Library Journal

Binelli, Mark. Detroit City Is the Place To Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis. Holt. Nov. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780805092295. $28; eISBN 9781429974615. SOCIAL SCIENCE
For most Americans, Detroit epitomizes contemporary urban blight. Here, native son and Rolling Stone contributing editor Binelli shows that while Detroit may be down it’s not out. In fact, current developments—organic farming on empty lots, a realignment plan to shift residents from desolate neighborhoods to a vibrant new center—suggest how not just Detroit but all troubled cities can rise again. Expect good writing on a freighted topic.

Coddington, Grace. Grace. Random. Nov. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780812993356. $30; eISBN 9780679645214. CD/Downloadable: Random House Audio. MEMOIR
Stunning British model. Then creative director of British Vogue. Then head of Calvin Klein’s operations in New York. Then creative director of American Vogue. And true star of the 2009 documentary The September Issue, in which she famously upstaged Anna Wintour. Here’s a memoir about Coddington’s 40 years in fashion, beautifully designed by the author herself. Go, fashionistas!

Fellowes, Jessica & Matthew Sturgis. The Chronicles of Downton Abbey: A New Era for Family, Friends, Lovers and Staff. St. Martin’s. Nov. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9781250027627. $29.99; eISBN 9781250027634. TELEVISION
Former deputy editor of Country Life and niece of lead Downton Abbey author Julian Fellowes, Fellowes has already written about the public television phenomenon in The World of Downton Abbey. Here she returns with critic/author Sturgis to give an official preview of Season 3, which launches on PBS in January 2013. Downtown Abbey fever does not appear to be abating (though not yet commissioned, Seasons 4 and 5 are in discussion), so this should be popular.

Fornatale, Peter & Bernard M. Corbett. 50 Licks: An Album’s Worth of Stories from the 50-Year History of the Rolling Stones. Bloomsbury USA, dist. by Macmillan. Nov. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9781608199211. pap. $17. MUSIC
Fifty years, 50 cool stories (or “Licks”), each named for a different Rolling Stones song, and often drawn from previously unavailable material. FM rock pioneer Fortanale, who died on April 26, joined with Corbett—the radio voice of Harvard University football and a lifelong Rolling Stones nut—to deliver another celebratory piece on the Band That Played On…and On.

Greene, Robert. Mastery. Viking. Nov. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780670024964. $28.95; Downloadable: Penguin Audio. PSYCHOLOGY
Want to be the master of your universe? Greene shows you how by looking at the folks who have done it before you, from middling-student Charles Darwin to Temple Grandin, Henry Ford, and more. Since Greene’s books (e.g., The 48 Laws of Power) have sold more than a million copies, he must have something to say to folks out there. Be prepared.

Kelley, Kitty. Capturing Camelot: Stanley Tretick’s Iconic Images of the Kennedys. Thomas Dunne Bks: St. Martin’s. Nov. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9780312643423. $29.99; eISBN 9781250018830. PHOTOGRAPHY
Assigned by United Press International to cover John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, Stanley Tretick became friendly enough with the candidate that he was given access to the White House once Kennedy was elected. He took many pictures readers will recognize immediately, often of JFK with his family. But of course never-before-seen shots are here, too. Best-selling author Kelley, a friend of Tretick, provides an upbeat text. Big publicity push.

Lil Wayne. Gone Till November. Grand Central. Nov. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9781455515264. $25.99. MEMOIR
Rapper Lil Wayne has won four Grammies and sold millions of albums; he also did time in Rikers Island Penitentiary in 2010 for criminal possession of a weapon. Here are the journals he kept at the time, reportedly smart, detailed, and thoughtful. Since he has five million Twitter followers and 33.7 million Facebook fans (decidedly the biggest numbers I’ve keyed in for those venues), this book will have an audience.

Love, Courtney & Anthony Bozza. Untitled. Morrow. Nov. 2012. 464p. ISBN 9780062127952. $29.99. eISBN 9780062127990. MEMOIR
These rock memoirs just keep coming. Now the contrarian, controversial Love, loved and hated by the media (and the rest of us), widow of Kurt Cobain and a scalding musician in her own right, tells her own story. With a 250,000-copy first printing and author appearances in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle (but not Portland?).

Mount, Jane (illus.). & Thessaly La Force (ed). My Ideal Bookshelf. Little, Brown. Nov. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9780316200905. $24.99. LITERATURE
If you’re like me, you judge people by what’s on their bookshelves. Here’s a book that lets you see what folks like Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Gwyneth Paltrow, Mark Bittman, Patti Smith, and more have stashed on theirs. Each contributor weighs in on his or her favorites (“There’s no cumulative purpose—it’s just an excellent way to waste your life,” says Jonathan Lethem), and Mount provides whimsical drawings of side-by-side spines. Sweet.

Nelson, Willie & Kinky Friedman. The Troublemaker: A Story of Faith, Redemption, and Staying True to Your Deepest Beliefs. Morrow. Nov. 2012. 192p. ISBN 9780062193643. $22.99; eISBN 9780062193650. lrg. prnt. MEMOIR
Nelson is such a famed singer/songwriter/activist that next year Austin will place an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of him on Willie Nelson Boulevard. Meanwhile, here’s a memoir cum inspirational tale—and just right for the holidays. With his career stuttering and his personal life in shreds, Nelson wasn’t facing the greatest Christmas in 1971. Even his house burned down. So he decided to change everything, shrugging off pressures to sound Nashville and heading in a new creative direction that landed him where he is today. With a 125,000-copy first printing; note the large print, not surprisingly since this hardy 78-year-old has some mature fans.

Scottoline, Lisa & Francesca Serritella. Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim. St. Martin’s. Nov. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780312640088. $25.99; eISBN 9781250025074. CD: Macmillan Audio. RELATIONSHIPS
Scottoline is doing so well with her juicily acerbic essays collections, particularly those written with daughter Serritella, that one wonders whether they will start taking precedence over her best-selling fiction. Here, mother and daughter deal with separation anxiety of an adult sort, as Serritella moves to the big city, Scottoline looks about her suburban empty nest, and both think about shifting boundaries. Cozy.

Standiford, Les. Desperate Sons: The Secret Band of Radicals Who Led the Colonies to War. Harper: HarperCollins. Nov. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780061899553. $27.99; eISBN 9780062218124. HISTORY
This chronicle of the Sons of Liberty in the American Revolution is billed as a political thriller, so expect excitement. Author of the best-selling Bringing Adam Home, Standiford goes behind the glossy surface of iconic events like the Boston Tea Party and Paul Revere’s midnight gallop to explain how dangerous (and admittedly illegal) they really were. His aim: to show that we are more bound together by the chances these “desperate Sons” took than divided by the petty politics of today. Well, we can hope.

Tapper, Jake. The Outpost: The Untold Story of American Valor. Little, Brown. Nov. 2012. 608p. ISBN 9780316185394. $28.99. CD/downloadable: Hachette Audio. CURRENT EVENTS
After Combat Outpost Keating was abandoned, the Pentagon determined that the camp, located in the desolate mountains of Afghanistan just 14 miles from the Pakistan border, should never have been established. But first came the October 3, 2009, attack by nearly 400 Taliban fighters, which the 53 U.S. troops held off at considerable cost. A senior White House correspondent for ABC News, Tapper did hard investigate work to understand how this fiasco came about. Lots of buzz about Tapper as a rising media star.

Brom. Krampus: The Yule Lord. Morrow. Nov. 2012. 368p. ISBN 9780062095657. $27.99. FANTASY
One Christmas Eve in Boone County, WV, a songwriter manqué named Jesse intervenes when he sees men in black attacking a white-bearded gent in a sleigh. Yes, it’s Santa, but he’s the bad guy here—and that’s Krampus’s bag left at the scene. According to Krampus, an age-old trickster demon who punishes wrongdoing, Santa locked him up and stole his magic 500 years ago. Now he’s free and wants his magic back—along with the holiday Santa so rudely usurped. Illustrator/author Brom’s big hit, The Child Thief, went through four printings; fans will be looking for this one. With a 40,000-copy first printing, plus 35 black-and-white illustrations and eight pages of color.

Carr, Caleb. The Legend of Broken. Random. Nov. 2012. 688p. ISBN 9781400062836. $27; eISBN 9780812994087. HISTORICAL
Back in 1994, Carr landed like a meteorite with The Alienist, which has sold over two million copies in all formats to date. Subsequent titles, also big sellers—though nowhere near as big as The Alienist—ricocheted from Victorian England to 2023. Here Carr goes way back in time to the medieval era, where a fortress may fall to the roiling invaders without or to undermining forces within. Evidently lots of juicy characters, e.g., a noble warrior and a scientist condemned for sorcery. Will this outsell The Alienist? We’ll see.

Chiaverini, Jennifer. The Giving Quilt: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel. Dutton. Nov. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780525953609. $25.95. POP FICTION
Post-Thanksgiving at Elm Creek Manor, aspiring quilters are enjoying a special winter session of quilt camp. Their aim? To create warm, colorful quilts for Project Linus, a real-life charity Chiaverini supports that gives handmade quilts and blankets to needy children. Not a dry eye after finishing this book; with a reading group guide and eight-city tour.

Engelmann, Karen. The Stockholm Octave. Ecco: HarperCollins. Nov. 2012. 432p. ISBN 9780061995347. $26.99. LITERARY HISTORICAL
Engelmann sets her debut novel in 1790s Stockholm—the city’s Golden Age, though with our spare knowledge of Swedish history, as Francine du Plessix Gray points out, we wouldn’t know much about it—and invents a card game called Octave that drives the action. When the fortune-telling Mrs. Sophia Sparrow foresees a golden future for smug bureaucrat Emil Larsson, she lays an Octave for him so that he can find the eight people who will help him realize that vision. Soon, however, Larsson realizes that his search is tied up with the fate of his country, which is verging on chaos. Historical fiction with heft—and some hefty buzz; there’s a 50,000-copy first printing, and rights have been sold to ten countries.

McCall Smith, Alexander. The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds. Pantheon. Nov. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780307907332. $24.95; eISBN 9780307907349. MYSTERY
Boasting more than one million copies in print, the Isabel Dalhousie series is right up there in popularity with McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. In this ninth entry, a Scottish landowner robbed of a Nicolas Poussin painting slated for the Scottish National Gallery asks Isabel’s help in dealing with the thieves, who have approached him privately. Just who are they, and does the hapless victim actually know them? With a reading group guide and a tour that will include Atlanta, Boston, Mobile, and New York, plus locales in Vermont and Canada.

Mayle, Peter. The Marseille Caper. Knopf. Nov. 2012. 224p. ISBN 9780307594198. $24. CD/downloadable: Random House Audio. MYSTERY
Mayle introduced charming, roguish sleuth Sam Levitt in The Vintage Caper, which has sold nearly 100,000 copies in hardcover, paperback, and ebook. (And he didn’t go on tour to plump for it, as the publisher hastens to point out; his tour for this second in the series is expected to push up the numbers.) Sam is happily ensconced in Los Angeles with charming Elena Morales when rich Francis Reboul calls him back to Marseille. Alas, helping out Francis puts Sam in the midst of a major real estate hustle, with the danger escalating as the battle over Marseille’s valuable waterfront heats up. Mayle’s tour will hit Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

Munro, Alice. Dear Life: Stories. Knopf. Nov. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780307596888. $26.95; eISBN 9780307961044. CD/downloadable: Random House Audio. SHORT STORIES
The highly admired Munro has won virtually every award imaginable (e.g., three Governor General’s Literary Awards and the Man Booker International Prize) and also sells books; her last title, Too Much Happiness, sold nearly 133,000 copies. The stories in her new collection, which revisits the towns and countryside around Lake Huron, highlight key moments when one’s life changes forever. Don’t miss.

Pullman, Philip. Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version. Viking. Nov. 2012. 400p. ISBN 9780670024971. $27.95. FAIRY TALES
Yes, it’s been 200 years since the publication of the first volume of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Children’s and Household Tales, and we’ll be seeing celebrations. Norton is reissuing an update of Maria Tatar’s The Annotated Brothers Grimm, and now Pullman has jumped in with his own versions of 50 of the immortal tales, from perennials like “Cinderella” to less familiar gems like “Briar-Rose.” The dark edginess of Pullman’s own work (like the famed Dark Materials trilogy) seems a good match for the Grimm tone of these stories.

Schutt, Christine. Prosperous Friends. Grove. Nov. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780802120380. $24. LITERARY
National Book Award finalist, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and two-time O. Henry Prize winner, Schutt is a writer’s writer whose elegant prose seems chiseled out of diamonds. Here, golden boy Ned Bourne and his wife, Isabel, seek fulfillment of their artistic promise by traveling to London, New York, and Maine but are less successful in managing their emotional and sexual lives. Understanding comes when they meet older painter Clive Harris and his poet wife, Dinah. With a reading group guide; for discriminating folks.

Sussman, Paul. The Labyrinth of Osiris. Atlantic Monthly. Nov. 2012. 448p. ISBN 9780802120410. $25. THRILLER
With Sussman’s The Last Secret of the Temple and The Lost Army of Cambyses having each sold over a million copies worldwide, you can bet that readers will be interested in this next work. Det. Arieh Ben-Roi is stumped by the murder of crusading Israeli journalist Rivka Kleinberg, found dead in a Jerusalem cathedral (of all places). So for help he turns to long-time buddy Yusuf Khalifa of the Luxor police. Kleinberg had been digging into the death of a British Egyptologist in the 1930s, which might provide some clues. Fun.

Ball, Edward. The Tycoon and the Inventor: A Gilded Age and the Birth of Moving Pictures. Doubleday. Nov. 2012. 448p. ISBN 9780385525756. $29.95; eISBN 9780385535496. Downloadable: Random House Audio. BIOGRAPHY
Originally scheduled for April 2012 and featured as a Pick last October, this is the story of how photographer Eadweard Muybridge invented stop-motion photography—the first step on the road to motion pictures—when asked by railroad tycoon and former California governor Leland Stanford to show that at one point a galloping horse’s four hooves leave the ground simultaneously. The dramatic Muybridge later killed his wife’s lover, though he was acquitted after a lot of media coverage. National Book Award winner Ball (Slaves in the Family) here combines art, science, true crime, and history-in-the-making in rough-and-tumble Gilded Age San Francisco.

Bair, Deirdre. Saul Steinberg: A Biography. Nan A. Talese: Doubleday. Nov. 2012. 752p. ISBN 9780385524483. $40; eISBN 9780385534987. BIOGRAPHY
The creator of fabulously spiky, satirical drawings and cartoons—everyone knows the iconic New Yorker cover that makes the rest of the country look like a really little slice of the pie—Steinberg was born in Romania and educated in Italy, which he fled with the rise of fascism. He became a U.S. citizen, a commissioned navy officer, and a member of the OSS in a single day, then went on to become one of the artistic lights of the postwar era. National Book Award winner Bair (for Samuel Beckett) got to rummage through 177 boxes of never-before-seen materials to write this biography. Nothing else out there on Steinberg, and what a fascinating life.

Coyne, Tom. Bury Me at the Finish Line: One Plodder’s Quest To Understand Where We’re Running To. Gotham: Penguin Group (USA). Nov. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9781592406548. $26. SPORTS
Author of the best-selling A Course Called Ireland, Coyne does golf but otherwise has never been that big on exercise. So he surprised himself by opting to run in the 2010 Marathon de Paris (though, hey, I’d go to Paris for anything). To make sure he followed through, he drafted some friends—a breast cancer survivor, a beer-belly Brit, and a chain-smoking waitress—to train with him, enticing them with an all-expenses-paid trip to the City of Light. Here he examines the fun of the run while reflecting on how the sport has turned into a mega-industry.

de Margerie, Caroline. American Lady: The Life of Susan Mary Alsop. Viking. Nov. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780670025749. $26.95. BIOGRAPHY
A descendant of Founding Father John Jay, born in Rome and raised partly in Argentina, Susan Mary hit Paris in 1945 with first husband William Patten and met everyone, from FDR to Churchill to Garbo. After Patten’s death, she married renowned columnist Joseph Alsop and with him became a legendary powerbroker, dominating Georgetown society for four decades. A fascinating-sounding book about a fascinating-sounding American woman, written by a French author who is now a member of the Conseil d’État, the highest administrative court of France.

Glassie, John. A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change. Riverhead: Penguin Group (USA). Nov. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9781594488719. $26.95. SCIENCE/HISTORY
A former contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine, Glassie tells the story of Anthanasius Kircher, a 17th-century scientist much admired in his day for discoveries that have since proven to be, politely put, half-cocked. Magnetism is not the force driving the universe, his translations of Egyptian hieroglyphics were all wrong, and what’s this about his proudly displaying a mermaid’s tailbone? An entertaining reminder that skepticism can be good.

Guerrieri, Matthew. The First Four Notes: Beethoven’s Fifth and the Human Imagination. Knopf. Nov. 2012. 368p. ISBN 9780307593283. $26.95; eISBN 9780307960924. MUSIC
Da-da-da-dum! Here’s what looks to be the only book available to lay readers offering an in-depth examination of Beethoven’s beloved and magisterial Fifth Symphony. Guerrieri, music critic for the Boston Globe, explores both the sources and the long-term impact of the symphony, which was, by the way, a source of inspiration during World War II to both the Nazis and the Allies. If this book seems specialized,  just remember that Beethoven has nearly a million followers on Facebook—take that, rock stars! And a similar title, Stuart Isacoff’s A Natural History of the Piano, turned out to be a sleeper hit for the publisher last fall.

Homans, John. What’s a Dog For? The Surprising History, Science, Philosophy, and Politics of Man’s Best Friend. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). Nov. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9781594205156. $25.95. PETS
Lots of books out there on the human-canine relationship. But Homans, executive editor of New York magazine, homes in on a particular aspect of our love affair with dogs—our treating them as if they were human beings. (Um, they aren’t?) Inspired by his Lab mix, Stella, who started out as his companion in neighborhood rambles and quickly became the centerpiece of the family, Homans considers scientific studies about evolutionary theory, cognitive behavior, and the consequences of dog ownership (great for our health). What a dog for? To learn from and love.

Keller, Timothy. Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Plan for the World. Dutton. Nov. 2012. 272p. ISBN 9780525952701. $25.95. Downloadable: Penguin Audio. RELIGION
Pastor of New York’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Keller is heard by thousands of congregants on Sunday morning—and his best-selling spirituality titles are read by millions. Here he considers how believers can find meaning and maintain their values in the jungle-out-there world of business today. No easy outs here; Keller helps folks practice what gets preached.

Lizard, Sal with Jonathan Lane. Being Santa Claus: What I Learned about the True Meaning of Christmas. Gotham: Penguin Group (USA). Nov. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9781592407569. $20. MEMOIR
After his hair and beard turned snowy white when he was only in his twenties, Lizard did what every guy should do in that predicament: he opted to play Santa, a job he’s been at year ’round for more than 20 years. More than a life account, this book offers inspiration drawn from the experiences he’s had in his custom-made red velvet suits, e.g., little children can make a big difference in this world, and they’re awe-struck about seeing Santa off-season. A national tour, though probably not by sleigh.

Nasaw, David. The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). Nov. 2012. 832p. ISBN 9781594203763. $40. Downloadable: Penguin Audio. BIOGRAPHY
Celebrated for his biographies of Andrew Carnegie and William Randolph Hearst, Nasaw takes on another larger-than-life figure: Joseph P. Kennedy, businessman, Hollywood mogul, founding chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S. ambassador to Britain as World War II commenced, and, of course, father to our 35th president. Nasaw evidently secured unrestricted and exclusive access to all of his subject’s papers and will address the big questions still hanging around, e.g., was Kennedy an isolationist, a Nazi sympathizer, a bootlegger? And did he really buy JFK’s elections?

Perelman, Deb. The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. Knopf. Nov. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780307595652. $35; eISBN 9780307961068. COOKBOOKS
Just ask the Smitten Kitchen’s 63,000 Facebook fans or its four million unique visitors per month: Perelman’s supremely helpful, visually stunning, wittily worded food blog really did deserve to be named one of 2011’s best blogs by Time magazine. (I know because I just checked it out and have already cribbed the recipe for Pasta with Garlicky Broccoli Rabe.) Perelman’s recipes are accessible but not Betty Crocker plain; this is fun, energized eating. Get it! With a six-city tour to Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

Phillips, Kevin. 1775: A Good Year for Revolution. Viking. Nov. 2012. 640p. ISBN 9780670025121. $36. HISTORY
Every American schoolchild will tell you that 1776 was a very good year for the American Revolution. But contrarian Phillips, Pulitzer finalist for The Cousins’ Wars, makes a case for 1775 as the revolution’s make-or-break year. That’s when Congress delivered a bunch of sharp ultimatums to Britain, British troops and royal governors were sent packing, and local Patriots grabbed the reins of government. Britain never recovered. Great for argumentative nonfiction book groups.

Sacks, Oliver. Hallucinations. Knopf. Nov. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780307957245. $26.95. CD/downloadable: Random House Audio. MEDICINE
Hallucinations: they don’t belong wholly to the insane. Illness or injury, intoxication or sensory deprivation, or simply falling asleep can cause any one of us to see (or hear, or smell, or sense) swirly, twirly things that aren’t there. Everyone’s favorite neurologist is back to explain types of hallucinations, what they tell us about the brain’s workings, and how they have influenced art and culture. Who knew medicine could be so much fun.

Schwartz, John. Oddly Normal: One Family’s Struggle To Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms with His Sexuality. Gotham: Penguin Group (USA). Nov. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9781592407286. $26. MEMOIR
A national correspondent with the New York Times, Schwartz faced a terrible tragedy two years ago when his 13-year-old son attempted suicide after coming out to his classmates. Frustrated by the school’s inability to help a student who didn’t fit the mold, he and his wife sought out organizations that could help Joe realize that he wasn’t alone or freakish. Here’s an account of their experiences, clearly as much a parental guide as a memoir.

Talbot, Margaret. The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century. Riverhead: Penguin Group (USA). Nov. 2012. 416p. ISBN 9781594487064. $28.95. MEMOIR
A New Yorker staff writer, Talbot takes a personal approach to telling the story of popular culture in early 20th century America. She tells the story of her father, Lyle Talbot, born in Nebraska in 1902, who became a magician’s assistant, actor with a traveling theater troupe, romantic lead in early talkies, character actor in big Warner films, and, finally, Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver regular. From small-town life to the big screen; sounds enticing, and lots of in-house excitement. 
 
Updike, John. Always Looking: Essays on Art. Knopf. Nov. 2012. 224p. ISBN 9780307957306. $45. ART CRITICISM
After Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005), here’s a final, posthumous volume of essays from a writer whose art criticism was as good as his fiction. The 15 pieces are taken mostly from the New York Review of Books, though readers will also find—and revel in—“The Clarity of Things,” the 2008 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities and as definitive a statement as we’ll get of Updike’s approach to criticism. With more than 200 color illustrations to go with commentary ranging from Degas to Serra. Bravo!

wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir. Pantheon. Nov. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780307907691. $25.95; eISBN 9780307907707. MEMOIR
A 2009 Man Booker International Literary Prize nominee and an Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience in his native Kenya in the late 1970s after his arrest for writing a controversial play, wa Thiong’o here follows up a first volume of memoirs called Dreams in a Time of War—which, by the way, was a Samuel Johnson Prize nominee. This new work covers wa Thiong’o’s high school years in 1955–59, which places it smack in the middle of the Mau Mau uprising that eventually led to the end of British colonial rule.  Nobel-worthy reading, I’ll bet; wa Thiong’o is often mentioned for the prize.

Banville, John. Ancient Light. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780307957054. $25.95; eISBN 9780307960832. CD/downloadable: Random Audio. LITERARY
At the end of a stuttering career, suddenly revived by a role-of-a-lifetime movie turn, actor Alexander Cleave looks back at his first and probably only love, a charged and ultimately catastrophic passion at age 15 for his best friend’s mother. Then there’s his daughter, whose own uncertain turn of mind he cannot understand. Always an honored writer, Banville has gained a bigger audience here since winning the Man Booker Prize for The Sea, so this probing study of memory’s shiftiness will be anticipated. With a reading guide and a six-city tour to Boston, New York, Portland (OR), San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

Cronin, Justin. The Passage Trilogy: Bk. 2: The Twelve. Ballantine. Oct. 2012. 560p. ISBN 9780345504982. $28; eISBN 9780345534897. CD: Random Audio. LITERARY THRILLER
After racking up honors like the PEN/Hemingway Award for his literary fiction, Cronin wrote a dystopian thriller called The Passage—and sold 600,000 copies while claiming awed reviews and best book nods, including from LJ. Here we see three strangers bonding over the chaos created by the U.S. government experiment gone awry that kicked off the first book, and, 100 years hence, we again meet Amy, Peter, Alicia, and the others as they track the 12 virals that started all the trouble. Alas, their quest is based on some assumptions that no longer hold. With a 15- to 20-city tour and a huge multimedia campaign.

Harris, Joanne. Peaches for Father Francis. Viking. Oct. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780670026364. $26.95. CD: Penguin Audio. POP FICTION
With Harris’s beloved chocolatière, Vianne Rocher, we return to the lovely French village of Lansquenet, where Vianne first opened up shop in Harris’s multi-million-best-selling Chocolat. Now the town is changed, with veiled women walking the streets and a minaret rising across the river, and—big surprise!—fierce, resistant Father Francis needs Vianne’s help. Charm and important social context; a recent New York Times editorial reports that France has Europe’s largest Islamic minority, which has caused headline-making tensions recently. The editorial goes on to explain that inclusive Marseille has no such troubles. Perhaps little Lansquenet will emulate its big brother.  

Pamuk, Orhan. Silent House. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780307700285. $26.95; eISBN 9780307958556. LITERARY
Before he won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, before he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Pamuk wrote this, his second novel—only now available in English. In the summer before the 1980 military coup, the widow Fatima anticipates her grandchildren’s annual visit to her home in Cennethisar, now a fancy resort near Istanbul but once a fishing village where Fatima’s physician husband settled to serve the poor. She reminisces with ever-loyal servant Recep, a dwarf who happens to be her husband’s illegitimate son, even as Recep’s dedicatedly nationalist cousin draws the entire family dangerously close to the looming political crisis. With a reading group guide; a good way to understand the Turkey of today.

Bizot, François. Facing the Torturer. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 224p. ISBN 9780307273505. $25; eISBN 9780307960870. HISTORY
Director of studies at Paris’s École Pratique des Hautes études and chair of Southeast Asian Buddhism at the Sorbonne, Bizot was a young scholar studying pottery and Buddhist ritual in Cambodia when he was imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge for three months in 1973, an experience he recounted searingly in The Gate. (Bizot was the only Westerner to survive Khmer Rouge imprisonment.) His captor was the infamous Duch, ultimately responsible for the deaths of more than 10,000 people. Duch was arrested for his crimes in 1999, and Bizot bore witness at his trial—an unimaginable act of courage that he revisits here with this book. Note that it’s classified as history—Bizot clearly turns the spotlight from himself to a horrifically dark time in human history.

Brands, H.W. The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace. Doubleday. Oct. 2012. 736p. ISBN 9780385532419. $35; eISBN 9780385532426. CD: Random Audio. BIOGRAPHY
A New York Times best-selling historian/biographer who’s given us firm portraits of Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, among others, Brands here takes on Civil War general and two-term president Ulysses Grant. Grant’s reputation suffered after the war, partly because of Southern resentment, and Brands is out to given us a fairer, better picture. He shows us a first-rate general and a President who was both popular and compassionate, working hard to protect the rights of freedmen; Brands calls him last presidential defender of black civil rights for nearly a century. I’m betting on this one.

Dobbs, Michael. Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman—from World War to Cold War. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 448p. ISBN 9780307271655. $28.95; eISBN 9780307960894. Downloadable: Random Audio. HISTORY
In February 1945, when Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Yalta, the alliance that had helped rout Hitler was already showing strains, and the start of the Cold War lay only months away. Dobbs, a Washington Post reporter who covered the fall of communism and authored the best-selling One Minute to Midnight, about nuclear brinkmanship, should have the perspective to cover this story. Lots of in-house enthusiasm.

Barker, Pat. Toby’s Room. Doubleday. Oct. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780385524360. $25.95; eISBN 9780385535021. HISTORICAL
Booker Award winner Barker’s new World War I trilogy (following the wonderful “Regeneration” trilogy) concerns a group of friends who meet at London’s Slade School of Art and move on through life—straight into the war. In this second volume (after Life Class), Toby and sister Elinor share a dark secret, and when Toby is reported missing and believed killed, Elinor faces yet another secret: what really happened. Life Class seemed a weak start to this trilogy; perhaps as we move past backstory to the real tragedy of the fighting, Barker will show her spirit.

Cisneros, Sandra (text) & Esther Hernandez (illus.). Have You Seen Marie? Knopf. Oct. 2012. 112p. ISBN 9780307597946. $21; eISBN 9780307960863. INSPIRATIONAL FICTION
Bereft after the death of her mother (she felt like “a glove left behind at the bus station”), the award-wining author of The House on Mango Street found renewed meaning by helping friend Roz hunt for her missing cat, Marie. This for-all-ages illustrated volume shows how we heal by investing in others. With a 13-city tour to Albuquerque, Austin, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Portland, San Antonio, San Francisco, Santa Fe, and Seattle.

Duffy, Stella. The Purple Shroud: A Novel of Empress Theodora. Penguin. Oct. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780143122258. pap. $15. HISTORICAL
Duffy made waves last year with Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore, which won not just a lot of enthusiastic readers but the Stonewall Writer of the Year Award. In this sequel, Theodora has snared Justinian, Byzantine emperor in the 500s, and is now learning what it means to rule. The two books have been jointly optioned for an HBO miniseries, so stay tuned.

Fforde, Jasper. The Woman Who Died a Lot: A Thursday Next Novel. Viking. Oct. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780670025022. $26.95. POP FICTION
In her next outing, seventh in Fforde’s outrageously inventive series, Bookworld enforcement officer Thursday Next returns home to Swindon to recuperate after an assassination attempt. But all is not well with her children: Friday’s career in the Chronoguard is floundering, Tuesday won’t be ready with the anti-Smote shield Swindon needs when an angry Deity comes calling, and then there’s Jenny, who’s just a memory. Wistfulness with the fun; the ten-city tour says it all.

Grisham, John. The Racketeer. Doubleday. Oct. 2012. NAp. ISBN 9780385535144. $28.95; eISBN 9780385536882. CD/downloadable: Random Audio. THRILLER
Evidently, only four active federal judges have been murdered in this country, surprising given our wild and wooly ways. Grisham imagines a fifth, Judge Raymond Fogletree, found murdered with his secretary in the lakeside cabin he built for himself. As the narrator says, “I did not know Judge Fogletree, but I know who killed him, and why. I am a lawyer, and I am in prison. It’s a long story.” And one you will likely want to read.

Homes, A.M. May We Be Forgiven. Viking. Oct. 2012. 496p. ISBN 9780670025480. $26.95. LITERARY
Harold’s younger brother George has it all—a fabulous job, wife and kids, and home. He also has fabulous temper, and one day when he really loses it, he manages to lose everything else, too. Suddenly, Harold has a new life running someone else’s family. The forthright Homes, excellent at fractured domesticity, is a writer that, I find, makes serious readers sigh. With a five-city tour.

Jio, Sarah. Blackberry Winter. Plume. Oct. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780452298385. pap. $15. POP FICTION
Last year, Jio triumphed with two paperback originals, The Violets of March and The Bungalow, which together have 100,000 copies in print. Here she returns with a story that leaps from 1930s Seattle, when single-mother Vera Ray comes off the night shift into a May Day snowstorm (a “blackberry winter” storm) and finds that her son and been abducted, to the present day, when Seattle Herald reporter Claire Aldridge learns about the long-ago abduction and starts investigating. Sweet, absorbing women’s fiction, from what I know of her previous work.

Nesbø, Jo. Phantom. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780307960474. $28.95; eISBN 9780307960481. CD/downloadable: Random Audio. THRILLER
Nesbø’s books have sold more than 14 million copies worldwide in 47 languages; The Snowman, published here in 2010, has sold 150,000 copies to date and was bought by Working Title Films, with Martin Scorsese attached to direct. In this latest adventure featuring Harry Hole, Harry has abandoned Oslo for Hong Kong. Then Oleg, the son of the woman he loved and left behind, is arrested for murder, and Harry returns to save him singlehandedly (he’s barred from rejoining the police force). Much followed; consider multiples.

Salter, James. All That Is. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9781400043132. $25.95; eISBN 9780307961099. LITERARY
PEN/Faulkner winner Salter publishes rarely—this is his first fiction in seven years—but when he does it’s choice. This novel features World War II veteran Philip Bowman, now a book editor, who enjoys the charged and intimate environment of the era’s publishing world yet suffers in his emotional life, enduring a failed marriage and relentless betrayal. A real in-house favorite; don’t miss.

Sullivan, Mark. Rogue. Minotaur: St. Martin’s. Oct. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780312378516. $24.95. THRILLER
Billed as part Bourne Identity, part Mission: Impossible, and part Hitchcock’s It Takes a Thief, this thriller stars Robin Monarch, a former topnotch CIA operative who abandoned his post mid-mission and vanished without explanation. Now he’s a thief, stealing from the very, very rich. But after a job goes wrong, he’s trapped into completing the mission he left behind. Sullivan writes international best sellers by himself and with James Patterson; keep an eye out for this one.

Wickersham, Joan. The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 224p. ISBN 9780307958884. $24.95; eISBN 9780307958891. SHORT STORIES
Astute readers will know Wickersham as the author of National book Award finalist The Suicide Index and will have seen her short fiction in Best American Short Stories. This theme-and-variation collection swirls across the globe over centuries, ranging from the collaboration between Mozart and librettist Da Ponte on several operas to a racecar driver’s widow, and nursing home resident, and a love triangle in 1940s America. My vote for book on this list I’m most curious to see; with a reading group guide.

Applebaum, Anne. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945–1956. Doubleday. Oct. 2012. 640p. ISBN 9780385515696. $35; eISBN 9780385536431. CD/downloadable: Random Audio. HISTORY
Slate and Washington Post columnist Applebaum won a Pulitzer for Gulag, so you can bet that a lot of folks will be anticipating her next book. Here she explains how the Soviet Union, suddenly in control of Eastern Europe after World War II, turned those countries into communist regimes and what life was then like for citizens who often found the new ideology utterly alien. Applebaum not only dug into newly opened archives but conducted interviews, which should give this book a personal feel. Exciting!

Bastianich, Lidia Matticchio & Tanya Bastianich Manuali. Lidia’s Favorite Recipes: 100 Foolproof Italian Dishes, from Basic Sauces to Irresistible Entrées. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9780307595669. $24.95; eISBN 9780307960856. COOKBOOKS
Lidia Bastianich has famously written eight cookbooks, five accompanied by nationally syndicated public television series. Here, she again joins forces with daughter Tanya, an Oxford Ph.D. in renaissance art whose travel company arranges art and culinary tours of Italy. They’re aiming for a truly reader-friendly book, with a lower price point and more compact size than the previous titles. But I’m betting that you’ll find the same old Bastianich quality.

Berkus, Nate. The Things That Matter. Spiegel & Grau. Oct. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780679644316. $35; eISBN 9780679644323. MEMOIR/INTERIOR DESIGN
Made famous by Oprah, star of his own talk show (just wrapping its second and last season), author of the best-selling Home Rules, and, coincidentally, an executive producer of The Help, Berkus is one hot designer. This book, partly a memoir about his rocketing success after founding a design firm in the mid-1990s at age 24, also talks about design precepts and “the things that matter”—the beautiful things he surrounds himself with that remind him of who and what he has loved and where he wants to go next. With a four-city tour to New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles; the media opportunities here are huge.

The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs. Random. Oct. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780679644750. $40; eISBN 9780679644767. PETS
Essays, short humor, poems, fiction, and cartoons! By Malcolm Gladwell, Ian Frazier, John Updike, Susan Orlean, Arthur Miller, E.B. White, and more! All from The New Yorker! And all about dogs! (Don’t worry, aurilophiles, cats are up next.) 

Brzezinski, Matthew. Isaac’s Army: The Jewish Resistance in Occupied Poland. Random. Oct. 2012. 544p. ISBN 9780553807271. $30; eISBN 9780679645306. HISTORY
Yes, the Jews fought back during World War II, and journalist/author Brzezinski chronicles one telling example: an underground movement in Poland masterminded by Isaac Zuckerman, only in his twenties at the time. Based in the Warsaw Ghetto, the movement sent couriers throughout the country, protecting Jews while battling the Gestapo. All its members escaped through the sewers during the Ghetto Uprising, ultimately surviving the war and helping to smuggle Jews to Palestine; Brzezinski was able to interview many movement members for his book. One story of derring-do that really, really matters.     

Coleman, David G. The Fourteenth Day: JFK and the Aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis; The Secret White House Tapes. Norton. Oct. 2012. ISBN 9780393084412. $25.95. HISTORY
On October 28, 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba, effectively ending the Cuban Missile Crisis. Or so we have always thought. In fact, as secretly recorded White House tapes now reveal, nuclear missiles, nuclear bombers, and Soviet troops remained in Cuba after that date, with Kennedy carefully negotiating to get as many of them out as possible within setting off the pugnacious Khrushchev. Director of the Miller Center’s Presidential Recording Program, Coleman has the goods.

Henken, Priscilla J. Taliesin Diary: A Year with Frank Lloyd Wright. Norton. Oct. 2012. 192p. ISBN 9780393733808. $34.95. MEMOIR/ARCHITECTURE
With husband David, Henken lived at Taliesin as part of the Fellowship, the architectural community that worshipfully surrounded Frank Lloyd Wright from the 1930s to the 1950s. Her diary, covering 1942–43, captures not only Wright at his height but an entire movement, spiritual as well as aesthetic, and the conflicts within the community. For smart readers.

Hitz, Alex. My Beverly Hills Kitchen: Classic Southern Cooking with a French Twist. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 368p. ISBN 9780307701527. $35; eISBN 9780307960948. COOKBOOKS
Red-Pepper Tart? Salted Caramel Cake? This is not your standard Southern cooking, though Hitz draws inspiration from his Deep South roots (raised in Atlanta, he was a partner in the city’s famed Patio by the River restaurant). Then he mixes it up with what he learned about cooking in France to create…la nourriture au réconfort? Good cooks will know Hitz’s luxury prepared foods line, The Beverly Hills Kitchen, which he promotes on his top-ranked HSN show of the same name. With a six-city tour to Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco; with a 75,000-copy first printing.

Kurzweil, Ray. How To Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. Viking. Oct. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780670025299. $27.95. SCIENCE
New York Times best-selling author (The Singularity Is Near), National Medal of Technology winner, and former LJ columnist (note that he was keynote speaker at LJ’s first virtual ebook summit), Kurzweil here explains reverse engineering the brain. It’s a project to understand how the brain works, how the mind emerges from it, and what this means for our understanding of intelligence, human or machine. So that you can stay cutting edge; with a nine-city tour.

London, Stacy. The Truth About Style. Viking. Oct. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780670026234. $32.95. FASHION
Preteen psoriasis left London physically scarred and emotionally burdened, and later she endured bouts of anorexia and then binge eating that promptly doubled her weight. So the cohost of TLC’s What Not To Wear understands that how we feel about ourselves affects all our choices, including what we wear; our worst fashion don’ts often stem from deep-down crisis. Here, she helps us see the crisis, deflect those choices, and develop a style all our own. I’m already looking in the mirror….

O’Reilly, Bill & Martin Dugard. Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot. Holt. Oct. 2012. 304p. ISBN 9780805096668. $28. HISTORY
O’Reilly, who presides over the highest-rated cable news show in the country, had a best seller with Killing Lincoln. Here, joined by best-selling author Dugard, he moves forward a century to recount events leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the terrible day itself. And the subtitle suggests a look at the long-range consequences.

Presilla, Maricel E. Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America. Norton. Oct. 2012. ISBN 9780393050691. 864p. $45. COOKBOOKS
Lots of cookbooks out there on Latin American favorites, but this one seems truly comprehensive—just look at the page count (and there are 500 recipes). Co-owner of the Latin restaurants Zafra and Cucharamama in Hoboken, NJ (and a Ph.D. in medieval Spanish history—I like that), Presilla ranges from Mexico to Argentina and through the Spanish-speaking Caribbean to show us that Latin American cuisine is not just tamales but adobos, sofritos, sancocho, and more. With a five-city tour to New York, Miami, San Francisco, Napa Valley, and Los Angeles; seems pretty much essential if you’ve got the audience.
Quammen, David. Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. Norton. Oct. 2012. 480p. ISBN 9780393066807. $28.95. SCIENCE
AIDS. SARS. Ebola. Frightening diseases with one thing in common: like other diseases even now being discovered, they originate with wild animals and are c`ommunicated to humans in a process called spillover. (It’s the price we pay for invading their space.) The John Burroughs Medal–winning author of The Song of the Dodo went into the field with scientists who trap bats in China and monkeys in Bangladesh to understand how and why these diseases emerge. For more on this critical issue, see Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin’s Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It and Peter Piot’s No Time To Lose: Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses, both out next month, and Nathan Wolfe’s recent The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age.

Queenan, Joe. One for the Books. Viking. Oct. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780670025824. $24.95. LITERATURE
When he hasn’t been working as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Spy, and other publications, writing for venues ranging from Time to Rolling Stone, or coming up with best-selling books like Closing Time: A Memoir, Queenan is reading, reading, reading. But he avoids books praised as “astonishing” and picks his reads in unusual ways: with his eyes closed, for instance, or by digging up books he always thought he would hate. By not taking a glowy aren’t-books-profound approach, he could be showing us what reading is all about. Try this, literati.

Schwalbe, Will. The End of Your Life Book Club. Knopf. Oct. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780307594037. $25; eISBN 9780307961112. CD/downloadable: Random Audio. MEMOIR/LITERATURE
The hugely accomplished Schwalbe has had a hand in publishing (he’s a former senior vice president and editor in chief at Hyperion Books), journalism (he’s had pieces in the New York Times), and the new media (he founded of Cookstr.com). But then he’s had to keep up with his mother, who taught at Harvard and the Dalton School and then spent ten years building libraries in Afghanistan. When she was preparing for chemotherapy treatments at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Schwalbe asked her what she had read lately, and so began a habit of reading the same books and discussing them—an activity that sustained Schwalbe’s mother throughout her treatments. A perfect book-club book about books and the community they create that also portrays the love between mother and son; with a reading group guide (no surprise) and a six-city tour to Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

Sethi, Aman. A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi. Norton. Oct. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9780393088908. $24.95. BIOGRAPHY/CURRENT EVENTS
A former biology student who has worked as a butcher, tailor, and electrician’s apprentice, Mohammed Ashraf is indeed free of the baggage of everyday life; he is now a homeless day laborer in Old Dehli. Sethi, a correspondent for the Hindu whose reporting has earned him an International Committee of the Red Cross award, aims to illuminate the global economic crisis by detailing what happened to Ashraf, providing vivid scenes of a tuberculosis hospital, Beggars Court, and the Old Delhi Railway Station where Ashraf and his friends gather. Already an international best seller; I’m feeling good about this book.

Tatar, Maria, ed. The Annotated Brothers Grimm. Norton. Oct. 2012. 576p. ISBN 9780393088861. $39.95. FAIRY TALES
It’s been 200 years since the publication of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Children’s Stories and Household Tales, which collected the treasures of Europe’s oral folk tradition. To celebrate, here’s a deluxe edition of indefatigable Harvard folklorist Tatar’s annotated Grimm anthology, first published by Norton in 2004. Six new tales have been added (e.g., “Four Clever Brothers” and “The White Snake”), and even more illustrations grace the pages. (Think Arthur Rackham and George Cruikshank, among others.) Definitely consider replacing those battered 2004 copies.

Dean, Debra. The Mirrored World. Harper: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780061231452. $25.99; lrg. prnt. HISTORICAL
Author of the affecting The Madonnas of Leningrad, an ALA Notable Book and a No. 1 BookSense Pick, Dean returns to her favorite city but in an earlier era. In 1700s St. Petersburg, fervent daydreamer Xenia is happily married to Andrei, but when tragedy strikes she withdraws from friends and family to dedicate herself to the poor, eventually vanishing—into a “mirrored world”? Sounds like a Russian novel indeed! With a 75,000-copy first printing and a reading group guide; good for book groups.

Follett, Ken. Winter of the World. Dutton. Sept. 2012. 1008p. ISBN 9780525952923. $36. HISTORICAL
In 2010, Follett launched “The Century Trilogy” with the No. 1 New York Times best seller, Fall of Giants, which traced the lives of five interrelated families—American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh—through the early years of the 20th century. Encompassing World War I and the Russian Revolution, that lusciously detailed 1000-pager did daunt a few readers. But most will be back for this follow-up (just as big), featuring the same families but moving them along to the rise of the Third Reich and World War II.

Harman, Patricia. The Midwife of Hope River. Morrow. Sept. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780062198891. pap. $14.99. HISTORICAL
A practicing midwife who has authored two memoirs, The Blue Cotton Gown and Arms Wide Open—both small-press publications that found an appreciative audience—Harman turns to fiction with a heroine appropriately named Patience Murphy. Patience, a midwife just getting started in 1930s Appalachia, willingly takes on hard-luck cases even as she carefully guards her own secrets. The 75,000-copy first printing, five-city tour (Atlanta, Birmingham, Charleston, WV, Knoxville, and Nashville), and reading group guide bespeak hope for this book; watch closely, especially in Appalachia.

Kadrey, Richard. Devil Said Bang. Harper Voyageur: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 400p. ISBN 9780062094575. $24.99. FANTASY
If you’ve been following the Sandman Slim novels (Amazon Top Tenner Kill the Dead; Sandman Slim, among BN.com’s best paranormal fantasies of the decade; and Indie Next Pick Aloha from Hell), you’ll know that James Starker, aka Sandman Slim, managed to break out of hell to revenge his girlfriend’s murder and has since done time in a very unlovely Los Angeles. Aloha sent him back to Hell, where he’s now the new Lucifer, ready for another breakout and with everyone in Heaven and Hell lining up to take shots at him. When Cory Doctorow calls this movie-bound series “wryer-than-wry and violenter-than-violent,” you know the audience. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Oates, Joyce Carol. Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories. Ecco: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9780062195692. $24.99.
SHORT STORIES
Deluxe author Oates offers a collection of 11 previously uncollected stories, whose borderland scenarios range from a well-off wife’s eloping with a spotted hyena to visitors surprised by what they discover at a maximum security prison. The title story is most significant, however, as it tracks the friendship between Elizabeth Short, famously known as the Black Dahlia, the victim of a markedly brutal murder in 1940s Los Angeles that remains unsolved, and her roommate, Norma Jeane Baker—who of course became Marilyn Monroe. The 25,000-copy first printing seems a bit low for this master; as Monroe fever hits, starting in August, this could be part of the mix.

Santo, Courtney Miller. The Roots of the Olive Tree. Morrow. Sept. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780062130518. $24.99; eISBN 9780062130532. lrg. prnt. POP FICTION
Multigenerational sagas featuring indomitable women are the stuff of contemporary fiction, but this debut is noteworthy because it represents a full five generations, still living together in a house surrounded by an olive grove in Sacramento Valley. Family matriarch Anna is in fact 112, and great-great-granddaughter Erin has just returned home pregnant after singing opera for two years; now a geneticist wants to study all the women to determine the secret of the family’s longevity. But as Anna worries, that might mean revealing secrets about the family’s origins that she’s hidden for over a century. One of those big-push debuts with a 100,000-copy first printing.

Thilliez, Franck. Syndrome E. Viking. Sept. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780670025787. $26.95. THRILLER
Subliminal images packed into a little-known film from the 1950s are so truly horrifying that a friend of Det. Lucie Hennebelle has gone blind after watching it. Meanwhile, Inspector Franck Sharko is investigating five murders that seem to be related to the film. As terror escalates worldwide, it appears that in its early stages neuroscience was used not for good but for evil. Trust the French to go for a thoughty thriller; this one was a big best seller in France, with rights sold to 11 countries.

Tropper, Jonathan. One Last Thing Before I Go. Dutton. Sept. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780525952367. $26.95; CD: Penguin Audio. POP FICTION
No wonder Silver is feeling slightly desperate; his ex-wife is about to marry a terrific guy, his Princeton-bound daughter announces that she’s pregnant, and if he doesn’t acquiesce to an operation, he will soon drop dead. Having broken out in 2009 with This Is Where I Leave You, a New York Times best seller, Tropper returns with another darkly funny, queasily heartwarming tale.

Annan, Kofi. Interventions: A Life in War and Peace. Sept. 2012. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). NAp. ISBN 9781594204203. $36. MEMOIR/CURRENT EVENTS
Few memoirs coming out this year will be as interesting and as important as this one by Annan, seventh Secretary-General of the UN from January 1997 to December 2006 and a corecipient (with the UN itself) of the Nobel Peace Prize for having founded the Global AIDS and Health Fund. Check in on how the world turned during his time in office.

Bar-Zohar, Michael & Nissim Mishal. Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service. Ecco: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780062123404. $26.99; eISBN 9780062123442. HISTORY
Official biographer of David Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres, Bar-Zohar joins with leading Israeli TV personality Mishal to document the history of Israel’s crack intelligence service, focusing on high-profile cases ranging from Eichmann’s apprehension to the killing of important Iranian nuclear scientists—which makes the book particularly relevant. With a 30,000-copy first printing.

Bawer, Bruce. Children of the Revolution: How Identity Studies Have Destroyed American Higher Education. Broadside: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780061807374. $25.99; eISBN 9780062097064. HISTORY/EDUCATION
Since Bawer’s While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within was a New York Times best seller and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and his Stealing Jesus a PW Best Book of the Year, it’s worth paying attention to his latest, a critique of how identity politics have shaped the academy in the last four decades. Not everyone will agree with Bawer that Chicano, African American, and Women’s Studies courses are exercises strictly in power struggle and victimhood that have gotten in the way of objective reasoning, but then listening to all sides of the argument is exactly what thoughtful readers should do. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

Gitlin, Todd. Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street. It: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 176p. ISBN 9780062200921. pap. $10. CURRENT EVENTS
Wall Street may not be occupied right now, but the Occupy Wall Street movement has changed our way of thinking; we all know what that “99 percent” means. Arguing that the movement has been misrepresented by both the Left and the Right, Gitlin—author, Columbia journalism/sociology professor, and former president of Students for a Democratic Society—considers the causes and consequences of the movement and where it might go next. Not a huge printing, but right for the right readers; note the 99 percent–friendly paperback price.

Greenberg, Andy. This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim To Free the World’s Information. Dutton. Sept. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780525953203. $26.95. TECHNOLOGY/CURRENT EVENTS
In the Sixties we marched in the streets. Now many young men and women fed up with the government, the military, and the corporations slip into silent whistleblower mode, anonymously uploading institutional secrets that they feel should be exposed. Think WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and OpenLeaks, and think about the long-term impact, as Forbes reporter Greenberg has us do here.

Johnson, Joyce. The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. Viking. Sept. 2012. 512p. ISBN 9780670025107. $32.95. BIOGRAPHY
Nine months before On the Road was published, aspiring novelist Johnson met Jack Kerouac on a blind date set up by Allen Ginsberg. Minor Characters, her National Book Critics Circle Award winner, detailed their relationship. Here Johnson looks at Kerouac the young artist, showing that his French Canadian background, which left him suspended between two languages and two cultures, deeply influenced his work. For literati everywhere.

Lofgren, Mike. The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted. Viking. Sept. 2012. 208p. ISBN 9780670026265. $24.95. CURRENT EVENTS
Lofgren, a Republican who worked as a Congressional staffer for 28 years—the last 16 as a senior analyst on the House and Senate Budget committees—made news in September 2011 when he angrily quit over the debt ceiling crisis. Critical though he is of the tired Democrats, he saves his real bashing for the Republicans, whom he called lunatics in a piece he subsequently wrote for Truthout. That piece got so many hits so fast that the site crashed; reading the book might be just as tumultuous an experience.

McCord, Catherine. Weelicious: Fast, Easy, and Fresh Recipes Your Kids Want To Eat! Morrow Cookbooks. Sept. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780062078445. $27.50. COOKING
With a new baby and a culinary degree, McCord was well positioned to launch Weelicious.com, which began as a compendium of baby food purees and now fosters family eating that is healthful and tasty and suggests how to teach kids to make smart choices about food. The site gets more than 500,000 hits a day and was among the New York Observer’s Top Ten “Must Read” Websites for Parents, so this should be in demand. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Max, D.T. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. Viking. Sept. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780670025923. $26.95. BIOGRAPHY
Appearing in The New Yorker a year after David Foster Wallace’s suicide at age 46, Max’s “The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s Struggle To Surpass Infinite Jest” really fired up readers. Now Max offers what is less a portrait of the man than of the artist, detailing Wallace’s struggles to become a novelist while circumventing depression and addiction. He also explores Wallace’s powerful impact on American letters—particularly as a symbol of integrity in an increasingly slick world.

Mazower, Mark. Governing the World: The Rise and Fall of an Idea, 1815 to the Present. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). Sept. 2012. NAp. ISBN 9781594203497. $25.95. HISTORY
Having ranged from Duff Cooper Prize winner Salonica City of Ghosts to Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Hitler’s Empire, among many other titles, Oxford-trained historian Mazower—now director of the Center for International History at Columbia University—seems good and ready to discuss world government from the post-Napoleonic era forward. Go for it, history fans.

Mendez, Antonio & Matt Baglio. Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History. Viking. Sept. 2012. 352p. ISBN 9780670026227. $26.95. Downloadable: Random Audio. HISTORY
In 1979, after Iranian militants stormed the American Embassy in Tehran, creating a hostage situation that lasted 444 days, six Americans escaped. Then a CIA agent, Mendez arranged for their rescue by bringing a bunch of Hollywood directors, producers, and actors to Iran, ostensibly to scout locations for a film they dubbed Argo but in fact to contact the escapees and smuggle them out. A crazy plan, but it worked, and Mendez is sharing the details only now. Yes, a film about the rescue is forthcoming, starring Ben Affleck and releasing in September.

Miller, Carol. Up All Night: My Life and Times in Rock Radio. Ecco: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 208p. ISBN 9780061845246. $24.99. MEMOIR/MUSIC
You bet that there are readers anticipating this memoir by the country’s top female disc jockey, who was raised in a staunchly intellectual Jewish household in Queens, got into progressive rock radio while at the University of Pennsylvania, worked with legends like Cousin Brucie, went all chatty with Paul McCartney and dated Steve Tyler, and eventually made it to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, having hugely shaped the business with her distinctive on-air approach. Here she tells her story, revealing her battle with cancer and fears about an unnamed illness that has taken many family members early in life, which gave her a real incentive to accomplish.

Perry, Michael. Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace. Harper: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 336p. ISBN 9780061894442. $25.99; eISBN 9780062097798. BIOGRAPHY
Perry recently returned home to a 37-acre farm in New Auburn, WI (see his Population: 485), where he serves on the local rescue service when not commenting for NPR or acting as a contributing editor to Men’s Health. He’s also neighbors with octogenarian Tom Hartwig, who builds his own cannons, runs a shop seemingly “stocked by Rube Goldberg, curated by Hunter Thompson, and rearranged by a small earthquake,” and defies the four-lane interstate that was shoved through his front yard a few decades back. Perry is a good author—2009’s Coop was an Indie best seller and won a bunch of regional awards—and this portrait of an individual is also a welcome portrait of an underrepresented place and lifestyle. So check it out, especially if Perry come to your neighborhood; his driving tour takes him to Iowa City, Des Moines, Chicago, Wichita, Grand Rapids, Kansas City, St. Louis, Omaha, Lincoln, and Nashville, as well as Northfield, Stillwater, and Minneapolis, MN, and Madison, Rice, Red Wing, and Milwaukee, WI.

Ricks, Thomas E. The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today. Sept. 2012. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). Sept. 2012. ISBN 9781594204043. $36. CURRENT EVENTS
Once a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, currently with the Center for a New American Security and a Foreign Policy blogger, Pulitzer Prize winner Ricks has already given us two best-selling books on our recent venture in Iraq, The Gamble and Fiasco. Here he steps back to provide a broader picture of military leadership—and particularly the decline in sound military leadership—since World War II. No doubt sobering.

Silver, Nate. The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). Sept. 2012. NAp. ISBN 9781594204111. $27.95. SOCIAL SCIENCE
In 2008, Silver created the polling website and blog FiveThirtyEight.com (named for the number of electors in the electoral college), then relaunched the blog with the New York Times two years later. Here he challenges the very idea of making predictions in everything from weather to politics (interesting position for a pollster), so I won’t venture to say how this book will do. But it has a built-in audience.

Simmons, Sylvie. I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen. Ecco: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780061994982. $27.99. BIOGRAPHY/MUSIC
A music journalist who’s profiled folks like Neil Young and Johnny Cash and recently won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for her liner notes for Leonard Cohen Live at the Isle of Wight 1970, Simmons conducted more than 100 interviews with friends and musicians (ranging from Judy Collins to, interestingly, Phillip Glass) to craft this portrait of the man who gave us such immortal songs as “Suzanne” and “Bird on a Wire.” Music lovers of a certain age will want, and since Cohen has just wrapped up a sold-out three-year world tour after a 15-year hiatus, he’ll be on their minds.

Weiss, Luisa. My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story (with Recipes). Viking. Sept. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780670025381. $26.95. MEMOIR/COOKING
When cookbook editor Weiss launched Thewednesdaychef.com, now an award-winning blog that boasts 100,000 unique visitors per month, it was just the beginning of a dramatic story. As she wrote about cooking her way through a stack of recipes, she was inspired to dump her fiancé, then her job, then her home, leaving New York for Berlin, where she had been partly raised by her Italian mother. Yummy tales, like foraging for plums in an abandoned orchard; even the curmudgeonly might want to head for the kitchen. With an eight-city tour.

White, Kate. Sweet Success: How To Get It, Run with It, Savor It. Harper Business: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780062122124. $24.99. BUSINESS
Here’s what White is doing when she’s not at her desk as editor in chief of Cosmopolitan or writing best sellers like the Bailey Weggins mystery series: she’s writing a career guide for women aiming to make it today’s tumultuous business world. To achieve success, says White, you’ve got to “Get It”—that is, take a risk that will land you ahead of the curve, as White did when she put Lady Gaga on Cosmo’s cover—then keep building on what you’ve done and learn to enjoy it (or why bother?). With a 40,000-copy first printing and lots of publicity through social media.

Boyle, T.C. San Miguel. Viking. Sept. 2012. 384p. ISBN 9780670026241. $27.95. Downloadable: Penguin Audio. LITERARY
In 1888, ailing Marantha Waters moves to the desolate isle of San Miguel Island off Southern California’s coast with her Civil War veteran husband, who runs a sheep farm there and does everything he can to keep their aspiring-actress daughter from slipping her bonds and returning to the mainland. In 1930, New York City librarian Elise Lester and her gung-ho World War I veteran husband choose to settle on San Miguel and like the Waters family achieve only an uncertain peace. As always, Boyle gives us sharp moral conundrum in a distinctive setting; with an eight-city tour.

Chabon, Michael. Telegraph Avenue. Harper: Harper Collins. Sept. 2012. 480p. ISBN 9780061493348. $27.99; eISBN 9780062124609. CD: HarperAudio. LITERARY
Race, corporatism, and last-stand idealism: core themes of contemporary American life, and who better to explore them than Pulitzer Prize winner Chabon, whose linguistic razzle-dazzle discloses acute observations about our shared culture—and, especially, its borders. It’s 2004, and longtime band mates Achy Stallings and Nat Jaffe still preside over Brokeland Records, a used-record emporium and de facto town center in a fictional space somewhere between Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives are the Berkeley Birth Partners, beloved local midwives. All’s well until a former NFL quarterback, one of the country’s richest African Americans, decides to build his latest Dogpile megastore on nearby Telegraph Avenue. Not only could this spell doom for the little shop and its cross-race, cross-class dream but it opens up past history regarding Archy’s untethered dad and a crime dating back to the Black Panther era. With a one-day laydown on September 11, a 300,000-copy first printing, and a 13-city Tour to Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami (for the book fair) Nashville, New York, Raleigh/Durham, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Washington, DC. Get it!

Coplin, Amanda. The Orchardist. Harper: HarperCollins. Sept. 2012. 448p. ISBN 9780062188502. $25.99. HISTORICAL
At the turn of the 20th century, when two dirty, pregnant girls steal from an orchard in the foothills of the Pacific Northwest’s Cascade Mountains that Talmadge has tended for 50 years, he lets them. Soon they return, tentatively befriending this sweet, solitary soul, as rooted as the trees in the land he loves. Then armed and angry men invade the orchard, and Talmadge steps up to protect his new charges, even as he’s reminded of the past’s sorrowful secrets. Exceptional in-house cheering for this debut, with rights sold to a half-dozen countries so far and a 75,000-copy first printing. Surely this is meant as an evocative understanding of the American West and its continued grip on our psyche, and I can’t wait to see how it works.

Ennis, Michael. The Malice of Fortune. Doubleday. Sept. 2012. 400p. ISBN 9780385536318. $26.95; eISBN 9780385536325. Downloadable: Random Audio. THRILLER
When his son Juan is murdered in distant Imola, Pope Alexander asks the courtesan Damiata to discover what happened—and holds her young son hostage until she does. In Imola, Damiata is so undercut by the political intrigue originating with the pope’s other son, the Duke Valentino, that she turns to a little-known Florentine diplomat named Niccolo Machiavelli for help; the observational skills she needs to catch the killer are ultimately furnished by one Leonardo da Vinci. Now that sounds like fun reading; the publisher’s big fiction title of the month.

Smith, Zadie. NW: A Novel. Penguin Pr: Penguin Group (USA). Sept. 2012. NAp. ISBN 9781594203978. $25.95. LITERARY
It’s been seven years since Smith last published a novel, so we’re all really chaffing to read this one. NW stands for northwest, that is, northwest London, where a group of friends living on an estate make their way through school and on to adulthood, staying more or less true to their ideals. Smith, herself was born in London’s diverse northwest, will surely provide her usual gorgeous, almost scary understanding of that society and the world at large.

Toobin, Jeffrey. The Oath: The Obama White House vs. The Supreme Court. Doubleday. Sept. 2012. 368p. ISBN 9780385527200. $27.95; eISBN 9780385536301. Downloadable: Random Audio LAW/CURRENT EVENTS
Having laid bare the working of the Supreme Court in his prize-winning The Nine, Toobin returns to assess how the Court—and, specifically, Chief Justice John Roberts—stack up against President Obama. From the moment that Roberts blew administering the Oath of Office at Obama’s inauguration, he and the administration have been ideologically at odds. Toobin argues that the two men are both charismatic and ambitious, though Obama’s actually the conservative one; he aims for step-by-step change, building on the past, while Roberts wants to unstitch everything accomplished by the New Deal. Essential reading as we gear up for the election.

Chertavian, Gerald. A Year Up: Rediscovering America and the Talent Within. Viking. Aug. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780670023776. $26.95. Downloadable: Penguin Audio. EDUCATION
Serving as a Big Brother, technology entrepreneur Chertavian realized that the country was defined by an “Opportunity Divide”: lots of disadvantaged youth were eager to work—and to work their way up the ladder—but they needed guidance. So in 2000 he founded Year Up, a program for low-income young adults emphasizing training, mentoring, and internships leading to real jobs; 85 percent of graduates are employed or in college full time within four months of graduation. The mediagenic program currently helps 1300 students in nine cities nationwide. Here’s how it all works; with a nine-city tour and lots of push.

Fontaine, Claire & Mia Fontaine. Have Mother, Will Travel: A Mother and Daughter Discover Themselves, Each Other, and the World. Morrow. Jul. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780061688393. $24.99; eISBN 9780062109637. MEMOIR
Everyone loves finding-oneself travel memoirs, and this one has a particular hook; it follows up Come Back, the best-selling story of Claire Fontaine’s efforts to rescue her daughter, Mia, from drug addiction. A decade later, they are eager to move beyond the roles defined in that book. So they launch a six-month, 16-city, 12-country getting-restarted tour, with adventures that included a passport-eating elephant. A mother-daughter relationship book with some cool settings; a 50,000-copy first printing.

Goldman, Carrie. Bullied: What Every Parent, Teacher, and Kid Needs To Know About Ending the Cycle of Fear. HarperOne: HarperCollins. Aug. 2012. 320p. ISBN 9780062105073 $25.99. PARENTING
After her first-grade daughter, Katie, was roundly bullied for having what was considered a gender-inappropriate Star Wars thermos, Goldman—purveyor of a popular blog on the Chicago Tribune’s online Chicago.now—wrote a post that attracted lots of attention. Katie’s story appeared in hotspots like the front page of CNN.com and Germany’s Der Spiegel, and the hashtag #MayTheForceBeWithKatie got a big rush. Here, Goldman expands her post considerably to offer concrete advice on dealing with bullying, something one in five teens (to move beyond Katie’s age group) say they have experienced in the last year. At 25,000 not the hugest printing on this list, but the issue is in the news.

Levine, Madeline. Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success. Harper: HarperCollins. Aug. 2012. 368p. ISBN 9780061824746. $25.99; eISBN 9780062196682. PARENTING
What makes a good parent? For psychologist Levine, whose New York Times best seller, The Price of Privilege, netted more than 125,000 copies in hardcover and paperback, it’s not about raising top-scoring wunderkinder. Instead of pressuring some kids to overachieve while entirely neglecting others, we need to define success in terms of having a sense of purpose and well-being. As the tiger mama debates continue raging, this book should have lots of appeal. With a 75,000-copy first printing and author appearances in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.

Lustig, Andrea Pomerantz. How To Look Expensive: A Beauty Editor’s Secrets to Getting Gorgeous Without Breaking the Bank. Avery: Penguin Group (USA). Aug. 2012. 224p. ISBN 9781592407231. $22.50. BEAUTY/STYLE
This guide from Glamour beauty sleuth Lustig could just as well have been titled “How To Look Good Inexpensively.” Lustig offers tips from high-priced cosmetic artists, a recipe for deluxe skincare that costs under $20, ideas for getting a really good dye at an inexpensive salon, and more. Since Lustig’s column is featured on Glamour.com, which draws in three million unique visitors a month, this should have readers. And who doesn’t want to be gorgeous?

Montanti, Elissa with Jennifer Haupt. I’ll Stand by You: Changing the World One Child at a Time. Dutton. Aug. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780525952954. $25.95. MEMOIR
Billed as a memoir but more, actually. Fourteen years ago, to overcome her grief after the death of several loved ones, Staten Island lab technician Montanti decided to help collect school supplies for children in Bosnia but discovered they need something different. After helping a child horribly maimed by a landmine, she founded her one-woman organization, the Global Medical Relief Fund, which has since helped bring 150 injured children from war zones in Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere to this country for treatment. Already lots of coverage, including two 60 Minutes segments; this book shows us what can be done.

Solo, Hope with Ann Killion. Solo: A Memoir of Hope. Harper: HarperCollins. Aug. 2012. 240p. ISBN 9780062136749. $24.99. MEMOIR
Featured twice on the cover of Sports Illustrated. TV appearances ranging from The Late Show with David Letterman to Dancing with the Stars. Social media queen with 850,000 Facebook fans and 345,000 Twitter followers. Solo may have made her name as the independent-minded goalkeeper for the U.S. women’s national soccer team—she was there for the Olympic gold in 2008—but she’s much more than that. Here’s her story, focusing on her relationship with her father, who taught her to love soccer but disappeared from her life for a time when he was convicted of embezzlement. Given the weight of the story and Solo’s headliner reputation, not to mention comparisons to Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle, the 30,000-copy first printing seems a bit cautious.

Stephenson, Neal. Some Remarks. Morrow. Aug. 2012. 288p. ISBN 9780062024435. $25.99; eISBN 9780062133618. ESSAYS
Surprise! Not another juicy work of speculative fiction from best-selling award winner Stephenson but a collection of essays he has contributed to magazines, symposiums, websites, and blogs. It will be interesting to see the expansive Stephenson work in a smaller format as he discusses, for instance, genre, Isaac Newton, and Star Wars. With a 75,000-copy first printing and author appearances in Austin, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Diego, and Seattle. Cool.