Knopf Doubleday

A Month of Maeve, part 6

psmith — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:00:01 +0000

As we all know too well, keeping up with the frantic pace of daily life can be exhausting. In the latest installment of our Month of Maeve feature, the author tells us how she copes with this fast-changing world and shares some amusing personal experiences regarding the topic.

23 John Grisham Titles Launch Today As Random House E-books in North America

jyamaguchi — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:48:37 +0000

John Grisham, one of America’s most widely read storytellers in print, is making his debut in digital. Random House, Inc. proudly announces the publication of the entire John Grisham backlist of twenty-three titles–from A TIME TO KILL to FORD COUNTY–as Random House e-books, beginning today, March 16. They will be available in the U.S. and Canada wherever e-books are sold.

With the addition of the e-books editions, John Grisham’s body of work is published by Random House, Inc. divisions in the now-customary three platforms–print, audio, and digital–and four formats: Doubleday hardcover, Dell paperback, Random House Audio, and Random House e-book.

More than 250 million John Grisham books have been sold worldwide and his works have been translated in twenty-nine languages. Since 1988, he has written one novel a year and every one of them has been a #1 New York Times bestseller. He has also published a critically acclaimed work of nonfiction, THE INNOCENT MAN, and a highly praised short story collection last November, FORD COUNTY, both of which also debuted at #1. His newest legal thriller is scheduled for Doubleday publication in October.

“John Grisham is one of the greatest storytellers of all time,” said Sonny Mehta, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. “Since the publication of his very first book, he has captivated readers with compelling characters, intricate plotting, and narratives about social justice that are impossible to put down. This is one of our most exciting e-book initiatives to date, and is certain to usher in a new generation of Grisham readers and e-book adopters.”

“All of us at Random House are thrilled that we will now have the entire library of John Grisham’s work in all formats, and under one roof,” said Gina Centrello, President and Publisher of the Random House Publishing Group.

John Grisham’s Random House e-book titles are A Time to Kill, The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Chamber, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, The Partner, The Street Lawyer, The Testament, The Brethren, A Painted House, Skipping Christmas, The Summons, The King of Torts, Bleachers, The Last Juror, The Broker, Playing for Pizza, The Innocent Man, The Appeal, The Associate, and Ford County.

Visit jgrisham.com for more information about John Grisham’s books.

Win a Free Copy of the “Miraculous” Insectopedia!

jkals — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:22:25 +0000

The 3/16 Science Times calls Hugh Raffles’s Insectopedia “miraculous . . . as inventive and wide ranging and full of astonishing surprises as the vast insect world itself.” Now is your chance to win a free copy of the book a week before the on-sale date.

Test your insect knowledge! Simply send your answers to the questions below to pantheonpublicity@randomhouse.com. The first three people to send in the correct answers will win free copies of Insectopedia.

1. Honeybees are famously ______?
a) Self sufficient
b) Neurotic
c) Cooperative
d) Antisocial

2. Which one of the following four explanations have scientists not used to account for homosexual sex among insects?
a) It’s practice for the real thing
b) It’s a mistake: he thinks it’s a girl
c) They just like it
d) It maintains group harmony

3. Ignis, by Flemish miniaturist Joris Hoefnagel, was the first European book devoted entirely to insects. In which year was it completed?
a) 1482
b) 1582
c) 1682
d) 1782

4. Chinese fighting crickets are isolated for five days before a contest to ensure they don’t compete under the influence of which drug?
a) Alcohol
b) Steroids
c) Vicodin
d) Ecstasy

5. Jean-Henri Fabre, known as the “Insect Poet,” argued with Darwin’s modern theory of instinct – a theory outlined in Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) – regarding which insects?
a) Ants
b) Fruit flies
c) Mosquitoes
d) Wasps

Insectopedia goes on sale on 3/23. Check out Raffles’s interview with Lewis Lapham on Bloomberg radio, and don’t miss his NYC events on 3/30 and 4/14. Go to http://insectopedia.org for more information.

Jules Who?

rfeldman — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:58:35 +0000

“Jules WHO?” asks The Buffalo News in its review of Jules Feiffer’s forthcoming memoir, on sale tomorrow. Responding to its own rhetoric the article continues, “Jules Feiffer is one of the most important cultural figures of the last 50 years despite his current late-life obscurity among the young in his ninth decade on earth. . . At 81, [Feiffer’s] time has come. Again. And this wonderfully weird and revealing book proves it. [Backing Into Forward] has all the neurotic splendor and self-protective disingenuousness of truth. It’s by turns entertaining and gripping about the life of a wildly talented man who was bad at sports, bad at school (he never went to college and wasted years fearing discovery) and by his own cheerful admission, not all that great at drawing either. But look at the deeply neurotic and emaciated lines in any characteristic Feiffer cartoon. No one ever drew late-20th century urban American civilization any better. In memoir form, he’s grand company.”

For more Feiffer, visit his website, read the profile in USA Today, and the interview in Martha’s Vineyard Magazine.

NYTBR Reviews The Man From Saigon

rfeldman — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:48:42 +0000

“There is something familiar, almost reassuringly so, about the elements of this fast-paced, vividly descriptive novel,” wrote Elizabeth Samet in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review. “The ingredients that decades ago proved so seductively vertiginous and surreally dislocating in [Apocalypse Now] flavor [The Man From Saigon]. . . . An atmosphere of deception and self-deception permeates this book. . . . Leimbach’s emphasis on a female reporter in a war that was so often covered by men is refreshing.”

Previously, the novel received a starred review in Publishers Weekly: “Leimbach (Dying Young) sets her vivid and powerful new novel in 1967 Vietnam to tell the story of Susan Gifford, a women’s magazine writer who arrives in-country to write human interest stories about the war. Instead, she ends up covering combat and finds an intense friendship with Son, a Vietnamese photographer, and an equally intense love affair with Marc, a married American journalist. During an ambush, Susan and Son are captured by the Vietcong and are marched into the jungle. When they are reported missing, Marc drops a potentially big story to find them. Meanwhile, Susan begins to suspect that Son may not be who he seems. Leimbach masterfully conjures the hothouse atmosphere of foreign correspondents in Saigon in the late 1960s, and in Susan she has created a heroine who is a worthy counterpart to the real life reporters who covered the war. Whether describing a convoy taking fire, a farcical press briefing, a quiet moment between Susan and Marc, or the ironic aftermath of Susan’s ordeal, Leimbach expertly captures the contradictions of the war, making this a solid addition to the literature of an endlessly reconsidered conflict.”

Read Leimbach’s essay for Amazon about writing the book, and visit her website.

Talking with Lucille Clifton

amyers — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:51:03 +0000

Poetry in Person, edited by Alexander Neubauer, is a rich book of conversations between Pearl London, the legendary New School teacher, and the many important American poets she brought into her classroom to share their poems in progress. Lucille Clifton, who passed away in February of this year, visited London’s classroom on May 3, 1983. She spoke about her childhood and beginnings as a poet, about the personal and political dimensions of being a black woman poet (she references Gwendolyn Brooks’s remark “Whenever I walk down the street it’s a political statement”), and shared drafts of her work with London and her students.

Click here to hear Clifton on being an extraordinary ordinary woman.
Audio

And here to hear her read her poem “the thirty eighth year.”
Audio

A Month of Maeve, part 5

psmith — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 14:00:33 +0000

What makes a book a real page turner? Is it constant adventure or the spellbinding depiction of everyday life? See if you agree with Maeve Binchy as she offers her thoughts on the subject and goes one step further…letting us in on how that philosophy shapes the heroes/heroines of her stories.

Brodeck Longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2010

rfeldman — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:44:54 +0000

Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck, translated from the French by John Cullen, is among the 15 contenders longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2010. Arts Council England awards the prize annually to the best work of contemporary fiction in translation. The novel, which Nan A. Talese published in June, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was glowingly reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. While only a handful of Claudel’s nine novels have been translated in English, American readers might be familiar with the 2008 film he wrote and directed I’ve Loved You So Long, a New York Times Critics’ Pick, which starred Kristin Scott Thomas.

“[Claudel's] latest novel, Brodeck, arrives like a fresh, why-haven’t-we-known-him discovery, revealing him to be as dazzling on the page as he is on the screen…. Brodeck is the Brothers Grimm by way of Kafka…. [Claudel] audaciously approaches a subject that seems thoroughly covered and makes it fresh. His nightmarish fairy tale captures the essential, inescapable evil at the center of the Holocaust, the human urge to destroy Others … a compulsion existing beyond time, place or politics.”
—The New York Times Book Review

National Book Critics Circle Award Winners Announced

psmith — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:59:00 +0000

The National Book Critics Circle announced the winners for the 2009 publishing year last night at a ceremony in New York City. Congratulations to all the award recipients, including Richard Holmes for nonfiction (The Age of Wonder) and Blake Bailey for biography (Cheever). Originally published by Pantheon and Knopf, respectively, both are new in paperback from Vintage Books!

The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister Caroline, who forever changed the public conception of the solar system; of Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas experiments revolutionized chemistry; and of the great Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Richard Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science.

Blake Bailey’s bestselling biography details the life of a literary icon. John Cheever spent much of his career impersonating a perfect suburban gentleman, the better to become one of the foremost chroniclers of postwar America. Written with unprecedented access to essential sources—including Cheever’s massive journal, only a fraction of which has ever been published—Bailey’s Cheever is a stunning example of the biographer’s art and a brilliant tribute to an essential author.

Read more about the awards on the NBCC site here.

A Month of Maeve, part 4

psmith — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:00:58 +0000

Maeve Binchy shares advice and encouragement for both aspiring writers and experienced scribes in her new book The Maeve Binchy Writer’s Club. In this latest video installment, she dishes on some tricks of the trade she has discovered and accumulated over the years, giving us her top three tips to writing a good novel.

Read more about The Maeve Binchy Writer’s Club and Heart and Soul.