Day of Dialog: Editors’ Hot Picks

-- Library Journal, 6/15/2007

Moderated by Barbara Hoffert, the panel featured Jonathan Burnham, senior vp & publisher, Harper: HarperCollins; Sarah Crichton, publisher, Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux; Jennifer Enderlin, associate publisher & executive editor, St. Martin’s Press; Paul Slovak, vp & associate publisher, Viking.

Jonathan Burnham’s picks were two fiction titles and three nonfiction titles. In the fiction category is Ann Patchett’s Run (Sept.), her first novel since Bel Canto. The novel is about 24 hours in the life of a Boston family, with plenty of twists and turns that lead to a mystery about the identity of the family’s children. “The prose is absolutely wonderful,” said Burham. His second fiction choice is a new novel from Clive Barker, which Burnham said marked Barker’s return to traditional horror. Mister B. Gone is an old-fashioned, very scary ghost story about a book, one of the first printed by Gutenberg, cursed by the devil. This thriller will publish on Halloween.

In the area of nonfiction, there is Jay Winik’s The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800 (Sept.), from the author of April 1865. Those years shaped the world we are living in now. Phenomenal, said Burnham. David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts (Oct.) is a great biography that shows how the emotionally blocked cartoonist used his cartoon characters to work through his problems. The result: “A fascinating psychological portrait.” Burnham was very excited about The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (Nov.), 70 years of letters among sisters Nancy, Unity, Diana, Pamela, Jessica, and Deborah that offer a prism of British and American social life and reveal the mechanics of a very complicated family. “It’s a very moving read, wonderfully gossipy, and very entertaining,” offered Burnham. The book was edited by Charlotte Mosley, Diana Mitford’s daughter-in-law. Burnham is hoping to bring over the last surviving sister, 87-year-old Deborah, who married the Duke of Devonshire, to promote the book.

Sarah Crichton of Farrar, Straus, & Giroux also had three nonfiction titles, all addressing contemporary issues:

1. Only Connect: The Way To Save Our Schools (Sept.) by Dr. Rudy Crew (former New York City superintendent of schools, now superintendent of Miami Dade County public schools). Crichton describes it as a wonderfully prescriptive book—“a real nuts and bolts program” that serves as a call to action and offers tips to parents to get involved. Plus great blurbs from people like Diane Ravitch.
2. The Paranoia Switch: How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior—and How We Can Reclaim Our Courage (Sept.) by psychologist Martha Stout (author of The Sociopath Next Door). According to Stout, psychologists know that trauma changes the wiring of the brain. After 9/11, such rewiring has led us to endorse torture and go to war based on lies. How did we let this happen?
3. The End of My Addiction (Jan. 2008) by Oliver Emerson, a noted cardiologist at Cornell who was also a massive alcoholic (drinking two-fifths of Scotch a day). Even after he dried out, he could never get rid of his cravings for drink and began to research the nature of addiction. He discovered that a drug used to treat Parkinson’s could also suppress the desire for addictive substances. It completely suppressed his desire for alcohol.

On the fiction side, Crichton recommended The Snake Stone (Oct.), a second historical mystery from Jason Goodwin featuring a eunuch in the sultan’s court in 19th-century Istanbul. This book follows the Edgar Award–winning The Janissary Tree. Crichton said the new work was equally as good as the first and that she had signed up the third, fourth, and fifth books in the series.

Viking’s Paul Slovak recommended two science books.

1. In The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (Sept.), Steven Pinker follows up his award-winning The Blank Slate with a discussion of how language shows us who we are.
2. A Life Decoded: My Genome–My Life is a memoir by Craig Venter, a pioneer in gene research who published the complete sequence of the human genome.

For fiction, coming in September is Garrison Keillor’s Pontoon. Keillor’s first Lake Woebegone novel since 2001, it is unusual in that it features lead female characters. For October, there is Jan Karon’s Home to Holly Springs (Oct.), in which Father Tim (of Karon’s Mitford series) returns to his hometown in Mississippi, and Cheating at Canasta, a new story collection from the masterly William Trevor. Finally, September marks the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which still sells 100,000 copies a year. Kerouac originally typed this work as a single paragraph on long sheets of tracing paper he then taped together to form a 120-foot scroll. Viking will be publishing this original version, which often differs significantly from the published edition. The book’s publication ties in with a major Kerouac exhibition at the NYPL in early November.

St. Martin’s Jennifer Enderlin had numerous picks in popular fiction:

Enderlin promoted Emily Giffin’s Baby Proof, released in May after its hardcover publication last summer: “She has risen above the chick lit pack.” She also cited Lean Mean Thirteen (Jun.), the latest Stephanie Plum novel by Janet Evanovich, whose deceptively simple voice many wannabe authors try and fail to capture. In addition, Enderlin cited Beth Harbison’s Shoe Addicts Anonymous (Jun.), about four women who connect through their love of shoes; Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher (Oct.), about a sex-education teacher’s unusual relationship with an evangelical soccer coach; Iris Johansen’s Pandora’s Daughter (Oct.), her first book for St. Martin’s; Gail Tsukiyama’s The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (Sept.), about the two Japanese brothers whose dreams are shattered by the approach of World War II; Chelsea Cain’s Heartsick (Sept.), a debut thriller about a female serial killer; John Hart’s Down River (Oct.), a second novel after the acclaimed King of Lies about the trouble that erupts when a power company wants to buy up land near a North Carolina river; and, finally, Donald McCaig’s Rhett Butler’s People (Nov.). McCaig’s work, says Enderlin, is very different from Alexandra Ripley’s Gone with the Wind sequel, Scarlett. Told from Rhett’s point of view, it parallels the original story, unraveling the mystery of Rhett Butler. “I really believed this was Margaret Mitchell’s writing when I read the manuscript,” proclaimed Enderlin.