Book News
Wolfe draws “Blood”
Tom Wolfe, the journalist and author of such best-selling novels as “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” “The Right Stuff,” “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” “A Man in Full” and “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” will publish a new novel in 2009.
Little, Brown and Co. will publish “Back to Blood,” which will consider class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption and ambition in Miami.
Characters include a young nurse of Cuban ancestry married to a famous French-emigre sex doctor, a freshman journalist on the trail of a Russian-mob-comes-to-Miami story, his wary editor, a second-generation Cuban police officer, a woman of Haitian background who passes for Anglo, and many more. The Denver Post
Holiday hotties
American Elizabeth Gilbert was the best-selling writer in the English-speaking book world over Christmas, according to data compiled by Nielsen BookScan from books sales in the U.S., South Africa, Australia and Ireland.
Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love,” her account of the year she spent traveling the world alone after a difficult divorce, sold just short of 300,000 copies in the final week before Christmas in the U.S., ahead of her nearest rivals, Stephen Colbert’s “I Am America (And So Can You!)” and Conn Iggulden’s “The Dangerous Book for Boys.”
The highest fiction titles were “Double Cross,” by James Patterson, and “The Pillars of the Earth,” by Ken Follett. thebookstandard.com
First Line
Becky: The Life and Loves of Becky Thatcher by Lenore Hart
“I see in the newspaper that he’s dead now, gone with Halley’s Comet. Mark Twain always said he’d leave when it returned — the same comet that streaked across the skies on the day of his birth.
I knew him first as little Sammy Clemens. The barefoot thumb-sucker who followed us around the back alleys and scrub woods of Hannibal wearing a hand-me-down shirt that fell to his knees. Eyes wide, always listening, because Sam worshipped the big boys. He longed to imitate the ones who swam out to the big timber rafts to catch a ride downstream. The ones who climbed out windows at midnight to swing a dead cat in the graveyard.”
Audio best sellers
Fiction
1. Double Cross, by James Patterson; read by Peter J. Fernandez and Michael Stuhlbarg
2. T Is for Trespass, by Sue Grafton; read by Judy Kaye
3. Darkest Evening of the Year, by Dean Koontz; read by Kristen Kairos
4. The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman; read by the author and a full cast
5. Playing for Pizza, by John Grisham; read by Christopher Evan Welsh
Publishers Weekly
