Book News
Orange Prize finalists.
Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” and Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Lacuna” have been selected as two of six finalists in the Orange Prize for Fiction, whose winner takes home $46,100 and a bronze statuette called the Bessie.
The prize was established in 1996 to celebrate fiction by women worldwide. Mantel’s “Wolf Hall,” which has already won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle award, traces the ascent of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s fixer. Kingsolver’s “The Lacuna” tells the story of a man torn between two nations, Mexico and the United States.
The other finalists are Rosie Alison for “The Very Thought of You”; Attica Locke for “Black Water Rising”; Lorrie Moore for “A Gate at the Stairs”; and Monique Roffey for “The White Woman on the Green Bicycle.”
The winner will be announced June 9 in London.
Bloomberg News
Skater ices book deal.
Johnny Weir has more to say, so he’s working on a book — a funny book.
Publisher Gallery Books announced Monday that the figure skater and reality TV star will release a “collection of wildly entertaining anecdotes and essays about everything from pop-culture to skating to fashion to Johnny himself.”
Weir stars on the Sundance Channel’s “Be Good, Johnny Weir.” The book is untitled so far and is scheduled to come out in January 2011.
The Associated Press
First Lines
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, by Daniel Okrent
The streets of San Francisco were jammed. A frenzy of cars, trucks, wagons, and every other imaginable form of conveyances crisscrossed the town and battled its steepest hills. Porches, staircase landings, and sidewalks were piled high with boxes and crates delivered on the last possible day before transporting their contents would become illegal. The next morning, the Chronicle reported that people whose beer, liquor, and wine had not arrived by midnight were left to stand in their doorways “with haggard faces and glittering eyes.” Just two weeks earlier, on the last New Year’s Eve before Prohibition, frantic celebrations had convulsed the city’s hotels and private clubs, its neighborhood taverns and wharfside saloons. It was a spasm of desperate joy fueled, said the Chronicle, by great quantities of “bottled sunshine” liberated from “cellars, club lockers, bank vaults, safety deposit boxes and other hiding places.” Now, on January 16, the sunshine was surrending to darkness.
Hardcover BestSellers
Fiction
1. Changes, by Jim Butcher
2. The Help, by Kathyrn Stockett
3. Caught, by Harlan Cohen
4. House Rules, by Jodi Picoult
5. A River in the Sky, by Elizabeth Peters
6. Silver Borne by Patricia Briggs
7. The Walk, by Richard Paul Evans
8. Deception, by Jonathan Kellerman
9. The Black Cat, by Lauren Conrad
10. Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes
Publishers Weekly
