Well-Dressed Books and Readers are Wearing "Interesting" Colors

Penguin came to us and said, we'll give you some nice tote bags to help promote Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings in paperback if you do a display. It was not hard to sell us on this, as we have an event coming up with the author on April 24. We've got plenty of backlist titles, as Riverhead is reissuing her earlier works, and bookmarks to promote her next kids' book, coming in September, which is called Belzhar.

We decided to do a raffle but there are two ways to win. You can either fill the entry form out and attend the event with no purchase necessary, or you can buy one of Wolitzer's books between April 1 and April 24, and we'll staple a receipt onto the form. In that case, you don't have to be present. I believe that satisfies the no purchase necessary requirement that Wisconsin has for contests.

The two most recent backlist titles to come out, which shipped along with the paperback release on March 25, are This is My Life and Sleepwalking. I looked carefully at the books and realized that I had read the former, which was originally titled This is Your Life. I can't find the review. The other Wolitzer backlist book that I'm sure I read, as I still have the hardcover on my bookshelf, is Hidden Pictures. That one is still unavailable, though Publishers Weekly called it "a singular feat."

Speaking of interesting Interestings things, Sharon came to me wondering if I had noticed that a lot of new paperbacks have a similar palette to Meg Wolitzer's latest. There's Michelle Richmond's Golden State, Jim Galvin's The Middle Men, Fiona Maazel's Woke Up Lonely, and the already-much-talked-about A Tale for the Time Being, from Ruth Ozeki. Ozeki, Galvin, and Wolitzer's hardcovers came out in 2013 with similar jackets, so only Richmond is new. Perhaps this is actually last year's trend, but you know how these things carry over, and since all these authors are relatively hip and at least cross-over literary, we'll know it's not played out till we see books meant for mass merchants with yellow, burnt orange, pale turquoise, with an apple green accent..