Roy Miller's Blog, page 255
March 5, 2017
Not Your Bubbe’s Kasha Varnishkes: Jewish Cookbooks
For many people in the U.S., the phrase “Jewish cooking” calls to mind a specific kind of dish: “heavy, old-fashioned, and maybe not very good for one’s health,” says Kim Lim, assistant editor at Skyhorse. But while Eastern European staples such as stuffed cabbage and chopped liver still have a place at the table, she says, “it’s now an eclectic mix of global flavors.”
The Modern Jewish Table by Tracey Fine and Georgie Tarn (Skyhorse, Aug.) presents 100 Kosher recipes inspired by international cooking traditions—think Jewish empanadas and Chinese chicken sesame toast. The authors also twist the classics in dishes such as Sephardi chicken soup with fragrant matzo balls and vegetarian chopped liver.
In March, Blue Rider will publish Jack’s Wife Freda by Maya and Dean Jankelowitz, who co-own the two downtown Manhattan restaurants of the same name and who grew up with, respectively, Ashkenazi and Sephardic traditions. Julie Jaksic developed the recipe lineup, which includes shakshuka, a Middle Eastern egg and tomato dish; malva pudding, a South African dessert (malva is Afrikaans for marshmallow); and a traditional matzo ball soup.
“The range of foods and flavors has broadened in modern Jewish cooking,” says Sarah Hochman, editor-in-chief at Blue Rider and Plume. “A focus on ethnic and regional foods has supplanted what we used to think of as comfort food, and in some instances, as American cooking.”
Both editors cite the Ottolenghi effect—the publishing impact of Israeli-born British chef and restaurateur Yotam Ottolenghi, whose five cookbooks (two coauthored by Sami Tamimi, his business partner) have sold a combined 911,000 print copies, per NPD BookScan. Ottolenghi has also influenced London’s restaurant scene, with newer restaurants including the Palomar, a Michelin Bib Gourmand winner, feeding the appetite for Israeli-inflected dishes. In The Palomar Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, Mar.), Layo Paskin and Tomer Amedi, the restaurant’s creative director and chef, highlight the southern Spanish, North African, and Levantine inflections in what its subtitle calls modern Israeli cuisine.
Here are more cookbooks reflecting the culinary diversity of the Jewish diaspora:
Fress by Emma Spitzer (Mitchell Beazley, Apr.). Taking its name from the Yiddish word meaning “to eat without restraint,” this book by Spitzer, a finalist on the BBC cooking competition show MasterChef, includes recipes inspired by her international travels (slow-cooked Moroccan chutney) and family favorites (“Grandpa ‘Bugga’s’ Turkey Schnitzel”).
It’s Always About the Food by the Monday Morning Cooking Club (HarperCollins, May). A weekly gathering of six food-loving Jewish women in Sydney has spawned three cookbooks, including this latest, which celebrates global influences on Jewish cooking.
The Joys of Jewish Preserving by Emily Paster (Harvard Common, June). “Queen Esther’s Apricot-Poppyseed Jam” and lacto-fermented kosher dill pickles are among the 75 sweet and savory recipes.
King Solomon’s Table by Joan Nathan (Knopf, Apr.). James Beard Award–winner Nathan gathers recipes that span the ages and the globe: Syrian meatballs with cherries and tamarind; slow-cooked brisket with red wine, vinegar, and mustard. Alice Waters contributes the foreword.
Matzo by Michele Streit Heilbrun (Clarkson Potter, Mar.). Heilbrun, co-owner of Streit’s Matzos, founded by her great-grandfather in 1925 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, shows 35 ways to cook year-round with the Passover staple. Dishes include matzo granola, caesar salad with matzo croutons, and matzo spanakopita.
The Modern Jewish Baker by Shannon Sarna (Countryman, Sept.). Starting with basic recipes for traditional baked goods, Sarna then encourages flights of fancy—tomato-basil challah, s’mores babka, and more.
A version of this article appeared in the 03/06/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Not Your Bubbe’s Kasha Varnishkes: Jewish Cookbooks
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Carson McCullers at 100 – The New York Times
Carson McCullers in 1955.
Credit
Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images
Feb. 19 was the centenary of the birth of Carson McCullers, one of the most distinctive and ill-fated writers in American history. McCullers died when she was 50, in 1967. She suffered a series of strokes before she was 30, and spent much of her life in pain.
Earlier this year, the Library of America published a volume of McCullers’s short stories, plays, essays, memoirs and poems. But it’s the author’s fiction (also published by the Library of America, among others) that keeps her reputation strong a century on. Her debut, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” is routinely listed among the best books of the 20th century, and Rose Feld’s assessment of it in the Book Review in 1940 proves that its towering reputation was formed more or less immediately.
“No matter what the age of its author, ‘The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter’ would be a remarkable book,” Feld started. “When one reads that Carson McCullers is a girl of 22 it becomes more than that. Maturity does not cover the quality of her work. It is something beyond that, something more akin to the vocation of pain to which a great poet is born.”
McCullers was actually 23 at the time, but point taken.
“She writes with a sweep and certainty that are overwhelming,” Feld said, concluding that we were to anticipate McCullers’s second novel “with something like fear,” given the standard set by the first.
Despite her ailments, McCullers managed to lead an eventful life. Reviewing Virginia Spencer Carr’s biography “The Lonely Hunter,” in 1975, Robert Phillips said the book plumbed McCullers’s “inordinate dependency upon others” and unraveled “relationships far kinkier than those exposed in Quentin Bell’s ‘Virginia Woolf’ or Nigel Nicolson’s ‘Portrait of a Marriage.’ ” One friend of McCullers was quoted by Carr: “You had to like burdens to love Carson, and many of us could not afford her emotionally or economically.”
Quotable
“I got an advance in the mid-four figures for ‘300 Arguments’ — a book I worked on for a couple years. So, clearly, this is not a job. Writing these books is not a job. And I guess I’m lucky in that I never assumed it would be, so I made other plans.” — Sarah Manguso, in an interview with Hazlitt
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This Land Is Your Land
Stephen J. Hornsby’s “Picturing America” is a beautifully illustrated new book that documents the “golden age” of pictorial maps, from the 1920s to the 1970s. It includes the playful (distorted views of the country from the perspective of New Yorkers, Texans and Californians); the obscure (a map of volunteer fire departments in Philadelphia, circa 1792, commissioned and drawn in 1938); and more of the obscure (a map of Michigan bakeries). This note accompanies that last one: “This may be the only map that has loaves of sliced bread as border decoration.”
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March 4, 2017
Week of March 6, 2017
S&S Nabs Nagorski WWII Book
Former Newsweek foreign correspondent Andrew Nagorski (Hitlerland) sold North American rights to a new book about Germany during World War II, The Year Germany Lost the War: 1941. Trident Media Group’s Robert Gottlieb brokered the sale with Alice Mayhew at Simon & Schuster. The book chronicles the titular year during the war; as Gottlieb explained, the author makes the case that “a few key blunders laid the foundation for Germany’s subsequent defeat.”
Tor to Relaunch Martin’s Wild Cards
In a North American rights deal, Kay McCauley at Aurous sold four new books and five relicensed backlist titles in the Wild Cards anthology series edited by George R.R. Martin to Tor. Diana M. Pho acquired the books for six figures. The series was launched at Bantam Books in 1987; it is set in an alternate history in which an alien virus infiltrated Earth after World War II.
Caine Re-ups Library Line at Berkley
Anne Sowards at Berkley nabbed two more books in Rachel Caine’s Great Library series. Lucienne Diver at the Knight Agency represented Caine (Morganville Vampires series) in the six-figure deal for North American rights. The series is set in a world in which, as Berkley explained, “privately owning books is a crime.” The hero of the series, Jess Brightwell, comes from a long line of “black-market book smugglers.”
Sourcebooks Buys Block Novel
Sandra Block (Little Black Lies), a finalist for the International Thriller Awards, closed a world English rights deal with Sourcebooks’ Shana Drehs for her new novel, What Happened That Night. Rachel Ekstrom at the Irene Goodman Agency represented Block. The publisher said the book is about a woman who was sexually assaulted but has no memory of the attack. When a video of the assault surfaces, “she teams up with a computer-savvy coworker with his own reasons for settling old scores, and the two begin to exact cold, unvarnished revenge.” The book is slated for 2018.
Bard Prof Brings Wartime Memoir to Morrow
In a world English rights deal, Justus Rosenberg sold How to Become a Guerrilla to Henry Ferris at William Morrow. The book is subtitled Coming of Age with Varian Fry and the Underground in Wartime France, and it chronicles the author’s time in the French Resistance, describing how, in 1937, he escaped the Nazis. Rosenberg, who is 96 and a professor emeritus at Bard, worked with the American journalist Varian Fry during World War II. As part of Fry’s underground network, Rosenberg helped save thousands of people from the Nazis, including notable artists such Marc Chagall and Max Ernst. The book, which Eric Myers at Dystel, Goderich, and Bourret sold, is scheduled for fall 2018.
Briefs
Anna Quinn’s debut novel Split was acquired in a world rights deal by Addi Black at Blackstone. Quinn, who owns the Port Townsend, Wash.–based bookstore (and publishing imprint) the Writers’ Workshoppe, was represented by Gordon Warnock at Fuse Literary. Warnock said the novel follows a teacher whose long-dormant dissociative identity disorder emerges when she sets out to save her daughter from “an unknown terror set to strike on Valentine’s Day.”
University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Martin Seligman sold The Hope Circuit to Ben Adams at PublicAffairs in a deal brokered by Inkwell Management’s Richard Pine. The book, set for spring 2018, will, the publisher said, chronicle “the transformation of modern psychology from a focus on a crippling past to concentrating on what is positive in life.”
Betsy Teter, at the nonprofit South Carolina–based Hub City Press, nabbed North American rights to Leesa Cross-Smith’s Whiskey & Ribbons. Kerry D’Agostino at Curtis Brown Ltd., who represented the author, said the literary debut, which is set over the course of single weekend in Louisville, Ky., “follows a fallen police officer’s widow and his best friend as they’re forced to confront the feelings they have for each other after his death.” Whiskey & Ribbons is slated for spring 2018.
A version of this article appeared in the 03/06/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Deals
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Paperback Row – The New York Times
Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
THE GIVENNESS OF THINGS: Essays, by Marilynne Robinson. (Picador, $16.) Robinson addresses societal shifts that trouble her — dwindling compassion, a declining interest in exploring “the glorious mind” — through the lenses of Christianity and Calvinist thought that guide her faith. The paperback edition includes a two-part interview between Robinson and President Barack Obama.
IMAGINE ME GONE, by Adam Haslett. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) The reverberations of a father’s mental illness are felt by his family — particularly the eldest child, who inherits a crippling, destabilizing anxiety. The novel’s greatest reward is an assertion “that despite the expense of empathy and the predictable disappointment of love, our tendency to care for one another is warranted,” Bret Anthony Johnston wrote here.
EYE ON THE STRUGGLE: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press, by James McGrath Morris. (Amistad/HarperCollins, $16.99.) As a reporter for a prominent African-American newspaper during the civil rights era, Payne covered some of the period’s biggest stories on the “deseg beat”: Emmett Till’s murder, Brown v. Board of Education, the march on Selma. Morris’s biography also showcases the central role of the black press in accelerating change across the country.
THE FUGITIVES, by Christopher Sorrentino. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) In Sorrentino’s elegant thriller, characters are in stages of flight: from responsibility, punishment and heritage. Sandy, a successful author evading his publisher and agent back in New York, flees to a small Michigan town. There, he’s enthralled by John Salteau, whom he believes to be an Ojibway storyteller. But Salteau is actually a mobster linked to a casino theft, and a Native American journalist, Kat, is in pursuit of the story.
NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN: A History of the United States Postal Service, by Devin Leonard. (Grove, $16.) Leonard touches on scores of colorful anecdotes from the mail service’s history, including those involving a postal inspector who blocked material that he believed threatened morality (birth control pamphlets and Walt Whitman’s poems) and a family that sent their child 75 miles by parcel post because it was cheaper than the train.
WHAT IS NOT YOURS IS NOT YOURS: Stories, by Helen Oyeyemi. (Riverhead, $16.) The delightful tales in Oyeyemi’s first collection blur the distinctions between the real, the ordinary and the fantastical, employing keys to unlock connections between disparate characters and histories. As our reviewer, Laura van den Berg, wrote, “Oyeyemi has created a universe that dazzles and wounds.”
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Bring the Funk: Spring 2017 Cookbooks
Books on preserving food are perennial favorites, and this season, fermentation steps into the spotlight. The renewed popularity of the practice, which is integral to making kimchi and kombucha, sauerkraut and sourdough, falls in line with other culinary trends of the moment—pulling back from processed foods in the name of a more hands-on relationship with what we eat.
“People want to reconnect with food in a more elemental way,” says Jane Willson, publishing director at Hardie Grant, which will release Ferment for Good by Sharon Flynn, a how-to and recipe compendium, in May. Flynn runs the Fermentary in Melbourne, where she sells fermented goods and teaches workshops. Fermenting, which the author calls “slow food for a fast world,” may take days, weeks, or months.
Hannah Fries, project editor at Storey Publishing, agrees that, although fermenting is an exercise in patience, it demands very little of the home cook. “It’s a slow process, yes, but throughout most of it, you don’t really have to do anything, so it actually requires very little of your time,” she says. “Most ferments are easy to get started, and then they just take a little monitoring. It’s big payoff for a relatively low-maintenance process.”
In June, Storey is publishing Fiery Ferments by Kirsten and Christopher Shockey, who live on 40 acres in southern Oregon’s Applegate Valley. The couple’s first title with the publisher, 2014’s Fermented Vegetables, has sold more than 34,000 print copies, per NPD BookScan.
“People are discovering the health benefits of probiotics and live foods,” Fries says. “At the same time, they’re discovering the amazing flavors that these foods can bring to everyday meals. The combination is pretty irresistible.”
Elizabeth Seise, an editor at Page Street, agrees. “There’s a great appeal in fermentation right now due to accessibility and nutritional value,” she says. In May, Page Street will release Traditionally Fermented Foods by Shannon Stonger, who lives on an off-grid homestead in Texas and documents her agrarian lifestyle on the blog Nourishing Days, which has more than 10,000 Facebook followers.
Seise says fermentation appeals to the kinds of readers, shoppers, and cooks who want more engagement with their food and to eat with health in mind. She also believes the resurgence of the age-old process has to do with a growing open-mindedness about food preparation. “We’re going through a brilliant time in regards to the ever-expanding palate,” she says. “More people are open to trying new things, especially if they’re healthy for you.”
A version of this article appeared in the 03/06/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Bring the Funk: Fermenting Books Take Hold
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Not Yet 30, This Fantasy Writer Is an Old Pro
V.E. Schwab
History of Magic: The fantasy writer V.E. Schwab — whose new novel, “A Conjuring of Light,” concludes a trilogy about multiple, magical Londons and debuts at No. 6 in hardcover fiction — also writes young adult books as Victoria Schwab; last summer, her novel “This Savage Song” hit No. 1 on the Y.A. hardcover list. “A lot of people assume that my adult books are darker,” Schwab said on a recent visit to The New York Times, “when really the reverse is true. My Y.A. books are way darker than my adult books. Kids can handle it. Adults want their escapism and their whimsy, and kids are like, Hit me with the dark stuff.”
Schwab, who has sleek red hair and wore oversize black-framed glasses, splits her time between Edinburgh and Nashville, where she grew up. (She also lived for three months in a garden shed in Liverpool, “with a giant English spider named Bob,” behind a house that was “very, very, terribly haunted. I think I was actually better off in the shed.”) She will turn 30 this year. “A Conjuring of Light” is her 12th book and her third New York Times best seller. “I always say I would rather be overwhelmed than underworked,” she laughed, adding that her agent was ready to kill her a few years ago, when she had three books due but decided on a lark to pursue a graduate degree in medieval art history: “I studied monsters.”
How, she was asked, had she settled on London as the setting for this trilogy? “My mother is from southern England,” she said. “I remember the very first time we went to visit, I walked into a graveyard, because that’s what 8-year-old me would do. And I realized in that way that children do, when their world feels very small and suddenly it gets very big, that every grave in the graveyard was older than my country. And it was my first real physical sense of history and antiquity. I remember traveling around London as a child and thinking that you could turn a corner and lose a hundred years. There are places that you can’t actually tell what decade or what century it is. And I loved that. I loved this idea of history as an ever-present thing all around you.” Also, she said, she grew up as a Harry Potter fan: “This series is my love letter to Harry Potter. I grew up literally in time with those books. I was 11 when the first book came out. And they managed dark themes with a sense of whimsy and a sense of escapism, and I think it kind of speaks to where we are in the world right now that people long for that.”
You Are Here: Yuval Harari’s new book, “Homo Deus,” about our technological future, lands on the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 3. Harari told The Atlantic recently that in some respects, the future is now. “Look at GPS applications,” he said. “Five years ago, you . . . navigated based on your own knowledge and intuition. But today everybody is blindly following what Waze is telling them. They’ve lost the basic ability to navigate by themselves. If something happens to the application, they are completely lost.”
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On the Genius of Daniel Woodrell, the “Battle-Hardened Bard of Meth Country”
I should thank Ang Lee for turning me onto Daniel Woodrell in the first place. Like pretty much every great book I discovered in high school and my early college years, I saw the movie first. Lee’s Ride with the Devil, his follow-up to The Ice Storm, provided me with my first exposure to Woodrell. I don’t much remember the film, if I’m being totally honest. (Was Jewel in it or did I dream that?) But I do remember going to the library to track down Woodrell’s Woe to Live On (the basis for the film) the day after I saw it.
I wasn’t as thorough in those days as I am now. I relied on bag sales and thrift stores and the racks at my local used bookstore and the library. If I liked a book by a writer, it didn’t mean I was going to hunt down every book he or she wrote. James Ellroy, Richard Price, and Elmore Leonard were the exceptions. But I learned to get thorough. And in the early 2000s, at a library bag sale, I discovered the work of George Pelecanos. I devoured everything I could find by him. I read interviews and blog posts. It was through Pelecanos that I first learned of Megan Abbott, Vicki Hendricks, and Willy Vlautin. Somewhere in one of those interviews, Pelecanos mentioned Woodrell’s Tomato Red. It took me a little while to smarten up and track down a copy. When I finally did, my brain was switched on.
The occasion of this piece is the release of the film based on Woodrell’s Tomato Red. The second was, of course, 2010’s Winter’s Bone, which catapulted Jennifer Lawrence to stardom and spawned a whole series of country noir knockoffs in the realms of film, TV, and literature. The adaptation of Tomato Red, written for the screen and directed by Juanita Wilson (As If I Am Not There), opens today. I have high hopes for it. And I’m nervous the way you get nervous when you hear one of your favorite books is being turned into a movie. It’s a private fear that doesn’t much matter. The movie will be good or bad or somewhere in-between. Initial word is that it’s pretty phenomenal, though.
Tomato Red is a book I return to often. If you haven’t read Woodrell, it’s the place I usually suggest people start. It’s neck-and-neck with The Death of Sweet Mister as my favorite work of his. I work part-time in a record store, and I often press records by Jason Molina and Julien Baker and Richard Buckner into people’s hands with ferocity. If I worked in a bookstore, you can bet I’d be shoving Woodrell at you.
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Tomato Red is the story of Sammy Barlach and the Merridew clan: Jamalee, James, and their mother Beverly. It’s got the downed electric line feeling of Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? You’ve got to approach with caution or you might get lit up. Woodrell’s words can send you spinning off into the distance. As a narrator, Sammy Barlach’s no hackneyed gruff noir dolt. His telling enchants. Megan Abbott, in her wonderful foreword to the book writes: “The thing Woodrell does to words is the stuff of dark alchemy. He breaks language apart, shatters it to glittery pieces, then stitches it together new. You don’t even know what it is—are those words? Sentences? Am I bewitched?”
Woodrell does the same with plot. You think you know the path, you think you’ve been on the path before, and then the path shifts under your feet. The world is the trap. Mystery abounds. Woodrell’s tales are subtle and explosive at the same time. His characters are always in conflict, with a life or death problem at stake. His voice is natural. He is close to his page.
Talking about what makes for great fiction, Barry Hannah once said: “We want the world transformed. Pioneer perspective.” And that’s just what we get with Woodrell. Pioneer perspective. Every book, every line gives us a new way of seeing, of knowing, of remembering. When you walk into Woodrell’s world, you have to take time to marvel at everything, the way Sammy does in the broken-into mansion at the beginning of Tomato Red: “This place, even seen in short bright moments, was revealed to have double of everything worth having, just about.” As a writer, you think, Jesus Christ, this Woodrell guy’s got double of everything. Language, plot, dialogue, sense of place, energy, tension . . .
The 2010 Busted Flush reissue of Tomato Red features a cool eight pages of blurbs from the likes of Megan Abbott, Joe Lansdale, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, C.J. Box, Carl Hiaasen, Reed Farrel Coleman, Ken Bruen, Allan Guthrie, Ray Banks, Tom Piccirilli, Duane Swierczynski, and many more. There are no phoned-in blurbs here. No favors for pals. The general tone of these blurbs is one of unrestrained astonishment. It’s not enough to say that Woodrell is a writer’s writer, but it’s true. Allow me a cheap baseball analogy: Woodrell is like Greg Maddux. You just want to sit at the edge of the dugout and watch him call a game. You yourself might have a killer fastball or a ball-buster of a change-up or just be a mad dog on the mound, but you know what it’s like to be in the presence of true genius. The methodical approach, the newness of everything, the intuition. Maddux’s method, according to Thomas Boswell, was to “deny the batter as much information—speed or type of last-instant deviation—until it [was] almost too late.” That’s exactly how it feels reading Woodrell. You can try to do what he does, but it’ll feel like imitation Faulkner or McCarthy; it won’t sound like Woodrell.
In 2011, Woodrell appeared on Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations Ozarks episode, and The Bayou Trilogy (the Mulholland Books omnibus volume collecting Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do) was on President Obama’s summer reading list. The Winter’s Bone film had ushered in, it seemed, a new wave of Woodrell appreciation. The general reading public was starting to understand what crime writers had understood for at least 15 years. Benjamin Percy’s 2013 Esquire profile of Woodrell cemented his reputation as “American literature’s best-kept secret” and “the battle-hardened bard of meth country.” Woodrell’s most recent novel, The Maid’s Version, was released in 2013. A slim stunner, it met with a fairly quiet reception. It had been seven years since Winter’s Bone, and Woodrell hadn’t given the world Winter’s Bone Two. His picture was bigger, the roots of the overall story he was telling much grander.
When I was a freshman in college, I read William Kennedy’s great novel Ironweed, and—no hyperbole here—it changed my life. Part of what struck me about Kennedy’s writing was that it was so incredibly hard to label. I could feel the place. I knew his Albany without being there (though I was only about 70 miles away). I felt inhabited by his characters as one must be inhabited by ghosts. I was them. They were me. Needless to say, I feel the same about Woodrell’s Ozarks and about his people. Dennis Lehane says in the Percy profile that Woodrell “writes high Greek tragedy about low people, and he never panders or looks down on the people he writes about.” That’s one of many things he has in common with Kennedy. Woodrell’s deep respect for his characters is apparent. Being close to his page means being close to his characters. They’re never one-note. But it’s more than just that. He’s interested in the whole of humanity through the lens of his place. He’s interested in exploring the whole of history through the whole history of his place.
I don’t have a lot of goals here beyond getting readers who haven’t yet read Woodrell to read him. Pick up the reissues of Tomato Red and The Death of Sweet Mister right now. Read the books. Read them again. Then read the forewords by Megan Abbott and Dennis Lehane. After that, you’ll have more riches to choose from: The Bayou Trilogy, Woe to Live On, Give Us a Kiss: A Country Noir, Winter’s Bone, The Outlaw Album (his story collection), and The Maid’s Version. Woodrell has spent 30 years unfurling a complex, beautifully shaped American saga. He’s been reckoning with the tortured history of his place and his kin. His has been a raucous exploration of roots and consequences, a heartbreaking meditation on desperation and survival. I wish I could do more here. I wish I could tell you exactly how his books sing. But I’m at a loss. I’m standing at the edge of the dugout. If I can get close, I’m going to ask him to sign a ball after the game.
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This Week’s Bestsellers: March 6, 2017
Game On
The #1 book in the country is The Legend of Zelda: Art & Artifacts, covering three decades of the influential video game franchise. A limited-run slipcased edition, which retails for $80 (twice what the conventional edition costs), is #20 in hardcover nonfiction. Comics publisher Dark Horse has seen a fair bit of success with video game art books, notably this book’s predecessor, The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia, which has sold 383K hardcover copies.
(See all of this week's bestselling books.)
V.E.’s Day
Fantasy author V.E. Schwab concludes her Shades of Magic trilogy with A Conjuring of Light, which debuts at #11 in hardcover fiction. The first two books in the series, 2015’s A Darker Shade of Magic and 2016’s A Gathering of Shadows, have sold a combined 75K copies in hardcover and trade paper. Based on first-week print unit sales for all three books, her fan base appears to be brightening. Here’s a look.
Shades of Magic Series First Week Print Unit Sales
A Darker Shade of Magic
1,204
A Gathering of Shadows
2,292
A Conjuring of Light
5,917
To Live Divine
Homo Deus, by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, appears at #6 in hardcover nonfiction; it was also a top-three nonfiction book in Spain in December. Our review calls it a “deeply troubling book” that “provocatively explores what the future may have in store for humans.” It’s a sequel of sorts to Harari’s 2015 hit Sapiens, which was translated into more than 30 languages and has sold 140K copies in hardcover in the U.S. That book saw its best print unit sales since the 2016 holiday season this week, with a 172% boost over the week before.
New & Notable
Star Wars: Empire’s End
Chuck Wendig
#4 Hardcover Fiction
Wendig closes out his Aftermath trilogy, which bridges the gap between the events of Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.
Humans, Bow Down
James Patterson and Emily Raymond
#5 Hardcover Fiction
Patterson makes a rare foray into adult SF with this novel of a machine-ruled world, coauthored by Raymond, his collaborator on book five of the Witches & Wizard YA fantasy series.
Christina Baker Kline
#8 Hardcover Fiction
The author of 2013’s Orphan Train, which has sold well over a million copies in trade paper, fictionalizes the life of the woman who inspired Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World. Our review called Kline’s prose “evocative” and “insightful.”
Stealing Fire
Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal
#10 Hardcover Nonfiction
Kotler, a journalist, and Wheal, an expert on high performance, look to Silicon Valley executives, scientists, Navy SEALS, and the Burning Man festival for clues into how people can lead more fulfilling and more productive lives.
Top 10 Overall
Rank
Title
Author
Imprint
Units
1
The Legend of Zelda: Art & Artifacts
–
Dark Horse
28,827
2
A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman
Washington Square
21,329
3
Hidden Figures (movie tie-in)
Margot Lee Shetterly
Morrow
21,003
4
Green Eggs and Ham
Dr. Seuss
Random House
20,972
5
Milk and Honey
Rupi Kaur
Andrews McMeel
17,383
6
Double Down (Wimpy Kid #11)
Jeff Kinney
Amulet
17,323
7
Devil in Spring
Lisa Kleypas
Avon
17,236
8
Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders
Random House
16,619
9
1984
George Orwell
Signet Classics
16,248
10
The Shack Wm.
Paul Young
Windblown
16,117
All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.
A version of this article appeared in the 03/06/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: PW Bestsellers
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Middlesex is “damned by its own abundance”
“Like its hermaphroditic narrator, Jeffrey Eugenides’s long-awaited second novel is a hybrid—it’s at once a Greek-American family saga and a picaresque coming-of-age narrative. Whereas the author’s first book, The Virgin Suicides (1993), was closely woven, Middlesex is long and episodic, reaching back across the twentieth century and bringing in dozens of characters. Yet the organization is simple. Calliope Helen Stephanides—now the forty-one-year-old male narrator, Cal—tells us how he came to switch sexual identities; how he kept his secret; and what happens once his true nature is exposed.
Middlesex is consistently whimsical in its scene-setting and use of language, but despite its vaudeville exchanges and niftily isolated punch lines, it’s rarely out-and-out funny. The narration is baldly self-conscious in its cleverness. In the beginning Cal refers to his brother as Chapter Eleven, and throughout the first half he interrupts the story to give us portentous glimpses of coming events. Likewise, and also in the manner of the picaresque, the author takes advantage of his loose structure and has the narrator recap in spots what’s happened so far, as if, in all the commotion, we might have forgotten.
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The reader spends much of the first half of the book anticipating the birth of its hero, yet when Calliope finally arrives, her early childhood flies by, warranting less than a dozen pages (which gloss over the question of why her mother didn’t discover her secret while changing or bathing her). At this point, having established a historical sweep across several generations, the book noticeably shifts gears. The final two hundred pages focus on just a couple of years of Calliope’s adolescence, giving Eugenides a chance to revisit the world of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, that he sketched so brilliantly in The Virgin Suicides.
Perhaps this is the author’s true home territory, because it’s here, in Calliope’s sexual awakening, in the tensions of innocent and helpless desire, that Middlesex is at its best. At her private girls’ school Calliope falls in love with another student, whom Cal calls The Object, and their teenage romance, with all its Nixon-era trappings, leads—through a series of improbable events—to her unmasking. The tail end of the book, covering her testing at the hands of a pop sexpert, her choice to become Cal, and a brief dip into the underworld of porn, is anticlimactic, though line-by-line the writing is always jaunty and sharp.
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The action stops in 1975, with the now male Cal in contemporary Berlin. Throughout the book, in the briefest of vignettes, he’s been trying to romance a photographer named Julie while paralyzed by fear of disclosing his true nature; but this is so undeveloped compared with the other sections that the reader never feels it fully. And such problems plague the whole novel: it’s off proportionally, both section-to-section and overall, its two halves at odds, each interesting at times but neither truly satisfying, despite Eugenides’s prodigious talent. Like Cal, it’s damned by its own abundance, not quite sure what it wants to be.”
–Stewart O’Nan, The Atlantic, September, 2002
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Letters to the Editor – The New York Times
DAVID ROSENBERG
MIAMI
The writer is the author of “A Literary Bible” and collaborated with Harold Bloom on “The Book of J.”
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Drawn Into the Middle East
To the Editor:
Janine di Giovanni’s review (Feb. 12) of recent graphic books about the Middle East described the disparate approaches the three books took to portraying the region and touched upon reasons for their varying levels of success; but, remarkably, the reviewer failed to devote a single line to what makes these graphic novels and memoirs graphic — the actual illustrations.
Glen Chapron’s photorealistic artwork gives “The Attack” the air of a gripping motion picture filmed on location in Israel and the West Bank. The cartoonish drawings in Riad Sattouf’s “Arab of the Future 2” are an appropriate way to depict the tribulations of the 6-year-old protagonist. And Sarah Glidden’s simple watercolor illustrations for “Rolling Blackouts” effectively convey the hard work and painstaking process of international journalism.
It’s nice that graphic novels and nonfiction are approaching parity with prose books in the review media. But a book reviewer who ignores the visual aspect of this format is no better than a film reviewer who keeps her eyes shut during a screening.
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GORDON FLAGG
PORTLAND, ORE.
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Lincoln and the Border States
To the Editor:
Alice Kessler-Harris’s review of Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s “Six Encounters With Lincoln” (Feb. 12), referring to the loyal border states where slavery was legal, claims that “to ensure their commitment to the Union, Lincoln simply turned a blind eye, dashing the democratic aspirations of thousands of enslaved people.”
Lincoln’s posture on combating slavery — and bringing about its eventual extinction — was far more nuanced than turning a blind eye. One example: On March 10, 1862, Lincoln met with a group of representatives from the four border slave states (Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky and Delaware) to encourage them to accept his plan for gradual, compensated emancipation.
On July 12, 1862, Lincoln invited 29 border-state representatives to the White House to press his emancipation plan, telling them, “I do not speak of emancipation at once, but a decision at once to emancipate gradually.” Two days later the president proposed to draft a bill “to compensate any State which may abolish slavery within its limits.” The representatives rejected the offer. Lincoln then began thinking, perhaps more earnestly, about another, broader strategy — and later that year introduced the Emancipation Proclamation, to take effect on Jan. 1, 1863.
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CHARLES W. MITCHELL
PARKTON, MD.
The writer is the editor of “Maryland Voices of the Civil War.”
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Perusing the Book Review
To the Editor:
In Jonathan Safran Foer’s book “Here I Am,” the character Sam Bloch observes that “perused” is “a word that means the exact opposite of what most people think it means.” After reading that, I looked up the definition of “perused,” and discovered that I was among “most people.”
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Apparently, so is James Atlas. In “Headed for the Graveyard of Books” (Author’s Note, Feb. 12), he determines that the books in the Shelburne Farms library “look as if they’ve been perused if not exactly read.”
MICHAEL OSTROFF
PASADENA, CALIF.
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The Book Review wants to hear from readers. Letters for publication should include the writer’s name, address and telephone number. Please address them to books@nytimes or to The Editor, The New York Times Book Review, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018. Comments may also be posted on the Book Review’s Facebook page.
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Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that we are unable to acknowledge letters.
Information about subscriptions and submitting books for review may be found here .
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