Today I had the opportunity to attend a publisher’s Book Buzz, an event that showcases the newest titles for this Fall and Spring of 2011. Hosted by Sterling Publishers (thanks for lunch!) it was held at the Free Library of Philadelphia and was a great day to view new and upcoming titles. The last Book Buzz I attended was in New Jersey and well if you read this blog or you know me I got lost and that colored a bit of my experience.
Author David Lubar was there, he signed an ARC of his new book and sorta remembered me from a meeting a few years ago when he was the guest at a Delco luncheon (squee!). Oh yeah, and he also entertained us with what I can only call a stand up bit.
Anywho, the publishers presenting today:
Adult titles
Hachette Books
Harper Collins
McGraw Hill
Norton
Penguin
Perseus
Random House
Sterling
Workman
Children’s/YA Titles
Workman
Tor/Forge
Sterling
Macmillan
Harlequin Teen
Each publisher was given ten minutes to present their books and despite my greedy desire to buy most books I picked the few that I think I’d like to add to my collection. There are also some great ones for work.
More after the jump
From Hachette Book Group
The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma
In this memoir Alice recalls her father reading her a book each night. They had a goal of 100 days but after the 100 days were up each wanted to continue and her father read to her until she left for college.
To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal
A book about what if in love…who hasn’t had those moments?
Harper Collins
The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard
Sixteen-year-old Nora Lindell is missing. And the neighborhood boys she’s left behind are caught forever in the heady current of her absence.
As the days and years pile up, the mystery of her disappearance grows kaleidoscopically. A collection of rumors, divergent suspicions, and tantalizing what-ifs, Nora Lindell’s story is a shadowy projection of teenage lust, friendship, reverence, and regret, captured magically in the disembodied plural voice of the boys who still long for her.
Told in haunting, percussive prose, Hannah Pittard’s beautifully crafted novel tracks the emotional progress of the sister Nora left behind, the other families in their leafy suburban enclave, and the individual fates of the boys in her thrall. Far more eager to imagine Nora’s fate than to scrutinize their own, the boys sleepwalk into an adulthood of jobs, marriages, families, homes, and daughters of their own, all the while pining for a girl–and a life–that no longer exists, except in the imagination.
A masterful literary debut that shines a light into the dream-filled space between childhood and all that follows, The Fates Will Find Their Way is a story about the stories we tell ourselves–of who we once were and may someday become.
Marshalling Justice by Michael J Long
Collected together for the first time in Marshalling Justice, here are selected letters written by one of the most influential and important activists in the American Civil Rights movement: the brilliant legal mind and footsoldier for justice and racial equality, Thurgood Marshall. The correspondences of a rebellious young attorney with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Marshalling Justice paints an eye-opening portrait of Thurgood Marshall before he became the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, during his years as a groundbreaking and vibrant Civil Rights activist in the tradition of Martin Luther King and Julian Bond.
Don’t Stop here!
McGraw-Hill
Chases’s Calendar of Events 2011
As much as I love bizarre holidays, wacky occasions and facts this book is terrific. The price gives me pause but I think we could make a case for it….
Norton
Townie by Andre Dubuss III
An acclaimed novelist reflects on his violent past and a lifestyle that threatened to destroy him—until he was saved by writing.
After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and crime. To protect himself and those he loved from street violence, Andre learned to use his fists so well that he was even scared of himself. He was on a fast track to getting killed—or killing someone else. He signed on as a boxer.
Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash of worlds couldn’t have been more stark—or more difficult for a son to communicate to a father. Only by becoming a writer himself could Andre begin to bridge the abyss and save himself. His memoir is a riveting, visceral, profound meditation on physical violence and the failures and triumphs of love.
Bloodmoney by David Ignatius
From the author of the best-selling Body of Lies and The Increment: in a tragedy of revenge, the CIA falls victim to its own daring operation in the Middle East.
Someone in Pakistan is killing the members of a new CIA intelligence unit that is trying to buy peace with America’s enemies. It falls to Sophie Marx, a young CIA officer with a big chip on her shoulder, to figure out who’s doing the killing and why. Her starting point is Alphabet Capital, the London hedge fund that has been providing cover for this secret operation, but the investigation soon widens to include the capitals of the Middle East and the cruel hills of South Waziristan.
Sophie thinks she has the backing of her hard-nosed boss, Jeffrey Gertz, and his genial mentor at headquarters, Cyril Hoffman. In addition, she gets help from the well-mannered lieutenant general heading Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. But the closer Sophie gets to her quarry, the more she realizes that nothing in this gallery of mirrors is quite what it seems. This is a theater of violence and retribution, in which the last act is one that Sophie could not have imagined.
Penguin Group
The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly
This taut psychological thriller begins when Karen and her nine-year- old daughter, Alice, pick up Rex from a ten-year stint in prison for murder. Flash back to the sultry summer in 1990s London when Karen, a straight-A student on the verge of college graduation, first meets the exotic, flamboyant Biba and joins her louche life in a crumbling mansion in Highgate. She begins a relationship with Biba’s enigmatic and protective older brother, Rex, and falls into a blissful rhythm of sex, alcohol, and endless summer nights. Naïvely, Karen assumes her newfound happiness will last forever. But Biba and Rex have a complicated family history-one of abandonment, suicide, and crippling guilt-and Karen’s summer of freedom is about to end in blood.
When old ghosts come back to destroy the life it has taken Karen a decade to build, she has everything to lose. She will do whatever it takes to protect her family and keep her secret. Alternating between the fragile present and the lingering past with a shocker of an ending, The Poison Tree is a brilliant suspense debut that will appeal to readers of Kate Atkinson, Donna Tartt, and Tana French.
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool by Danilee Evans
Introducing a new star of her generation, an electric debut story collection about young African-American and mixed-race teens, women, and men struggling to find a place in their families and communities.
When Danielle Evans’s short story “Virgins” was published in The Paris Review in late 2007, it announced the arrival of a bold new voice. Written when she was only twenty-three, Evans’s story of two black, blue-collar fifteen-year-old girls’ flirtation with adulthood for one night was startling in its pitch-perfect examination of race, class, and the shifting terrain of adolescence.
Now this debut collection delivers on the promise of that early story. In “Harvest,” a college student’s unplanned pregnancy forces her to confront her own feelings of inadequacy in comparison to her white classmates. In “Jellyfish,” a father’s misguided attempt to rescue a gift for his grown daughter from an apartment collapse magnifies all he doesn’t know about her. And in “Snakes,” the mixed-race daughter of intellectuals recounts the disastrous summer she spent with her white grandmother and cousin, a summer that has unforeseen repercussions in the present.
Striking in their emotional immediacy, the stories in Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self are based in a world where inequality is reality but where the insecurities of adolescence and young adulthood, and the tensions within family and the community, are sometimes the biggest complicating forces in one’s sense of identity and the choices one makes
First of all, what a great title! And secondly, a book about African Americans!
The Perseus Book Group
The Veganist by Kathy Freston
Kathy is a vegan, her husband is not. In this book she writes about how the two can co-exist.
Appetite for Reduction by Isa Chandra Moskowitz
Isa Chandra Moskowitz is known for making groundbreaking strides in vegan cooking, proving that going vegan doesn’t mean sacrificing flavor. Appetite for Reduction offers 125 delicious, big-portion recipes—from Spinach Lasagna to Manhattan Glam Chowder—that are fewer than 400 calories per serving, low in fat and sugar, and high in fiber. Best of all, a healthy dinner can be on your table in under forty-five minutes.
Random House
Madame Tussard by Michelle Moran
“Moran leaps to 18th-century France with this book about Madame Marie Tussaud-yes, the Madame Tussaud of wax museum fame. Here, Marie is asked to teach the art of wax sculpting to the sister of Louis XVI-an association that nearly costs her her head when the revolution comes. Moran is a sprightly and gimlet-eyed writer, so this should be fun-and a possible breakout.”–Library JournalHistorical
Sterling Publishing
The Mad Bomber of New York by Michael Greenburg
Between 1940 and 1957, 33 bombs–strategically placed in Grand Central, Penn Station, Radio City Music Hall, Macy’s and other populous areas of New York–paralyzed the city, sending shockwaves of fear through an unsuspecting public.
George Metesky, the “Mad Bomber,” unleashed a reign of terror that reverberated through America’s social, legal, and political landscape, ultimately spurring the birth of modern criminal profiling when a crime psychiatrist was called in to assist in the manhunt. Compelling historical true crime, The Mad Bomber of New York is the gripping tale of two individuals engaged in a deadly game of hide-and-seek, with the city of New York caught in the crosshairs.
My Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me by Hilary Winston
TV writer Hilary Winston offers up a witty collection of autobiographical tales about her misadventures in dating.
Just when Hilary feels like her life is finally in order, she gets a sucker-punch to the gut: Her ex has written a novel based on their relationship in which he refers to her throughout as the “fat-assed girlfriend.” Her response to this affront is just one of the many hilarious stories in My Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me-a laugh-out-loud, tell-all in which Hilary sets the record straight for all her exes.
Workman Publishing Company
Silver Girl (formerly Silver Sparrow) by Tayari Jones
Two best friends but one of them knows they are actually sisters!
The Big Book of Sodas: 200 Recipes for Making Carbonated Connections
The title says it all!
Children/YA titles
Workman
Amazing Cows by Sandra Boynton
Uh…it’s Sandra Boynton!
From Sandra Boynton—as it could only come from Boynton—an inventive new exuberant jumble of a book for the young reader. Amazing Cows is a picture book, a storybook, a book of fun and games—it’s all those things in one. Plus it even shows you how to find the startling recording of Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero Completely Unraveled for Orchestra and Kazoos” performed by Sandra Boyton & The Highly Irritating Orchestra. (Running time is 17:14, but seems MUCH longer.)
A work of pure obsession, Amazing Cows celebrates cows and offbeat cowness with a miscellany of cow stories, cow poems, cow jokes, and other bovine ephemera. Along the way, expect lively guest appearances by ducks, pigs, and excessive numbers of chickens. There’s a song: “It Had to Be Moo.” A game: “Find the Hidden Cows.” Famous Barnyard Composers (surely you’ve heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Moozart and Johann Sebastian Bockbockbock). Knock-knock jokes, a cow myth, and an Amazing Cow comic-book adventure: “Trouble on Zebblor 7.” Cow fashion. Cow Limericks. How to Speak Cow. Plus so much mooer.
Amazing Cows is full-color, 96 pages long, and packed with the kind of silly fun that young readers adore, especially when they can read it to themselves—and then read it to their parents, and then to their little brothers, and then to the family dog. Or the family cow.
Tor/Forge
David Lubar has a plethora of tiles but the one I want (well I got a signed ARC!) is Attack of the Weenies series. (Tee-hee! Weenies!)
I’m also excited about The Boy from Flysie and Down the Mystery River
Sterling
ABC Dinosaur
It’s an alphabet book! About DINOSAURS!
Weird US: A Freaky Field Trip
I will scare myself silly when I read this but I can’t help it! There’s a spirit that haunts the Fernwood Cemetery. That I pass. Daily. Gulp!
Macmillan
Won Ton, A Cat Tale Told in Haiku
Nice place they got here.
Bed. Bowl. Blankie. Just like home!Or so I’ve been told.
Visiting hours!
Yawn. I pretend not to care.
Yet — I sneak a peek.So begins this beguiling tale of a wary shelter cat and the boy who takes him home.
Sometimes funny, sometimes touching, this adoption story, told entirely in haiku, is unforgettable
The Marbury Lens by Andrew Smith
Sixteen-year-old Jack gets drunk and is in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is kidnapped. He escapes, narrowly. The only person he tells is his best friend, Conner. When they arrive in London as planned for summer break, a stranger hands Jack a pair of glasses. Through the lenses, he sees another world called Marbury.
There is war in Marbury. It is a desolate and murderous place where Jack is responsible for the survival of two younger boys. Conner is there, too. But he’s trying to kill them.
Meanwhile, Jack is falling in love with an English girl, and afraid he’s losing his mind.
Conner tells Jack it’s going to be okay.
But it’s not.
Andrew Smith has written his most beautiful and personal novel yet, as he explores the nightmarish outer limits of what trauma can do to our bodies and our minds.
Harlequin Teen
The Kimani Tru new series.
When fifteen-year-old Krystal Bentley moves to Lincoln, Connecticut, her mom’s hometown, she assumes her biggest drama will be adjusting to the burbs after living in New York City.
But Lincoln is nothing like Krystal imagined. The weirdness begins when Ricky Watson starts confiding in her. He’s cute, funny, a good listener—and everything she’d ever want—except that he was killed nearly a year ago. Krystal’s ghost-whispering talents soon lead other “freaks” to her door—Sasha, a rich girl who can literally disappear, and Jake, who moves objects with his mind. All three share a distinctive birthmark in the shape of an M and, fittingly, call themselves the Mystyx. They set out to learn what really happened to Ricky, only to realize that they aren’t the only ones with mysterious powers. But if Krystal succeeds in finding out the truth about Ricky’s death, will she lose him for good.
The Iron Daughter by Julie Kagawa
Half Summer faery princess, half human, Meghan has never fit in anywhere. Deserted by the Winter prince she thought loved her, she is prisoner to the Winter faery queen. As war looms between Summer and Winter, Meghan knows that the real danger comes from the Iron fey—ironbound faeries that only she and her absent prince have seen. But no one believes her.
Worse, Meghan’s own fey powers have been cut off. She’s stuck in Faery with only her wits for help. Trusting anyone would be foolish. Trusting a seeming traitor could be deadly. But even as she grows a backbone of iron, Meghan can’t help but hear the whispers of longing in her all-too-human heart.
Some books are available now. Others in the new year. I swear at the rate these books are coming I may never need another read again!
Getting ready to tuck into some ARCs,
-r
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