... h20boro lib blog

Labels: bestsellers, books, children's books, harry potter, rowling, YA fiction

Oprah has chosen Jeffrey Eugenides' controversial book about a hermaphrodite, Middlesex (2003), for her new book club read. Multiple reviews at Complete Review.

And the publishing industry's BookExpo America is over; here are some highlights reported by USA Today:

• Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert's book, I Am America (And So Can You!), is due out in October and is predicted to be "just as big as Jon Stewart's' America:The Book.
• It will be a big fall for history titles, including Rick Atkinson's The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (October) and The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945 (September) by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns.
• Most-talked-about fall fiction: Alice Sebold's The Almost Moon and Ann Packer's Songs Without Words.

More details here.

Labels: bestsellers, bookexpo, colbert, eugenides, fall fiction, history, middlesex, oprah, sebold

Hey, we still have snow here in Maine! Nonetheless, Publishers Weekly asked folks at four bookstores to choose 25 books that will be hits this summer; you can read the full list here.

Titles include:

• Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union(May), on the top of everyone's list
• Don DeLillo's Falling Man (June), a novel about 9/11.
• Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns (May 22), his second novel following The Kite Runner (the film version of which is due out in late 2007).
• Ian McEwan's short novel On Chesil Beach (June), set in early 1960s England.
• Maine author Kate Braestrup's book, Here if You Need Me (Aug.), about losing her husband, a Maine state trooper, in an accident and becoming a Unitarian Universalist chaplain on search-and-rescue missions.
• William Gibson's Spook Country (Aug.)
• Psychological thriller In the Woods by Tana French (May), set in a suburban Dublin neighborhood in 1984.
• Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero (May), set in Northern California in the 1970s and in France before that.
• Armistead Maupin's Michael Tolliver Lives (June), featuring a key character from Tales of the City.
• Günter Grass's memoir, Peeling the Onion (June 25), where he reveals that he was drafted into the Waffen-SS.
• Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: A Year of Food Life (May), "memoir of a year spent procuring and cooking local food."

Labels: bestsellers, forthcoming, publishing, summer books

Labels: bestsellers, conroy, forthcoming, literary fiction, set in charleston, set in south carolina

The bookshelves may be labelled 'Real Life,' 'Painful Lives,' or something similar, but the fact that there are bookstore sections devoted to these kinds of books attests to the selling power of misery literature, or 'mis lit.' Anthony Barnes, in the Independent, writes:

"As page-turners go, they are hardly the most uplifting of reads. The abuse, pain and betrayal are often relentless. But 'misery literature' has now become the book world's boom sector.

"New figures show that the misery memoir market doubled from £12m in 2005 to £24m last year, with up to 10 new titles vying to be top of the glums each month. The top-selling misery memoir in the UK -- Behind Closed Doors by Jenny Tomlin -- shifted 278,000 copies in 2006, more than six times the number sold by last year's Booker Prize winner, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai.

"Of the 100 bestselling paperbacks last year, more than a tenth were tales of real-life misery, and they make up six of the top 10 in the Sunday Times paperback bestseller list. ...

"At their core, most are chilling tales of childhood abuse with some form of redemption and triumph against adversity at the end." These books apparently appeal most to women with young children.

Labels: bestsellers, bookselling, misery lit, UK

Are marketing departments, publishers' narrow focus on the bottom-line, and chain booksellers seeking to please the masses keeping good writing from being widely published? Prolific fiction writer Fay Weldon thinks so.

Weldon writes that "'Best selling' should not be an accolade so much as a warning. Today the danger for writers who continue to aspire to 'good' in the old sense [i.e., not necessarily selling the most books or winning a prize] is that they won’t get published at all, or it will be with miserable print runs. The synopses they must have approved before they begin a commissioned book will please marketing rather than the editorial department.

"Caution is the death of creativity. ... As the sequels and prequels take over -- if they liked that one, surely they'll like this one -- the creative imagination withers. "

Scott Pack (previously head buyer for UK bookselling giant Waterstone's, now commercial director of The Friday Project, a web-to-print publisher.) somewhat agrees, at least about which books are good and which aren't, but he contradicts some of Weldon's arguments: "A good book is a good book no matter what the genre or how many copies it sells. And a bad book remains bad, whatever the pedigree of the author or how many critics fall over each other to praise it. Quality is not always in inverse proportion to the number of copies sold. ... Publishing is a commercial industry and should not have to apologise for it. ... The money a publisher makes from the fast turnover of John Grisham or Patricia Cornwell allows them to invest in less popular titles that won’t sell anywhere near as well."

Labels: bestsellers, bookselling, publishing, weldon