Book News
“Office” scribe wins Thurber award.
Steve Hely isn’t funny only when he’s writing for TV’s “The Office.” Hely’s modestly titled novel, “How I Became a Famous Novelist,” was awarded the 2010 Thurber Prize for American Humor.
Hely, who has previously written for “30 Rock” and “The Late Show With Davie Letterman,” received $5,000.
Kennedy memoir ahead.
U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, is writing a memoir. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has announced that Kennedy’s “Coming Clean” is planned for next fall.
The publisher says Kennedy, who has struggled with depression and alcohol and drug addiction, will write “a truly revealing, intimate portrait.”
The Associated Press
First Lines
The Brave by Nicholas Evans
The boy followed the guard along the corridor, watching the sway of his backside and the belt with its handcuffs and baton and the big bunch of keys that jangled as he walked. The back of the man’s blue shirt was stained with sweat and he kept wiping his neck with the palm of one hand. It was a part of the prison the boy hadn’t been allowed in before. The walls were bare and whitewashed and there were no windows, just fluorescent boxes on the ceiling speckled inside with dead bugs. The air was still and hot and smelled of stale cabbage. He could hear distant voices, someone shouting, someone laughing, the clank and echo of metal doors. Somewhere a radio was playing the Beatles’ new No. 1, “A Hard Day’s Night.”
The boy’s weekly visit usually took place in the long hall next to the waiting room. He was almost always the only child there and the guards knew him by now and were friendly, chatting with him as they led him to one of the booths. Then he’d have to sit there staring through the glass divider, waiting for them to bring his mother in through the steel door in the back wall. There were always two guards with rifles. He would never forget the shock of that first time they had led her in, the sight of her in her ugly brown prison dress and handcuffs and ankle chains, her hair cut short like a boy’s. He’d felt a pain in his chest, as if his heart were being prized open like a mussel shell.
When she came in she always scanned the booths for him and smiled when she saw him and the guard would bring her over and sit her down in front of him and remove the cuffs and she would kiss the palm of her hand and press it to the glass and he would do the same.
But today it was different. . . . They would be able to touch. For the first time in almost a year. And for the last time ever.
Hardcover Best Sellers
Fiction
1. Safe Haven, by Nicholas Sparks
2. Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
3. Wicked Appetite, by Janet Evanovich
4. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larsson
5. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
Nonfiction
1. The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
2. Pinheads and Patriots, by Bill O’Reilly
3. The Power, by Rhonda Byrne
4. S–t My Dad Says, by Justin Halpern
4. Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach
5. Crimes Agains Liberty, by David Limbaugh
Publishers Weekly
