Live From BEA:
Booksellers Hot on Colbert, Sebold, Russo
By Charlotte Abbott -- Publishers Weekly, 6/2/2007 2:20:00 PM
Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chief, delivered the BEA keynote and bagged the year’s killer advance for his memoir, The Age of Turbulence (Penguin Press), but TV’s beloved empty suit, Stephen Colbert may have stolen the show. Hundreds of sleep-deprived booksellers lined up at 7 a.m. yesterday for tickets to his signing, enduring a volley of flying elbows in the rush to meet him after the Book & Author Breakfast. While Colbert’s Nielsen ratings aren’t as high as his mentor Jon Stewart’s, many booksellers predicted that Colbert’s more literate viewers would propel I Am America (And So Can You!) (Grand Central, Oct. 2), to equivalent success.
In fiction, Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs (Knopf, Oct.) came up trumps. "It’s the best thing I’ve read for the fall," said Bill Cusumano, bookseller and buyer at Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor, Mich. "Russo is as controlled and concise as ever, but has expanded his horizon. It’s set in Venice and blends two stories together so beautifully." Betsy Burton, owner of the King’s English in Salt Lake City, added, "Russo’s never written a bad book—and you really can’t say that of most authors who’ve been around as long." Major hopes also hang on Alice Sebold’s second novel, Almost Moon (Little, Brown, Oct. 16). The first line ("When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily") suggests it probably won’t be a YA crossover like The Lovely Bones, but according to Nancy Quinn of the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee, Wis., it could have similar word-of-mouth. "It’s about the real burdens involved when parents grow older and start to rely on the next generation to care for them," she said. "I got up in the middle of the night to go back to it, and even insisted that a friend read it so I could talk to someone about it." Big Names and Breakouts Overall, booksellers are satisfied with the fall mix. "I was just talking with Roberta Rubin [owner of The Book Stall in Winnetka, Ill.] and we were surprised by how little we’ve heard about the book of the show," said Chuck Robinson, co-owner, Village Books in Bellingham, Wash. "People are pretty excited about the season overall." Among the most often-mentioned titles is Denis Johnson’s Viet Nam spy tale, Tree of Smoke (FSG, Sept.). Arsen Kashkashian of Boulder Bookstore mentioned its dauntingly long chapters, but Daniel Goldin, buyer at Harry W. Schwartz, countered that "this one definitely seems National Book Award-bound." There’s also lots of buzz about Ken Follett’s World Without End (Dutton, Oct.), the sequel to Pillars of the Earth (though the 1000-page galley isn’t yet available). For book clubs, there’s Ann Patchett’s Run (HarperCollins, Sept. 24), about two African-American brothers adopted by a Boston mayor. Patchett’s book club phenom Bel Canto is "a tough one to follow," acknowledges Kathleen Caldwell, owner of a Great Good Place for Books in Oakland, but Run "surpasses it" in her opinion. Others are bullish on Irène Némirovsky’s Fire in the Blood (Knopf , Sept 25), though the story set in the 1930s has a more domestic theme than her acclaimed WWII novel Suite Francaise."There are also some excellent debuts that we can sell vast quantities of before they get on the radar of national bestseller lists," said Vivien Jennings, owner of Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kan. She cited Noah Charney’s thriller The Art Thief (Atria, Sept.), as did Amazon’s Brad Parsons, who noted that Atria has had a great fiction run. Jennings also pegged Nancy Horgan’s Loving Frank (Ballantine, Aug.), about a woman who had a tragic love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. "If Loving Frank isn’t big in hardcover, it will be in trade since it’s perfect for book clubs," concurred Cusumano. Other potential breakouts include The Spanish Bow (Harcourt, Sept.), Andromeda Romano-Lax’s debut about a Catalan boy who receives a cello bow that launches him on a musical journey through 50 years of cultural tumult in Spain. "We think it has the same potential audience as Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind, which was a big hit for us," said Jen Reynolds, publisher relations manager at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati, Ohio. Brock Clarke’s An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (Algonquin, Sept. 4) has also sparked a lot of buzz, though opinions are more divided. Nancy Pearl of the Seattle Public Library found the narrative voice "wonderful," while Betsy Burton of the King’s English found the narrator too unsympathetic to sustain the anxiety-provoking plot. Caldwell, who has 120 book clubs registered at The Great Good Place, said she liked how Picador is publishing paperback original fiction, such as The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa, a collection of three novellas. "One of the stories was in the New Yorker, which is where I discovered her," said Caldwell. "Book clubs will often take a chance on a paperback over a hardcover." Memoir on the Rebound A year and a half after James Frey went down in flames on Oprah, "the memoir is still alive and well," declared Karen West, director of events at Book Passage in Corte Madera, Calif. Like many others, she expects big sales from political accounts, like outed CIA agent Valerie Plame’s Fair Game (S&S, Oct.) and Jimmy Carter’s newly announced memoir of his post-presidency (S&S), as well as celebrity-driven books like Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life (Scribner, Dec. 4). West also believes "we are also turning back to intimate stories." One eye-catcher is Amy Silverstein’s Sick Girl (Grove, Oct.), about a 24-year-old law student who gets a heart transplant, starts a family and outlasts her doctor’s life-expectancy predictions. "It’s a personal journey and also a larger story about the health-care system," she said, "much in the same way that Bridget Kinsella talks about prison from the personal point of view in Visiting Life" (Crown, July). Meanwhile, Goldin and Kashkashian talked up Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s by John Elder Robison (Crown, Sept.), which Robinson’s brother, Augusten Burroughs, will help him promote. Bottom line: Despite a slow first quarter in the industry, bookseller see plenty of hope for a good fall. —With reporting by Claire Kirch, Bridget Kinsella, Kevin Howell and Ed Nawotka
