Our New Releases This Week are Almost Entirely From the Penguin Group.

Because publishers don't release too many books in December, it's exciting to get a Penguin shipment of new titles for 12/27 on sale. They are mostly reprints, but who cares?  Finally something new!

The highest-profile fiction paperback release in the carton was The Discovery of Witches , by Deborah Harkness. This was a surprise bestseller for Viking last winter. Hey, not that they didn't work hard, but everyone knows that breakout titles don't always break out. Jason was one of the many folks out there who read it and thought that it hit the market of folks who ran out of Sookie Stackhouse novels. That's a lot of folks. The next title, Shadow of Night, is currently scheduled for July 2012. Feel free to have us hold a copy for you.

In nonfiction, the lead would be Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Though I didn't read Chua's memoir, that didn't stop me from having some engaging conversations with folks who read the book. Several of our customers found the story itself quite different from the press that surrounded it. Was this a parenting manual that advocated a Chinese-style upbringing? Or was Chua being a bit more coy about the whole thing, acknowledging her own inability to live up to the ideal.

The Dispatcher, what's that? Jason has it scheduled for our new mystery case. I asked him, and he told me that his previous novel, Good Neighbors, sold quite well for us and won the CWA John Creasey Dagger first novel award.  The previous novel was based on the famous Kitty Genovese case. The Guardian says the new book "reads at a cracking pace." I don't know what kind of pace that is, but it sounds positive.

I dug around and found a hardcover! Jeffrey Zaslow's The Magic Room came in, a multi-generational story about a Michigan bridal shop. Zaslow is known for working on bestsellers such as The Last Lecture, Gabby, and Highest Duty, but this is more akin to The Girls from Ames. The focus of the story is about six women who go to Becker's to find the write dress, each with very different stories, but in the end, the book becomes a portrait of marriage itself. It is said that a lot of folks get engaged over Christmas break, so if we had a bridal table, this would be a good addition. We don't, so Zaslow's book is in the Boswell's Best section.

The reprints are also available as Google ebooks from our website. The originals will be forthcoming.