Book News
White House insider goes fictional.
Like many White House officials, former Bush communications director Nicolle Wallace is committing her experiences to print — only in this case it’s a fictional narrative about the nation’s first female president.
“Eighteen Acres,” to be published in October, follows the adventures of President Charlotte Kramer and her staff “as they take on dangerous threats from abroad and within her very own Cabinet,” according to publisher Atria Books. (Eighteen acres, by the way, is the size of the White House complex.)
Hmmm. Sounds like a cross between the short-lived series “Commander in Chief — Geena Davis as first female prez — and the veteran spy saga “24,” which in recent years has also featured a female president.
Wallace worked for President George W. Bush, but she may be better known as a senior adviser to 2008 Republican White House candidates John McCain and Sarah Palin. Wallace and Palin did not get along.
First Lines
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, by Thomas Mullen
It all began when they died.
No one I spoke to was entirely sure when they were first called “The Firefly Brothers,” or why the phrase stuck. A play on the Firesons’ name, or an initial mispronunciation embossed into permanence by the papers? Or perhaps a reference to how the brothers always seemed to vanish from the authorities’ gaze, only to reappear so very far from their pursuers. As if they were a tiny piece of magic, an otherworldly glow, misplaced in our dark and mundane world.
But what was magic and what mundane in those insane times? Jobs you’d worked for two decades vanished. Factories that had stood tall for lifetimes went vacant, were scavenged for scrap, and collapsed. Life savings evaporated, sometimes in a single day. In our once fertile heartland, dry winds blew with the power and rage of untold stories accidentally left out of ancient texts, returning with a vengeance, demanding to be heard. Men disappeared, some scribbling sad notes for their wives, others leaving behind nothing, as if they’d never lived there at all. The reality we’d all believed in, so fervently and vividly, was revealed to be nothing but a trick of our imagination, or someone else’s, some collective mirage whose power to entrance us had suddenly and irrevocably failed.
Independent BestSellers
Fiction
1. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
2. The Girl Who Played With fire, by Stieg Larsson
3. The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver
4. The Swan Thieves, by Elizabeth Kostova
5. Half Broke Horses, by Jeanette Walls
Nonfiction
1. Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
2. Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage, by Elizabeth Gilbert
3. Stones Into Schools, by Greg Mortenson
4. Just Kids, by Patti Smith
5. The Kind Diet, by Alicia Silverstone
