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LIT HUB'S HOME FOR BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK MARKS BULLETIN 9/24

In literary land this week: a first edition of Frankenstein sold at auction for a record-breaking $1.17 million, Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk is bringing his next novel to Substack, Gillian Flynn and Lena Waithe are getting their own book imprints, in the wake of student protests a Pennsylvania school district has reversed its ban on diverse books, and nonsensical conservative polemic American Marxism has sold a million copies (sigh).

Here at Book Marks, we got some rapid-fire book recs from Héctor Tobar and Casey Schwartz, and looked back at a 1937 review of The Hobbit by Tolkien’s old pal C. S. Lewis.

The Best Reviewed Books of the Week

FICTION

1. Bewilderment by Richard Powers

 9 RAVE • 9 POSITIVE •  4 MIXED • 2 PAN

“The tenderness and delicacy with which the father-son relationship is depicted repeatedly brought to my mind Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, though it is a pre-apocalyptic planet on which Theo and Robin struggle to find fortitude and hope.”  –Rob Doyle (The Guardian)  

2. Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor

6 RAVE • 8 POSITIVE • 4 MIXED

“McGregor commits himself so wholeheartedly to the project of honouring minutiae (and has the literary talent to match) that the scene when post-stroke Doc first learns to touch his nose feels almost as dramatic as an Antarctic blizzard.”  –James Walton (The Times)  

3. The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

9 RAVE • 3 POSITIVE • 2 MIXED

“The most endearing aspect of Ozeki’s novel is its unabashed celebration of words, writing, and reading. A library is one of the novel’s most enchanted settings.”  –Priscilla Gilman (The Boston Globe)  

4. The Trees by Percival Everett

7 RAVE • 2 POSITIVE

“The Trees is a wild book: a gory pulp revenge fantasy and a detective narrative that alternates between deadpan and slapstick modes of satire.”  –Christian Lorentzen (Bookforum)  

5. The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine

7 RAVE • 2 POSITIVE • 1 PAN

“The story is a shape-shifting kaleidoscope, a collection of moments—funny, devastating, absurd—that bear witness to the violence of war and displacement without sensationalizing it.”  –Laura Sackton (BookPage)  

NONFICTION

1. The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan

9 RAVE • 1 POSITIVE • 4 MIXED • 1 PAN

“Srinivasan proposes the kind of education enacted in this brilliant, rigorous book. She coaxes our imaginations out of the well-worn grooves of the existing order.”  –Jennifer Szalai (The New York Times)  

2. The Sleeping Beauties by Suzanne O'Sullivan

5 RAVE • 4 POSITIVE

“At the heart of this tour de force is the question, deceptively simple but so difficult to answer: What do we mean by illness? Should medicine—biologically minded, diagnosis-privileging Western medicine—alone be allowed to decide?”  –Brandy Schillace (The Wall Street Journal)  

3. Pump: A Natural History of the Heart by Bill Schutt

3 RAVE • 3 POSITIVE

“The author successfully pairs accessible science with strong storytelling, describing how Greek, Egyptian, and medieval scholars helped advance human knowledge (and at times misled it).”  –Publishers Weekly

4. The Cause by Joseph J. Ellis

5 RAVE • 1 POSITIVE • 1 PAN

“Ellis is no apologist, but he is a chronicler of the entire revolution, its best aspirations, its worst contradictions and its ongoing dilemmas.”  –Hugh Hewitt (The Washington Post)  

5. Eight Days in May by Volker Ullrich

2 RAVE • 4 POSITIVE

“It still must be hard for a German scholar to be entirely dispassionate about what was done in (still, just) living memory.”  –David Aaronovitch (The Times)  

Books Making the News This Week

Biggest New Books: Richard Powers’ Bewilderment, Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex, Craig Johnson’s Daughter of the Morning Star, and Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s Peril are some of the biggest new titles hitting shelves this week.

Book Deals: Author of Fatherland, The Ghostwriter, and Munich Robert Harris's Act of Oblivion, a historical novel concerning the greatest manhunt of the 17th century, the search for the signers of King Charles I's death warrant, has been sold to Harper; 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist Megan Kate Nelson's The Westerners: The True Pioneers Who Built a Region and Defined a Nation, to Scribner; author of White Flights and Your Face in Mine Jess Row's On Being Short, a collection of personal essays infused with cultural criticism about the paradoxical, problematic, dysfunctional lives of American men in the 21st century, to Graywolf; TV/film writer and author of The Spectacular Zoe Whittall's Wild Failure, a debut story collection steeped in explorations of femme desire, agency, violence, dislocation, and anxiety, to Ballantine; recent Oprah's Book Club author Honorée Fanonne Jeffers's A Good Woman’s Light, a biography of the great poet and scholar Lucille Clifton, to Knopf; and Krista Burton's Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Hunt Down the Last Remaining Lesbian Bars in America, to Simon & Schuster.

Adaptation Announcements: Netflix has acquired the rights to Roald Dahl’s entire catalogue. The official trailer for the film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s Passing has been released. As has the first teaser trailer for Denzel Washington’s Macbeth.

Awards Circuit: The winners of the 2021 Dayton Literary Peace Prize have been announced, as have the 2021 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honorees and the finalists for the 2021 John Dos Passos Prize. 

The Most Viewed Books of the Week

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

1. ↑ 46.87% Beautiful World, Where Are You  SALLY ROONEY

2. ↑ 255.14% Bewilderment  RICHARD POWERS

3. ↑ 71.68% Matrix  LAUREN GROFF

4. ↑ 68,200.00% Abundance  JAKOB GUANZON

5. ↑ 804.17% Intimacies  KATIE KITAMURA

6. ↓ 16.36% Harlem Shuffle  COLSON WHITEHEAD

7. ↑ 144.75% The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois  HONOREE FANONNE JEFFERS

8. ↑ 507.77% Hell of a Book  JASON MOTT

9. ↑ 1,339.47% Zorrie  LAIRD HUNT

10. ↑ 449.46% The Prophets  ROBERT JONES, JR.

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

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