Summer has yet to begin, but publishers and booksellers were focused on fall this past weekend at BookExpo America. The convention is a chance for publishers to build excitement for their BIG books, and, judging by the fervor created by the galley giveaways, they succeeded. See below for news and book recommendations from the expo, in addition to other highlights of the week.
Just like a Star Trek convention only marginally less nerdy.
Some BEA highlights…
- The NY Times book blog discusses the most buzzed about adult books, including the new Dan Brown novel, Lost Symbol. It also provides recommendations for works by less main stream, literary authors like Joshua Ferris and Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife.
- Publishers Weekly did a children’s book round-up, highlighting the biggest YA, middle-grade, and picture books. Catching Fire, the follow up to The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, generated the most excitement, with 1,000 galleys disappearing in ten minutes. Fortunately for attendees, fans did not ascribe to the first book’s fight-to-the-death approach when battling for galleys.
- In previous years, fights over galleys wouldn’t have been necessary, but this year BEA encouraged publishers to cut down on distribution. Part of the reasoning was budgetary, but the cutback also forced publishers to narrow their focus by selecting only a few galleys to give away. The LA Times book blog gives more details as it mourns the free book euphoria of years past.
In other news…
- There is now a pig in Gloucestershire named “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.” That’s because Geoff Dyer’s novel of the same name has been awarded this year’s Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, which means lots of champagne and a pig in your honor. According to judge James Naughtie, the winning book must be well written, interesting, and laugh-out-loud funny: “You can admire very clever intellectual fireworks but in the end you also need the odd belly laugh, and Dyer gives you that.” For more information on the prize and winning book, check out the Guardian’s coverage.
- According to Neil Genzlinger of the NY Times Book Review, even the most liberal, planet-loving readers will find themselves laughing at P.J. O’Rourke’s latest collection, Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending, Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed to Be – With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank Mowing Our Lawn. While Genzlinger bemoans the overly political essays toward the end of the book, he says most of the time “you’ll hardly hear the cries of the rare lizards and cactuses being ground to extinction under O’Rourke’s tires because you’ll be laughing too hard.” If someone’s going to destroy the planet, at least he’s making us laugh along the way.
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