Summer Books Season

USA Today posts its lengthy interactive list of summer fiction and non-fiction. You can sort by title, author or release date, and look at all the books at once or only fiction or non-. Excerpts available for some. [22 May]
Politics and Prose Bookstore’s Summer Favorites 2008, with separate lists for hardcover fiction, paperback fiction, pb […]

Patricia Cornwell’s Latest to Be Serialised in UK

Booktrade announced today that UK newspaper The Times will serialise Patricia Cornwell’s latest novel, The Front, “in its entirety prior to UK publication” on 15 May 2008, starting with the first of ten daily instalments this Monday. The book, the second to feature Massachusetts State Investigator Win Garano and only 208 pages, won’t be released […]

Spring Books Preview

it’s that time again … Here are links to the first of the Spring Books Preview lists:
>> Washington Post: Lists about 35 fiction, mystery and suspense, and short story titles , and the same number of non-fiction titles, organised by topic (biography, the world, sports, memoir, etc.)
>> Village Voice: Features a review of Martin Amis’s […]

New Books This Week

The Reader’s Advisor lists “sure-to-sell” books due out this week.
Fiction titles include Susan Wittig Albert’s latest China Bayles crime novel, Nightshade; Nevada Barr’s latest Anna Pigeon crime novel, Winter Study; Dorothy Cannell’s Goodbye, Ms. Chips, latest in the Ellie Haskell series; Barbara Delinsky’s Suddenly; Eric Jerome Dickey’s Pleasure; Karen Robards’ romantic thriller Guilty; and the […]

RA Rundown

Don’t forget to check out the weekly RA Rundown at The Reader’s Advisor Online Blog. (If you add the weblog to your RSS aggregator, you won’t have to remember.) Here’s this week’s, with news of Wally Lamb’s first new novel in 10 years, problems for print encyclopedias, and of course mashups of the hottest books […]

Dan Brown’s Next Book

The big question for many: When will Dan Brown’s next book, following his wildly successful The DaVinci Code (2003), be published? Jeffrey Trachtenberg, writing in the Wall Street Journal today, says it’s a mystery:
“[T]he nation’s biggest retailers can barely restrain themselves. ‘We’re constantly asking,’ says Bob Wietrak, vice president of merchandising at Barnes & Noble […]

Benazir Bhutto’s Book Out Soon

“Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated last week at a rally in Pakistan. Harper Collins announced that her new book, originally scheduled for Spring, was completed only about a week before her death. The book, called Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West, will be rushed into print as soon as possible, according to […]

E-Books / Amazon’s Kindle

From The Reader’s Advisory Online Blog yesterday:
“What To Say When Your Patrons Ask About E-Books Tomorrow (And They Will)
“In case you haven’t heard, Amazon unveiled their new E-Book reader — the ‘Kindle’ — today.
“Don’t just brush this off as more hype. This launch is huge. So here’s what you do: … “
Read on.

The Greying of American Books

From an article in the LAT today, title Shades of Gray in Fiction, by Maria La Ganga:
“Since America’s 78 million baby boomers started turning 60 last year, dozens of novels with graying protagonists and late-life themes have hit the nation’s bookstores, adding a few new wrinkles to the face of contemporary fiction and underscoring a […]

Christian Bookselling

Three pieces recently about Christian publishing:
>> Halo to Christian profits in the Telegraph (24 Sept.): Although sales in the UK of Christian books have almost doubled in 10 years, from £60m [$122 million] 10 years ago to £110m [$224 million] now, chain bookstores, like Waterstone’s, “don’t take the category seriously or stock a wide […]