PW Picks: On Sale the Week of November 7, 2011

The most noteworthy books hitting stores this week includes big guns like Stephen King, Umberto Eco, Don DeLillo and Annie Liebovitz; fringe darlings in sci-fi hero Phillip K. Dick and conservative stalwart Newt Gingrich; and highly anticipated books from Robert K. Massie (Catherine the Great) and Christopher Paolini (Inheritance). Plus: two volumes looking to cash in on earlier smash successes—Heaven Is For Real and The Hunger Games, respectively—and a biography of late, beloved author Kurt Vonnegut (yet another fringe darling, a sci-fi hero humanist stalwart).

PW Tip Sheet: Here Come the Memoirs

This week is chock-full of memoirs...but why do we read them?

Reading List: John Hodgman

Coming out this week is That Is All, the final installment of a trilogy of nonsensical almanacs from the sly, satirical John Hodgman (The Areas of My Expertise), contributor to The Daily Show. Hodgman shares the four books that inspired his oeuvre.

Ranking Sherlock Holmes Stories? Elementary

"When I was asked to write The House of Silk, I reread the entire canon and promptly fell in love with them all over again, and if I have one hope for my book, it’s that it will introduce a new generation of readers to these wonderful stories."

PW Picks: On Sale the Week of October 31, 2011

Our top books hitting bookstores this week, featuring books by Joan Didion, Condoleezza Rice, Malcolm Gladwell and Marcel the Shell. Read our reviews and full On-Sale Calendar.

Excerpt: Don’t Peak in High School

An exclusive excerpt from The Office writer and actress Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) out on November 1 from Crown.

Drawing Board: Awkward Family Pet Photos

Yes, Awkward Family Pet Photos is finally a book. Mike Bender and Doug Chernack, coauthors of the New York Times bestselling Awkward Family Photos, have returned with another "celebration of awkwardness."

Literary Cage Match: Which Book Deserved to Win the Booker?

Deputy Reviews Editor Mike Harvkey and News Editor Gabe Habash settle, via cage match, who should've rightly won the Man Booker this year.

Debbie Nathan's Reading List

"Researching Sybil Exposed often felt like rummaging through an Olde Curiosity Shoppe crammed with dusty books."

One Question for a Bookseller

Dustin Kurtz, a bookseller at Manhattan’s beloved McNally Jackson, gives us the skinny on bestselling backlist titles.

PW Picks: On Sale the Week of October 23, 2011

Our top books hitting bookstores this week. Also includes links to our reviews and full On-Sale Calendar.

PW Tip Sheet: The Book Award Blues

What a week it’s been for indignation. The National Book Award finalists (announced last week) came under criticism from Salon’s Laura Miller for its rarefied selections (“the literary equivalent of spinach”), while the Man Booker committee attracted grumbling for the opposite reason, for dumbing down literature by privileging readability over quality. NBA judge Victor LaValle published a rejoinder to Miller on PW’s Book News Web page,and a coterie of British writers came together to support an alternative to the Booker, the imaginatively named Literature Prize. (Whew. And we haven’t even mentioned the bad week Lauren Myracle has been having.)

But so much sturm and drang, I’d argue, is wonderful for literature.

Six Questions for Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami's Translator

Haruki Murakami’s much anticipated IQ84 is out this week. We caught up with Jay Rubin, Murakami’s longtime translator, to find out the pleasures (no cognates!) and pains (trembling hands!) of his trade.

Essay: On Metal and 'Moby-Dick'

They’re curious bedfellows—heavy metal and classic literature—but not as surprising as you might think. Consider how many heavy rock and metal bands—notably Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, and Metallica—have gone ekphrastic and based individual songs on works of literature. Still, few bands come to mind as having devoted an entire album to one book. Enter Mastodon’s 2004 release, Leviathan, inspired by and loosely based on Melville’s classic.

To an extent, all albums are “conceptual” in that they are totalities, but the term is most often used to describe albums in which the musical composition, lyric content, and album art integrate themes and establish a narrative. This is entirely true of Leviathan, right down to Paul A. Romano’s cover design of a white sperm whale breaching to toss a ragged whaling ship.

PW Picks: On Sale the Week of October 17, 2011

Our top books hitting bookstores this week. Go online for our reviews and full On-Sale Calendar.

Drawing Board: Matt Kish

Matt Kish, artist and author of Moby-Dick in Pictures talks about how the book came to be.

Five Questions for Nathaniel Philbrick

Nathaniel Philbrick, winner of the National Book Award, talks about his new book Why Read Moby-Dick? with PW.

PW Tip Sheet: All Aboard the Pequod!

The National Book Award committee has unfurled a typically iconoclastic list of finalists, sidestepping the big names of the year—Didion, Harbach, Eugenides—in favor of debuts, smaller presses, lots of biographies, and lots of looking back. If there’s anything unifying the titles—or the adult titles, at least—it’s mood and focus: they’re overwhelmingly about the past and overwhelmingly about societies in the grip of transition and individuals in the grip of history. They’re books about hard times (is it any wonder these are the books speaking to us now?)

Some books look at the past—and some books from the past, it turns out, never quite leave us. Nathaniel Philbrick, himself a NBA winner, has a new book out this week—Why Read Moby-Dick?—and it got us thinking about how certain books seem to excite other books.

Three Questions for a Children's Bookseller: Meghan Goel

Meghan Goel, children’s book buyer at BookPeople in Austin, Tex., cues us in to the books she (and her customers) are looking forward to this season.

PW Picks: On Sale the Week of October 10, 2011

Our top 10 picks of books hitting bookstores this week, including new titles by Jane O'Connor and Robin Preiss Glasser, Jeffrey Eugenides, Harry Belafonte, Roz Chast, and Alan Hollinghurst.