Book News
Vonnegut led top authors in sales
In the past year, three of the most famous authors to emerge after World War II have died: Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron. Their deaths all resulted in front-page stories, lengthy appreciations and ongoing discussions.
No writer was more competitive, or ambitious, than Mailer, author of such epics as “The Naked and the Dead” and “The Executioner’s Song.” Critics likely would hand him the prize for his generation. But if sales are the measure, then honors clearly go to Vonnegut.
According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of industry sales, Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” has sold about 280,000 copies since 2006, more than four times the combined pace of six of the most talked-about books of the past 60 years: Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead,” “The Armies of the Night” and “The Executioner’s Song,” and Styron’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” “Sophie’s Choice” and “Darkness Visible.” The Associated Press
Kabul bookseller responds
The famed bookseller of Kabul — whose family life was chronicled by a Norwegian journalist — has published a scathing response to that best-selling book, accusing the author of creating lies about him and abusing his hospitality and friendship.
Shah Mohammed Rais welcomed journalist Asne Seirstad into his crowded four-room house in February 2002, after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan toppled the hard-line Taliban regime.
Rais says that Sierstad’s resulting 2003 bestseller, “the bookseller of Kabul” was full of “concocted histories.” He has filed a lawsuit against Sierstad in Norway over the book. The Associated Press
First Line
“In the timeless dark of his captivity, before the president made him a hero for the careless act that had cost a friend his life, Captain Corey Grace distracted himself from guilt and the pain of torture by recalling why he had wished to fly: to escape from darkness to light.
“His earliest memories were of the metaphoric prison of his parents’ joyless house: the way his father’s mute and drunken rage turned inward on itself; his mother’s tight-lipped repression of her own misery, as clenched as her coiled hair. Even the Ohio town they lived in, Lake City, felt cramped — not just the near identical shotgun houses and postage-stamp lawns, but the monochromatic lives of those who never seemed to leave, the gossip one could never erase, the pointless bigotry against minorities no one had ever met.”
Paperback religion
Bestsellers
1. 90 Minutes in Heaven: A True Story of Death and Life, by Don Piper with Cecil Murphey
2. Just Beyond the Clouds, by Karen Kingsbury
3. Summer, by Karen Kingsbury
4. The Parting, by Beverly Lewis
5. Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential, by Joel Osteen
Publishers Weekly
