleberger
5. Hollow Earth, by John Barrowman and Carole E. Barrowman
Several booksellers and I were just pondering the fate of all these interesting Star Wars licenses in lieu of Disney's purchase. Something like Tom Angleberger's kids' series, the newest of which, The Surprise Attack of Jabba the Puppet, finds the MacQuarrie Middle School kids besieged by Professor FunTime and his incessant videos that promise to raise test scores. Do you really think Disney would allow this without having complete control? I don't. We'll see what happens to projects like this or William Shakespeare's Star Wars or Darth Vader and Son.
In the Journal Sentinel, Mike Fischer tackles Night Film. He writes: "The title of Marisha Pessl's Night Film— a gothic thriller that's among the best novels I've read this year — refers to the movies made by fictional director Stanislas Cordova, a dark and mysterious genius who, we're told, went "down into the dark crags and muck of human desire and longing."From the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Grace Bond Staples reviews March, John Lewis's graphic novel about his role in the civil rights marches and demonstrations of the 1960s. Created with Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell, it's the first installment of a three-part series.
And from the Detroit Free Press, Julie Hinds profiles Toby Barlow (see above), who is coming to Boswell for Babayaga ."Why did Barlow spend about four years creating a fictional vision of post-World War II Paris that's populated with an ad man from Detroit who becomes entangled with spies, witches whose lives span centuries and one very curious police detective who adjusts remarkably well to being magically transformed into a flea?"
All this in the Cue section, plus Miss Manners tells you the correct way to "répondez s'il vous plaît."
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