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LIT HUB'S HOME FOR BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK MARKS BULLETIN 8/27

In literary land this week: Oprah has selected Honorée Fanonne Jeffers's The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois as her latest book club pick, Coffee House Press has announced Anita Budd as its new executive director and publisher, and Dorothy Parker is back in New York City—with a new and improved tombstone.

Here at Book Marks, we got some rapid-fire book recs from Kerri Arsenault and Alexandra Kleeman, and looked back at a classic review of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

The Best Reviewed Books of the Week

FICTION

1. The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

 7 RAVE

“The sign of a great novel is that the author creates a world and when she moves her hands away, the world is still in motion.”  –Veronica Chambers (The New York Times Book Review)  

2. The Guide by Peter Heller

3 RAVE • 6 POSITIVE • 1 MIXED

“...if you’re of a darker, more contemplative frame of mind, there’s something cathartic about Peter Heller’s latest novel, The Guide, an ever so subtly dystopian wilderness noir that speculates on the horrors of a post-pandemic society.”  –Barbara VandenBurgh (USA Today)  

3. After the Sun by Jonas Eika

4 RAVE • 4 POSITIVE

“Utterly brilliant and occasionally confounding, these strange stories catch like fishhooks into the reader’s nervous system.”  –Kirkus

4. The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny

4 RAVE • 3 POSITIVE

“Timely and thrilling, this 17th entry is one of the series’ most rewarding … satisfying both as an intricate crime-solving procedural and as an opportunity to revisit Three Pines.”  –Gail Pennington (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)  

5. More Than I Love My Life by David Grossman

5 RAVE • 1 POSITIVE • 1 PAN

“Immaculately translated by Jessica Cohen, this is another extraordinary novel from Grossman, a book as beautiful and sad as anything you’ll read this year.”  –Alex Preston (The Guardian)

NONFICTION

1. Real Estate by Deborah Levy

17 RAVE • 5 POSITIVE

“The narrator of Real Estate is drily funny, irreverent, curious, even wise; she makes the reader want her for a companion.”  –Stephanie Merritt (The Guardian)  

2. Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow

6 RAVE • 3 POSITIVE

“A certain kind of sorrow lingers because a part of us wants it and wills it to persist, and Chow artfully and intelligently maps which kind of grief this is.”  –Gaiutra Bahadur (The New York Times Book Review)  

3. The Failed Promise by Robert S. Levine

6 RAVE

“While the author expertly depicts Douglass—he has written about the great orator before—his portrait of Andrew Johnson stands out.”  –Randall Fuller (The Wall Street Journal)  

4. The Chinese Question by Mae Ngai

2 RAVE • 5 POSITIVE

“Ms. Ngai’s study is a book for our time, reminding us of the increasingly interconnected global economy that—since at least the 16th century—has enriched select peoples, empires and nations at the expense of many others.”  –Andrew R. Graybill (The Wall Street Journal)  

5. Presumed Guilty by Erwin Chemerinsky

3 RAVE • 3 POSITIVE

“It is an eloquent and damning indictment not only of horrific police practices, but also of the justices who condoned them and continue to do so.”  –Melvin I. Urofsky (The New York Times Book Review)  

Books Making the News This Week

Biggest New Books: Louise Penny’s The Madness of Crowds, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, Deborah Levy’s Real Estate, and Christopher Clary’s The Master are some of the biggest new titles hitting shelves this week.

Book Deals: Maggie Millner's Couplets, a hybrid novel-in-verse following a writer in her late 20s who leaves her longtime boyfriend for an obsessive, consuming affair with another woman, has been sold to FSG; author of Darktown and The Last Town on Earth Thomas Mullen's After the Blinding, a speculative thriller about the ways technology has warped how we see the world and the people around us, to Minotaur; author of How We Fight For Our Lives Saeed Jones's Alive at the End of the World, a collection of poems that respond to the betrayal and confusion of living in a world poisoned by white supremacy, to Coffee House Press; and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars and Directorate S Steve Coll's final volume in his investigative chronicle of the U.S. misadventure in Central Asia, in which he chronicles the restoration of Taliban rule and the final collapse of American ambition in Afghanistan, to Penguin Press.

Adaptation Announcements: LaKeith Stanfield will star in the new adaptation of Victor LaValle’s 2017 novel The Changeling, and the first trailer for Jane Campion’s movie adaptation of Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel The Power of the Dog has dropped. 

Awards Circuit: Ayad Akhtar’s novel Homeland Elegies and Ben Ehrenreich’s environmental warning Desert Notebooks were among the winners of the American Book Awards, while Shola Von Reinhold and Doireann Ní Ghríofa have won the £10,000 James Tate Back Prize.

The Most Viewed Books of the Week

According to traffic data from Book Mark's widget and website

1. ↓ 46.44% Burning Man  FRANCES WILSON

2. ↑ 500.94% The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois  HONOREE FANONNE JEFFERS

3. ↑ 127.24% Four Thousand Weeks  OLIVER BURKEMAN

4. ↑ 488.00% Intimacies  KATIE KITAMURA

5. ↑ 36.94% Crying in H Mart  MICHELLE ZAUNER

6. ↑ 5,771.43% The Season  KRISTEN RICHARDSON

7. ↑ 8.76% Braiding Sweetgrass  ROBIN WALL KIMMERER

8. ↑ 260.42% Velvet Was the Night  SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA

9. ↓ 10.96% The Midnight Library  MATT HAIG

10. ↑ 21.57% Beautiful World, Where Are You  SALLY ROONEY

(*Percentages based on week-to-week change in total views.)

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