-
Pulp Hero: The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, PW Book of the Week
The Angel’s Game Carlos Ruiz Zafón . Doubleday , $26.95 (464p) ISBN 978-0-385-52870-2 Fans of Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind and new readers alike will be delighted with this gothic semiprequel. In 1920s Barcelona, David Martin is born into poverty, but, aided by patron and friend Pedro Vidal, he rises to become a crime reporter and then a beloved pulp novelist.
-
Universal Westerns: PW Talks with Author Craig Johnson
Craig Johnson’s The Dark Horse is his fifth contemporary mystery featuring Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire. What would you want everyone to know about Walt’s home state of Wyoming? It’s diverse, and even if there are only 535,000 of us, it’s not as square as it looks, culturally or physically.
-
Children's Books: Virginia Lee Burton Turns 100
With so many major literary commemorations this year—the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth and the 150th of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to name just a few—Virginia Lee Burton’s son, Aris Demetrios, says that he’ll do whatever it takes to make his mother’s centennial stand out, including donning a sandwich board and walking around the Boston Common.
-
Children's Book Reviews: Week of 4/6/2009
Among this week's reviews: Kate and Jules Feiffer's take on the pet heading to the White House; new fiction from Margarita Engle and Jenny Valentine; and round-ups of advice titles and books with inventive formats.
-
Web Exclusive Reviews: Week of 4/06/2009
This Week's Web: lyrical essays on a life in poetry, a celebrity psychologist on the sickness of celebrity, a graphic ambulance ride-along, the new science of talent development, and two excellent volumes on music and race relations. Plus: Cezanne the Godfather, Thoreau the arsonist, and Paula Deen the health-conscious (not to worry, it's just for a chapter).
-
Nonfiction Book Reviews
The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana Rick Bass . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt , $26 (384p) ISBN 978-0-547-05516-9 Novelist and naturalist Bass (The Lives of Rocks) gets up close and personal with local fauna, flora and folks in this account of the passing seasons in northwestern Montana’s Yaak Valley wilderness range, where he and his family—four of the estimated 150 inha...
-
Bailouts of the Self-Help Kind: Self Help Books in a Down Ecomony
Millions of jobs lost. Companies struggling to stay afloat. Economies around the world teetering on the brink of ruin. No one reads today’s headlines and feels better. But the endless litany of bad news might have a silver lining for one segment of publishing: the self-help category. Conventional industry wisdom holds that books focusing on personal improvement have done well in recession...
-
Fiction Book Reviews
A Fair Maiden Joyce Carol Oates . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt , $22 (160p) ISBN 978-0-15-101516-0 Sixteen-year-old Katya Spivak and elderly Marcus Kidder share a bizarre romance in Oates’s derivative and unpolished new novel. In bland Bayhead Harbor, N.J., Katya serves as a nanny to the Engelhardts’ two young children.
-
The Original Joy of Cooking: PW Talks with Author Richard Wrangham
In Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic), Richard Wrangham dishes up an intriguing theory of human evolution. On behalf of sushi haters like me, tell our readers how nature has fitted humans to eat cooked food. Biologically, we are not well-adapted to raw foods. Our teeth and stomachs are small compared to those of chimpanzees or gorillas, because we don’t eat ...
-
‘Twilight’ Hits Arab World
The Arab Cultural Center, bought the Arabic-language rights to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight quartet at last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, and will be publishing the books this May.
-
In Defense of Historical Fiction
Someone who owns a successful independent bookstore told me recently that if I ever decide to write a novel about an officer in the army in the American Revolution I’d better give him dripping fangs, bat wings and a tail. Well, he wasn’t far from wrong, because as we all know, the bestselling young adult novels today are either about vampires, fantasy or romance.
-
The Boys Blow up at Dynamite
The Boys and writer Garth Ennis have found a happy home at Dynamite Entertainment, with 100,000 copies of various Boys collections in print.
-
10 Years and Counting At AiT/Planet Lar
San Francisco indie comics publisher AiT/Planet Lar celebrated it’s 10th anniversary in March.
-
Carol Tyler Recalls “A Good and Decent Man”
Cartoonist Carol Tyler’s father, Chuck, is a regular guy. He’s gruff and he’s loyal and he builds things. In her new graphic novel, You’ll Never Know: A Good and Decent Man, Tyler begins to tell Chuck’s story, which is also, of course, her story.
-
Stan Mack Revisits the American Revolution
Cartoonist, children’s book author and pioneering graphic novel creator Stan Mack has teamed with writer/editor Susan Champlin to create a four book series of fictional graphic novels for Bloomsbury that are aimed at 10-14 year-old readers and set during important American historical periods.
-
Comics Briefly
Book Review Comic by Bechdel; New Runaways Creators Revealed; S. Clay Wilson Needs Help; Hernandez and Sakai Signing; Bleach, Naruto Movies on iTunes; Secret Identity Launch Party; War of Kings #1 Free Online and Princess Diana in Female Force
-
Panelmania: Remake
A robot boy named Max Guy battles bookstore shoppers in this exclusive 6-page preview of Remake, a collection of comics by Lamar Abrams that mixes manga-style action with pure absurdity. Remake will be released by Adhouse Books in May.
-
A Garland of Garlands: 2009 Poetry Anthologies
The father of all poetry anthologies was Greek—the Anthologia Graeca, known in English as The Greek Anthology, the first version a collection of epigrams and poems compiled by Meleager of Gadara. That was in the first century B.C. Ever since, the poetry anthology has endured as a form that strives to represent or establish a particular tradition or mode of practice.
-
The New Storytelling: Multimedia Children's Publishing
Back in early December, when we meet with Lisa Holton about her new book packaging company, Fourth Story Media, it seems like an oddly exhilarating moment to be discussing a start-up, much less a book publishing start-up. Back then, word had just leaked that Houghton Mifflin wasn't acquiring new books.
-
Children's Book Reviews: Week of 3/30/09
Picture Books What Is This? Antje Damm . Frances Lincoln (PGW, dist.), $15.95 (96p) ISBN 978-1-84507-899-7 Buttons become pig noses and a kitchen faucet turns into a swan under Damm's inventive hand. This appealing title, in line with Damm's Ask Me, invites readers to imagine what ordinary objects could become, given the addition of some paint, paper or clay.
Browse archive by date:
