Book Radar: Eleanor Catton, Richard Flanagan, Salman Rushdie, Rebecca Schaeffer, Maurice Isserman, Lee Child

Booker-winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton’s third novel, BIRNAM WOOD, sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A psychological thriller, Birnam Wood is set in rural New Zealand where super-rich foreigners have stored caches of weapons in fortress-like homes in preparation for disaster. The novel follows the guerrilla gardening outfit Birnam Wood, a group of quarreling leftists who move about the country cultivating other people’s land. Their chance encounter with an American billionaire sparks a tragic sequence of events which questions, ultimately, how far each of us would go to ensure our own survival–and at what cost.

Winner of the Booker Prize in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan’s next novel, FIRST PERSON, about the producer of a TV reality show who recalls his years as a young, struggling writer and his decision to serve as the ghost writer for a notorious con man–and how he and grew increasingly uncertain if he was helping the con man write his memoir, or if the tables had turned and he was instead re-writing his own life–to Knopf for publication in April 2018.

Salman Rushdie’s THE GOLDEN HOUSE, a modern-day bildungsroman set against the panorama of American culture and politics since the inauguration of Barack Obama, it presents a host of memorable characters, including a young American film-maker whose involvement with a secretive, tragedy-haunted family teaches him how to become a man, weaving together a story of life over the last eight years: the rise of the Tea Party, Gamergate and identity politics; the backlash against political correctness; and the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain sporting make-up and colored hair, to Random House for publication in September 2017.

Rebecca Schaeffer’s debut NOT EVEN BONES, featuring a teenage girl who dissects monsters, packaging their parts for sale on the black market, but when her mother brings home a live specimen, she follows her conscience and helps him escape—and ends up sold on the black market in his place, pitched as Dexter meets This Savage Song, to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s for publication in Fall 2018.

Author of Continental Divide and winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for history Maurice Isserman’s CLIMB TO GLORY, the definitive WWII history of the 10th Mountain Division, the force of elite mountain and ski troops who led the Allied advance through northern Italy, and whose members (including Ivy leaguers, two Von Trapp children, future presidential contender Bob Dole, and the eventual founders of Aspen and Vail) would go on to reshape both America’s environmental movement and help launch its favorite winter pastime, to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

NYT bestselling author Lee Child’s NO MIDDLE NAME: The Complete Jack Reacher Short Stories, a volume of all Lee Child’s short fiction featuring Jack Reacher; a new novella, TOO MUCH TIME, along with SECOND SON, DEEP DOWN, HIGH HEAT, NOT A DRILL and SMALL WARS, five Reacher novellas which were first published in eBook-only form, and all the other Reacher short stories that Child has written, to Ballantine Bantam Dell for publication on May 30, 2017.

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made. As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.

Book Radar: Jessica Keener, Keir Graff, Elizabeth Strout, Elizabeth Crane, Tim Wirkus, Denis Johnson, Mike McCormack, Stephen King & Owen King

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made. As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.

From Publishers Lunch, news of the following book deals...

Jessica Keener’s STRANGERS IN BUDAPEST, about a grieving father, convinced his son-in-law has murdered his daughter, who travels from Boston to Budapest to take matters into his own hands when an American couple and their newly adopted son—also in Budapest—become dangerously entangled in the father’s obsession for revenge, pitched as reminiscent of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, to Algonquin for publication in 2017.

Booklist Online editor and author of The Other Felix and the upcoming The Matchstick Castle Keir Graff’s THE PHANTOM TOWER, where a pre-war apartment building in Chicago turns out to be a portal—for an hour a day—to its ghostly, never-built twin; when a couple of kids stumble upon the tower—whose residents may be alive, dead, or something...different—they’ve got to find their way back to reality, to Putnam Children’s.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout’s ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE, exploring the adult lives of the characters who grew up with Lucy Barton in Amgash, Illinois, to Random House for publication in June 2017.

Author of The History of Great Things and We Only Know So Much, Elizabeth Crane’s story collection TURF, featuring stories that explore and satirize our search for identity and belonging, tales of realism that blend into the fantastical, to Soft Skull for publication in Summer 2017.

Tim Wirkus’s THE INFINITE FUTURE, a genre-bending novel set in Brazil, Idaho, and outer space, which follows a librarian, a writer on the lam, and a disgraced historian, on an impossible quest for a fabled mystical book, whose pages we eventually find ourselves in, pitched as a mix of Bolano and Bradbury, to Penguin Press.

National Book Award and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Denis Johnson’s story collection (all original material except for two stories), for publication in January 2018, and a novel about a deposed Middle Eastern dictator retelling his life’s story as he is being interrogated, to Random House.

Irish author Mike McCormack’s SOLAR BONES, shortlisted for The Goldsmith Prize; on All Souls Day it is said in Ireland that the dead may turn up in their own home, and so we meet a middle-aged engineer who turns up between 12 noon and 1 p.m. at his kitchen table and reflects on the events that took him away and how minor decisions ripple into waves and test our integrity every day, to Soho Press.

Stephen King and son Owen King’s SLEEPING BEAUTIES, a novel set in the near future, to Scribner for publication in 2017.

Book Radar: Paul Auster, Martyn Burke, Paula McLain, Kathleen Alcott, Michael Crichton, Christian McKay Heidicker

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made. As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.

From Publishers Lunch, news of the following book deals...

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy, The Book of Illusions, and Sunset Park), about the four parallel lives of one 20th-century, American boy, to Holt for publication in February 2017.

Music for Love or War by Martyn Burke, a novel of the clash of civilizations of Hollywood and Afghanistan, to Tyrus Books for publication this December. Its opening lines: “According to what we’ve been told, the source of all knowledge is somewhere just south of Sunset Boulevard. The problem is that Danny has lost the address.”

Lovers and Exiles by Paula McLain (The Paris Wife and Circling the Sun), based on the life of Martha Gellhorn, the war correspondent who was also Ernest Hemingway’s third wife, to Ballantine for publication in 2017.

America was Hard to Find by Kathleen Alcott (Infinite Home), tracing the fallout of an affair between an astronaut and a radical anti-war activist on their families, friends, colleagues, and, especially, their child, from the 1960s through the Cold War, a period of time when Americans’ understanding of their own country utterly changed, to Ecco.

The late Michael Crichton’s Dragon Teeth, following the rivalry between real-life paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh during a time of intense fossil speculation and discovery in the American West in 1878, told through the adventures of a young fictional character named William Johnson who is apprenticed first to one, then to the other and not only makes discoveries of historic proportion, but transforms into an inspiring hero, found in the Michael Crichton Archives by his widow Sherri, who says it “was clearly a very important book for Michael,” to Harper for publication in May 2017.

Christian McKay Heidicker’s Throw Your Arm Across Your Eyes and Scream, pitched as Pleasantville meets Cloverfield, following the 15-year-old daughter of the woman who was carried to the top of the Empire State Building by King Kong, in a world where the horrors of 1940s and 50s sci-fi movies are everyday occurrences, to Simon & Schuster Children’s for publication in Summer 2018.

Book Radar: Nancy Pearl, J. P. Monninger, William Jensen, Tara Ison, S. M. Stirling and Sarah Weinman

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made. As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.

From Publishers Lunch, news of the following book deals...

Librarian Nancy Pearl’s GEORGE AND LIZZIE, a married couple have radically different understandings of what love and marriage should be. He grew up in a warm and loving family in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his father an orthodontist, his mother a stay-at-home mom; while she grew up as the only child of two famous psychologists who related to her more as an in-house experiment, than a child to love; it extends from their first meeting to more than a decade into their unlikely marriage. (Touchstone, publication in June 2017)

J. P. Monninger’s THE MAP THAT LEADS TO YOU, in which a recent college graduate traveling around Europe with her two best friends meets and falls in love with an enigmatic Vermonter a few years older than she is, who is following his grandfather’s journal to various cities around Europe. (St. Martin’s, publication in Summer 2017)

William Jensen’s CITIES OF MEN, pitched as Richard Russo’s The Risk Pool, Tobias Wolf’s This Boy’s Life and Richard Ford’s Canada. It’s billed as a Bildungsroman wherein a mother goes missing without explanation and her son sets out to find her. Along the way, the boy experiments with alcohol, violence, and vandalism, and he begins to truly know his father, a Vietnam veteran struggling with PTSD. Together, father and son drive around the hills of Southwest America in hopes of finding the most important woman in their lives.

Author of Rockaway and Ball, Tara Ison’s AT THE HOUR BETWEEN DOG AND WOLF, a coming-of-age novel of identity and the devastating consequences of war and prejudice, about a Parisian-Jewish girl who must hide out with French Christian villagers during World War Two, pitched in the vein of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See. (Counterpoint, for publication in Spring 2017)

S. M. Stirling’s THE BLACK CHAMBER TRILOGY, set in an alternate history where Teddy Roosevelt regains the Presidency in 1912, kicking off a 20th century of even greater technological and social change than in our real timeline. (Ace, for publication in 2017 and 2018)

Editor of the anthologies Women Crime Writers and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives Sarah Weinman’s AMONG THE WHOLESOME CHILDREN, on the abduction and tragic life of Sally Horner, the real-life inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. (Ecco)

Book Radar: Neal Stephenson, Kris D’Agostino, Sebastian Junger

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made.  As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.

From Publishers Lunch, news of the following book deals...

New York Times bestselling author (including the most recent Seveneves) Neal Stephenson’s Fall, pitched as a high-tech retelling of John Milton’s classic Paradise Lost featuring some characters from Stephenson’s Reamde, to William Morrow for publication in Fall 2017.

Author of The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac Kris D’Agostino’s The Antiques, a humorous family drama about three estranged siblings who return home, amidst a Hurricane Sandy-like storm, to sell an heirloom painting at their dying father’s request, only to discover their real fortunes lie elsewhere, pitched in the vein of Jonathan Tropper and Emma Straub, to Scribner.

Sebastian Junger’s Tribe, the follow-up to War, focusing on the stresses that veterans face after completing their service, combining history, psychology and anthropology as he investigates the “alienating effects of modern society,” to Twelve for publication in May 2016.

Book Radar: Ron Rash, Geraldine Brooks, Rick Moody, Mark Lawrence

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made.  As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.


1.  From Publishers Lunch comes the announcement of this sale:

Ron Rash's untitled novel, about two brothers who share responsibility for a murder, and a collection of poetry, to Megan Lynch at Ecco.

If it weren't for the Oxford comma, I might have thought this was a single work about two killers who also write poetry. But I assume this is a two-fer deal, which means we'll get a novel and another poetry book from one of my favorite contemporary authors. Here's hoping this new collection follows in the footsteps of his earlier release, Waking, which I particularly enjoyed.

2.  This next novel coming from Geraldine Brooks (author of People of the Book and March) really has me intrigued: Horse, about a famous racehorse and a missing masterpiece, moving from match races in the antebellum South to the salons and paint-spattered studios of the 1950s New York art world at the dawn of abstract expressionism, set as the Civil War ignites, threatening both a beloved horse and an irreplaceable painting. It's forthcoming from Viking....in 2020. In the meantime, Brooks fans can anticipate this Fall's release: The Secret Chord, a novel about Biblical King David's life. Cue "Hallelujah."

3.  Here's another book to put on your long-range radar: Rick Moody's The Long Accomplishment, a new memoir on marriage and love. It will be a month-by-month account of the first year of his second marriage, to artist Laurel Nakadate,  and will be published in 2017.

4.  Finally, of possible interest for those of you who are fans of Nuns With Guns literature comes Red Sister by Mark Lawrence, author of Prince of Thorns. This new one is billed as an "epic fantasy trilogy about a girl of unique abilities who is taken away by an abbess to join an order of fighting nuns" and is scheduled for publication in Spring 2017.

Book Radar: A Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly duet, a Shirley Jackson thriller, Matthew Quick's Good Luck, the return of Robert Stone

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made.  As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.

I was noodling around my agent's website last night and stumbled across this joyous announcement: a new Tom Franklin novel is imminent.  The buttercream frosting on this news is the fact that his wife, poet Beth Ann Fennelly, is co-author of The Braided River.  To the best of my knowledge, this is the first creative work they've collaborated on--apart from their three children...and editing an anthology of Southern fiction (The Alumni Grill II: Anthology of Southern Writers).  It's no secret I'm a huge fan of Franklin's previous books--the short story collection Poachers and the novel Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter--so The Braided River, set in 1927 Mississippi, is a big, loud ping! on my book radar.  Here's the synopsis I found at the Sobel Weber site last night:

With the Mississippi swollen to dangerous flood levels, the water crashing at the high levee walls and the rain unceasing, Ham Johnson and Ted Ingersoll, WWI vets and U.S. Government prohibition agents, have been diverted from their normal duties and sent to tiny Hobnob, Mississippi, where the river bends precariously. Two previous agents have disappeared on this assignment. A case of stolen dynamite is reportedly on its way to Hobnob. If a saboteur can blow the Hobnob levee, the town will flood, yet all the towns and cities from Jackson to New Orleans will be spared. Their mission, to find the dynamite and save the town, gets more complicated when the agents discover, in the aftermath of a crime, an abandoned baby. Enter Dixie Clay Holliver, the best bootlegger in the county. Her house, Sugar Hill, is several miles from Hobnob, in deep piney country, near the creek by her still. Her husband Jesse--charismatic, philandering, sometimes violent--distributes her whiskey. He is a man-about-town in local speakeasies, and someone she’s beginning to realize is a stranger. Dixie Clay has resigned herself to a life of solitude, making her perfect whiskey and mourning her own baby, who died two years before. The river continues to rise, and she continues to work. And then a stranger named Ingersoll brings her a baby. That’s when her troubles--and her joys--begin. And Ingersoll's.

The Braided River is scheduled to be published by William Morrow in October.

Shirley Jackson fans, should sit up, antennae quivering and buzzing, at this news of a "deal" I found in a Publishers Lunch email last week: "Susan Scarf Merrell's untitled literary thriller set at Bennington College in the 1960s, narrated by a young woman who moves with her professor husband into the home of novelist Shirley Jackson and Jackson's husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and who uncovers a chilling connection between the celebrated couple and the disappearance of a young co-ed on campus years before, [sold] to Sarah Hochman at Blue Rider Press, for publication in 2014."  Lest you think the Hymans might have been a dull couple, I direct you to this Wall Street Journal article written in 2010 by biographer Joan Schenkar who spins some eyebrow-raising tales of dinners in the Hyman-Jackson "rambling Victorian house."

Matthew Quick, author of The Silver Linings Playbook, has sold his next novel to HarperCollins.  The Good Luck of Right Now is, according to Publishers Lunch, "a comic yet moving novel told through a series of letters to Richard Gere, written by a young man who, in the aftermath of his mother's untimely death, forms an unlikely family with three other damaged souls--a priest, a librarian, and her brother."

And finally, from the Department of It's-About-Time, word has reached this intrepid reporter's ears that a new novel by Robert Stone--his first in a decade--will hit bookstores in November.  Death of the Black-Haired Girl, coming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has this brief teaser synopsis on its Amazon page: "an illicit romance at one of America's most esteemed colleges leads to tragedy..."  Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to catch the elevator up to the Department of Can't-Wait.

Book Radar: Benjamin Percy, Stephen King, Ian Rankin, Fifty Shades of Louisa May Alcott

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made.  As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.

One of the biggest, brightest blips on my radar in recent days was the news that a new Benjamin Percy novel was in the works.  I'm already looking forward to his werewolf love story, Red Moon, which should be coming our way early next year.  And now comes word that his next novel, called The Dead Lands, will be published by Grand Central.  According to Publishers Lunch, it's "a post-apocalyptic reinvention of Lewis and Clark's epic journey across the West."  I can't wait to discover it!

Next year at this time, Stephen King will have a new novel called Joyland coming from Hard Case Crime, publishers of his previous short novel The Colorado Kid.  The press release has this description of the new novel: "Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever."  In that same press release, King stated: "I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts. That combo made Hard Case Crime the perfect venue for this book, which is one of my favorites. I also loved the paperbacks I grew up with as a kid, and for that reason, we’re going to hold off on e-publishing this one for the time being. Joyland will be coming out in paperback, and folks who want to read it will have to buy the actual book."  In a carefully-polished sound byte which, as Nigel Tufnel says in This Is Spinal Tap, puts it up to eleven, Hard Case editor Charles Ardai said: "Joyland is a breathtaking, beautiful, heartbreaking book....It’s a whodunit, it's a carny novel, it's a story about growing up and growing old, and about those who don't get to do either because death comes for them before their time. Even the most hardboiled readers will find themselves moved. When I finished it, I sent a note saying, 'Goddman it, Steve, you made me cry.'"

Good news for Inspector Rebus fans: author Ian Rankin is bringing his character out of retirement.  His next novel featuring the Edinburgh detective (his 18th) is called Standing in Another Man's Grave and looks like it will be published here in the U.S. in January.  Rankin made the announcement at the recent Hay Festival, saying there was "unfinished business between the two of us."  He'd previously sent Rebus into retirement in Exit Music four years ago.

And now I will inexcusably lower the bar of decency here at the blog ("What?!" you say. "There was a bar?").  Capitalizing on the Fifty Shades of Grey tidal wave, OR Books will bring us Fifty Shades of Louisa May in July.  In an interview with Galley Cat, the anonymous author boldly bares all: "Call it lewditure. Call it literotica. Call it an antidote to mommy porn."  She/he doesn't care what you call it, as long as you swipe your Visa card and put your dirty money in his/her pocket.  The publisher's synopsis says the book "imagines an unhinged Melville doing what comes naturally, a Centennial Ball unlike any heretofore described, Louisa May’s ardent encounters with her 'Wooden Friend,' and much, much more."  I'm sorry to report that it's also "explicitly illustrated with X-rated woodcuts."  Cue the Moby's Dick jokes.

Book Radar: J. K. Rowling, Junot Diaz, William T. Vollmann, Aryn Kyle, Herman Wouk, and Erik Larson

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made.  As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.

By now, you’ve no doubt heard the news that J. K. Rowling will be coming out with her first adult novel (perhaps you’ve also heard that chewing gum you like is coming back into style).  The Casual Vacancy is a “blackly comic” tale about an idyllic town ripped apart by a parish council election.  The 480-page book will be set in Pagford, a dreamy spot with a cobbled market square and ancient abbey which becomes a town at war with itself.  I never made it through the Harry Potter books (and barely survived the Potter movies), but The Casual Vacancy actually sounds like something I’d pick up and spend a few hours with (tea and scones close at hand, of course).  The novel will appear in late September.

Junot Diaz also has a new book of fiction coming out this Fall.  His new story collection This Is How You Lose Her, “about the heartbreak and radiance that is love,” will be published by Riverhead on September 11.  Diaz hasn’t published a book since winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in 2008, so his fans are pretty thirsty for his words. Here’s what Riverhead had to say in its press release:

 [The stories] capture the heat of new passion, the recklessness with which we betray what we most treasure, and the torture we go through – “the begging, the crawling over glass, the crying” – to try to mend what we’ve broken beyond repair. They recall the echoes that intimacy leaves behind, even where we thought we did not care. They teach us the catechism of affections: that the faithlessness of the fathers is visited upon the children; that what we do unto our exes is inevitably done in turn unto us; and that loving thy neighbor as thyself is a commandment more safely honored on platonic than erotic terms. Most of all, these stories remind us that the habit of passion always triumphs over experience, and that “love, when it hits us for real, has a half-life of forever.”

It’s been seven years since his last novel--the National Book Award winner Europe Central--but now it appears William T. Vollmann has two forthcoming works of fiction: Last Stories, a collection of “ghost” stories: supernatural, metaphysical, and psychological tales about love, death, and the erotic, set all over this world and the next; and The Dying Grass, the next novel in his “Seven Dreams” series, which also includes The Rifles, The Ice-Shirt, and Argall.  According to my Publishers Lunch email, The Dying Grass explores “the clash between Native Americans and White settlers, [and is] set during the Nez Perce War of 1877 with flashbacks to the Civil War.”  This is a reminder to me that I need to crack open those other Vollmann “Dreams.”

Here's another deal that pinged sharply on my radar screen: a new novel by Aryn Kyle, author of The God of Animals.  Publishers Lunch says Hinterland is “the story of a turbulent platonic friendship between a married father and the gifted, troubled, charismatic woman he's known since college, and how her sudden death--one he feels he should have saved her from--changes the course of his life and that of his family: a story of friendship and family, obsession and devotion, failure and forgiveness, and love.”  If that sounds a little canned and cliche, consider the strength of the opening line of The God of Animals, her debut novel: Six months before Polly Cain drowned in the canal, my sister, Nona, ran off and married a cowboy.  I have no doubt Kyle can pull off a terrific narrative with verve and energy.

And here’s the most heartwarming, encouraging deal on my Book Radar: 96-year-old novelist Herman Wouk has sold his latest novel to Simon & Schuster.  The Lawgiver follows the production of a movie about Moses through “letters, memos, emails, journals, news articles, recorded talk, tweets, Skype transcripts, and text messages” sent between characters.  Publication is set for the fall.  It’s nice to see the The Winds of War author is still going strong.

And, finally, for all you fans of Erik Larson (In the Garden of Beasts and The Devil in the White City), you’ll be happy to hear he’s got another narrative history on the way.  Sea of Secrets is “a fresh take on the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, which heightened tensions between the US and Germany and helped sway American public opinion in favor of entering the war."  Looks like you’ll have to wait a while, though--the New York Times says its tentative publication date is 2015.

Book Radar: Tom Wolfe, Stephen Dobyns, Andrew Sean Greer

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made. As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.


It looks like Tom Wolfe's long-discussed, much-anticipated novel about immigration will finally be published this October.  At least that's what Amazon has posted on its page for Back to Blood.  It also carries this full-to-bursting plot synopsis:

As a police launch speeds across Miami’s Biscayne Bay--with officer Nestor Camacho on board--Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, a wanna-go-muckraking young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; an Anglo sex-addiction psychiatrist and his Latina nurse by day, loin lock by night--until lately, the love of Nestor’s life; a refined and oh-so-light-skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole-spouting, black-gang-banger-stylin’ little brother; a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers in the ’hoods, ‘de-skilled’ conceptual artists at the Miami Art Basel Fair, ‘spectators’ at the annual Biscayne Bay regatta looking only for that night’s orgy, yenta-heavy ex-New Yorkers at an ‘Active Adult’ condo and a nest of shady Russians.

Back to Blood has been lobbed like a shuttlecock across the net in media reports since at least 2008 when the New York Times broke the news that Wolfe had decided to leave his long-time (42 years) publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux for a reported $7 million advance from Little, Brown.  Wolfe didn't comment on the move, but he did have this to say about the book: “Two years ago when I got the idea of doing a book on immigration, people would say, ‘Oh, that’s fascinating,’ and then they would go to sleep standing up like a horse. Since then the subject has become a little more exciting, and in Miami it’s not only exciting, it’s red hot.”  So, what do you think?  Will the octogenarian's next novel be hot as a bonfire, or will it fizzle like his last novel, the campus romp I Am Charlotte Simmons?


Here's another plot description that sets my radar to beeping and blipping:

[The novel] is set in a small Rhode Island town where a newborn baby is replaced by a snake in its hospital bassinet, a mysterious stranger is shot dead and scalped and large, ornery coyotes have taken to roaming the streets.

That's for The Burn Palace by Stephen Dobyns (The Church of Dead Girls) which will be coming from Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin, sometime in winter 2013.  Ornery coyotes are always good.


The plot description for Andrew Sean Greer's next novel, Many Worlds, doesn't exactly set off the sprinkler system for me, but I have full faith that the author of The Story of a Marriage and The Confessions of Max Tivoli will pull off another dazzler.  Here's the brief synopsis which appeared at Publisher's Marketplace: "a young woman living in 1985 receives electroconvulsive therapy for her depression and, as a result, travels through time to parallel worlds where she is forced to confront the uncertainties of love and the unpredictable consequences of even the most carefully considered choices."  In an interview with the Haighteration blog last summer, Greer elaborated a little more on the story, saying it was about "three different versions of her life, one in which she's living in 1918, one in which she's living in 1941, and one in 1985. So she gets to see how her life would have been different if she had been born in different times."  Many Worlds will be coming from Ecco sometime in 2013.

Book Radar: Lemony Snicket, George Saunders, Michael Chabon

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made.  As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.


In the most happy unfortunate news I've heard in a long time, Galley Cat reports that Lemony Snicket will return to bookstores this October.  Mr. Snicket (aka Daniel Handler) makes his morose way back to the page in a four-book series from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers called All the Wrong Questions which will kick off with Who Could That Be at This Hour?  Best news of all?  Graphic novelist Seth will illustrate the “authorized autobiographical account” of Snicket’s childhood.  While I'll miss Brett Helquist's exquisite renderings of the world of A Series of Unfortunate Events, if anyone had to replace him, my first choice would be Seth.  Here’s more from the Little, Brown release: “Drawing on events that took place during a period of his youth spent in a fading town, far from anyone he knew or trusted, Snicket chronicles his experiences as an apprentice in an organization nobody knows about. While there, he began to ask a series of questions—wrong questions that should not have been on his mind. Who Could That Be at This Hour? is Snicket’s account of the first wrong question.”


Publishers Marketplace reports that George Saunders' Tenth of December, his first story collection in six years, is set for publication by Random House in Fall 2012.  Happy, happy news for fans of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline!


By now, news of Michael Chabon's next novel is as omnipresent as one of his wife's Twitter rants.  But in case you hadn't heard, Telegraph Avenue will be making its appearance sometime this Fall, courtesy of Harper Perennial.  The Huffington Post has a few details and several links to other stories.  It's been described, at various times, as being " a contemporary adult novel set in and around the San Francisco Bay Area," "a 'naturalistic' novel about two families in Berkeley," and a story set in "the shifting restless polycultural territory manifesting in the joint between Oakland and Berkeley."  Whatever the label slapped on the book, I've got one of my own: "PROMISINGLY FANTASTIC."