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LIT HUB'S HOME FOR BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK MARKS BULLETIN 9/3

In literary land this week: the reviews for Sally Rooney’s new novel have begun to pour in,  Salman Rushdie has launched his own substack, a new study shows that we’re choosing our summer reading... to look smarter, and you can now download Robin Marty’s handbook to abortion access and support for free.

Here at Book Marks, we rounded up August's best audiobooks and September’s most anticipated Sci-Fi and Fantasy releases, and took a look back at a 1960 review of To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Best Reviewed Books of the Month

FICTION

1. Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So

 19 RAVE • 5 POSITIVE

“It feels transgressive that Afterparties is so funny, so irreverent, concerning the previous generation’s tragedy.”  –Hua Hsu (The New Yorker)  

2. Billy Summers by Stephen King

10 RAVE • 8 POSITIVE • 1 MIXED

“King is doing the best work of his later career when the ghosts are packed away and the monsters are all too human.”  –Neil McRobert (The Guardian)  

3. Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

13 RAVE • 1 POSITIVE

“Moreno-Garcia always leaves her own indelible stamp on any seemingly familiar genre.”  –Elizabeth Hand (The Washington Post)  

4. The Turnout by Megan Abbott

10 RAVE • 5 POSITIVE • 1 MIXED

“The Turnout is as much about female rage, jealousy and sexual desire as it is a suspense novel set in a dance studio.”  –Suzanne Berne (The Washington Post)  

5. Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman

7 RAVE • 6 POSITIVE • 1 MIXED

“Kleeman’s great skill, and this novel’s abiding triumph, is how seamlessly she blends the horrific with the mundanely troubling, the ridiculous—or the impossible—with the ordinarily absurd.”  –Matthew Specktor (The Los Angeles Review of Books)  

NONFICTION

1. Real Estate by Deborah Levy

18 RAVE • 7 POSITIVE

“Levy, whose prose is at once declarative and concrete and touched with an almost oracular pithiness, has a gift for imbuing ordinary observations with the magic of metaphor.”  –Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)  

2. Burning Man by Frances Wilson

8 RAVE • 7 POSITIVE • 1 MIXED

“Wilson’s voice is so appealing—confiding, intelligent, easy, amused—I would happily have read a straightforward blaze through the life, cradle to grave, basket to casket.”  –Laura Freeman (The Times)  

3. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner

7 RAVE • 5 POSITIVE • 1 MIXED

“Amid all the tension and the horror, Donner has an eye for stray bits of grim comedy.”  –Jennifer Szalai (The New York Times)  

4. The Irish Assassins by Julie Kavanagh

8 RAVE • 3 POSITIVE

“This is one of the best researched and most enjoyable historical reads I have come across in quite some time.”  –Estelle Birdy (The Irish Independent)  

5. Two-Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson

4 RAVE • 8 POSITIVE • 1 MIXED

“Sampson overturns old misogynist assumptions, establishing that it was Barrett Browning’s tremendous literary success that brought her and nascent poet Robert Browning together.”  –Donna Seaman (Booklist)  

Books Making the News This Week

Biggest New Books: Paula Hawkins’ A Slow Fire Burning, Craig Whitlock’s The Afghanistan Papers, Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart is a Chainsaw, and Helen Hoang’s The Heart Principle are some of the biggest new titles hitting shelves this week.

Book Deals: Jessie Burton's The House of Fortune, a stand-alone companion novel revisiting the characters and 17th-century Amsterdam setting of The Miniaturist, has been sold to Bloomsbury; Egil "Bud" Krogh and Matthew Krogh's The White House Plumbers: The Seven Weeks That Led to Watergate and Doomed Nixon’s Presidency, to St. Martin’s; New York Magazine political columnist Ed Kilgore's United We Fall, a look at the unexpected dangers of political unity, to Simon & Schuster; authors of The Club  Jonathan Clegg and Joshua Robinson's Messi Vs. Ronaldo, an account of the intertwined sagas and generational rivalry of two of the greatest soccer players of all time, to Custom House; and a new Marlon James novel is coming in February.

Adaptation Announcements: Alicia Keys is adapting her own song “Girl on Fire” into a book, the first trailer for Amazon’s adaptation of The Wheel of Time has dropped, and the upcoming Lady Chatterley’s Lover adaptation will apparently be “raunchier than Bridgerton.”

Awards Circuit: The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses is coming to the US and Canada.

The Most Viewed Books of the Week

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

1. ↑ 50.55% % The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois  HONOREE FANONNE JEFFERS

2. ↑ 97.74% % Beautiful World, Where Are You  SALLY ROONEY

3. ↑ 1,012.73% Darryl  JACKIE ESS

4. ↑ 462.96% White Ivy  SUSIE YANG

5. NEW A Slow Fire Burning  PAULA HAWKINS

6. ↑ 6,542.86% Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls  T KIRA MADDEN

7. ↑ 553.23% The Office of Historical Corrections  DANIELLE EVANS

8. NEW The Magician  COLM TÓIBÍN

9. NEW Several People Are Typing  CALVIN KASULKE

10. NEW My Heart Is a Chainsaw  STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES

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

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