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LIT HUB'S HOME FOR BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK MARKS BULLETIN 10/1

In literary land this week: James Patterson and Scholastic are joining forces to mitigate illiteracy; Margaret Atwood and Sandra Cisneros are among those calling for the release of three imprisoned Iranian writers; and a group of prominent translators are asking that translators be named on the covers of the books they have translated.

Here at Book Marks, we got some rapid-fire book recs from Sophie Ward and Wendy Holden, and rounded up September’s best audiobook releases.

The Best Reviewed Books of the Month

FICTION

1. Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

 26 RAVE • 21 POSITIVE •  20 MIXED • 2 PAN

“Once again, Rooney has drawn a circumscribed world—four people, tightly wound in the small universe of one another’s lives—and once again, this is a love story, although the book’s most compelling romance is the platonic one between its two main female protagonists.”  –Hermione Hoby (4Columns)  

2. Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

24 RAVE • 5 POSITIVE • 1 PAN

“Harlem Shuffle has dialogue that crackles, a final third that nearly explodes, hangouts that invite even if they’re Chock Full o’ Nuts and characters you won’t forget even if they don’t stick around for more than a few pages.”  –Janet Maslin (The New York Times)  

3. Matrix by Lauren Groff

21 RAVE • 4 POSITIVE • 1 MIXED

“With masterful wordplay and pacing, Groff builds what could have been a mundane storyline into something quite impossible to put down. The writing itself is a demonstration of power.”  –Keishel Williams (NPR)  

4. The Magician by Colm Tóibín

17 RAVE • 4 POSITIVE • 1 MIXED • 2 PAN

“Tóibín delves into the layers of the great German novelist’s unconscious, inviting us to understand his fraught, monumental, complicated and productive life. It’s a work of huge imaginative sympathy.”  –Jay Parini (The New York Times Book Review)  

5. Bewilderment by Richard Powers

12 RAVE • 10 POSITIVE • 6 MIXED • 3 PAN

“Sorrowing awe is Bewilderment’s primary tone, and its many remarkable scenes are controlled with high novelistic intelligence. Robin is as compelling a fictional creation as I’ve encountered in some time—fierce, lovable and otherworldly.”  –Rob Doyle (The Guardian)  

NONFICTION

1. Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach

10 RAVE • 2 POSITIVE

“Mary Roach is the Deborah Vance of science writing … you’re hooked, and for good reason. Roach has a sure sense of drama, and she crafts sentences that crackle and pop.”  –Peter Fish (The San Francisco Chronicle)  

2. The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan

9 RAVE • 4 POSITIVE • 4 MIXED • 1 PAN

“These essays are works of both criticism and imagination. Srinivasan refuses to resort to straw men; she will lay out even the most specious argument clearly and carefully, demonstrating its emotional power, even if her ultimate intention is to dismantle it.”  –Jennifer Szalai (The New York Times)  

3. Graceland, at Last by Margaret Renkl

7 RAVE • 4 POSITIVE

“Renkl’s gift, just as it was in her first book Late Migrations, is to make fascinating for others what is closest to her heart.”  –Barbara J. King (NPR)  

4. The Sleeping Beauties by Suzanne O'Sullivan

6 RAVE • 4 POSITIVE

“[A] brilliant, nuanced and thoughtful look at the lived experience of illness while asking important questions about the relationship between body and mind. Dr. O’Sullivan’s rich prose weaves a tapestry as hauntingly beautiful as it is scientifically valid.”  –Brandy Schillace (The Wall Street Journal)  

5. Chasing Me to My Grave by Winfred Rembert

7 RAVE

“Rembert’s memoir is not just a lens through which we can view American history; at its heart it is a love story … documents racial and economic violence under white supremacy as a living history. It also gives us an example of how to live without bitterness or seeking revenge.”  –Jeannine Burgdorf (The Chicago Review of Books)  

Books Making the News This Week

Biggest New Books: Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star, Joshua Ferris’ A Calling for Charlie Barnes, and Phoebe Robinson’s Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes are  some of the biggest new titles hitting shelves this week.

Book Deals: Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate of the United States and author of Memorial Drive Natasha Trethewey's Repentance, a memoir tracing her journey as a Black daughter of a white father, and the poet daughter of a poet father, has been sold to Ecco; critic and editor Matt Singer's Opposable Thumbs: The Siskel and Ebert, a dual biography of two of the most famous and powerful forces in cinema and television, to Putnam; author of The Diana Chronicles Tina Brown's The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor, the story of the Windsors over the last 25 years, to Crown; author of Longbourn Jo Baker's The Midnight News, a novel of World War II intrigue, love, and danger, which follows a young woman unraveling during the Blitz in London, to Knopf; and Kelly Link’s debut novel will be published by Random House in 2024.

Adaptation Announcements: Media Res has won the battle for the film and TV rights to Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads; Macbeth is coming back to Broadway in the Spring, with Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga in the lead roles; and the first trailer for the series adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman has been released.

Awards Circuit: The shortlist for the 2021 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize has been revealed, and the MacArthur Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2021 “Genius” Grant.

The Most Viewed Books of the Week

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

1. ↑ 22.35% Beautiful World Where Are You  SALLY ROONEY

2. NEW Cloud Cuckoo Land  ANTHON DOERR

3. ↓ 51.52% Bewilderment  RICHARD POWERS

4. ↑ 32.37% The Book of Form and Emptiness  RUTH OZEKI

5. ↑ 2,256.00% Entitled  KATE MANNE

6. ↑ 171.36% The Magician  COLM TÓIBÍN

7. ↓ 8.59% Harlem Shuffle  COLSON WHITEHEAD

8. ↑ 255.13% Peril  BOB WOODWARD

9. ↑ 10,575.00% The Lincoln Highway  AMOR TOWLES

10. ↑ 8,925.00% The Art of Solitude  STEPHEN BATCHELOR

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

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