Karl Malantes’ much-anticipated Vietnam novel, Matterhorn is being released today;  you’ll be seeing it covered in many consumer reviews.

USA Today both interviewed the author about the book’s long journey to publication (Marlantes wrote the first draft in 1977) and reviewed the book yesterday. Calling it “brutally vivid”, reviewer Carol Memmott notes that it also shows war as a reflection of society,

…as much a tribute to the Marine culture of bravery as it is a dissection of a contentious war and a meditation on the American civil rights movement and how it spilled over into the fighting holes of Southeast Asia.

More reviews are in the pipeline; it’s scheduled for the New York Times Book Review on April 4th. Also coming are reviews in:

Washington Post
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Oregonian
Los Angeles Times
Seattle Times

Marlantes is going on a 25 city-tour beginning April 8th. In an innovative move, the publisher hosted a pre-publication dinner for the author with librarians from his home state, Washington, including Nancy Pearl.

The book is rising on both Amazon, where it’s at #50, and B&N.com, where it’s featured on the home page and cracked the top ten, rising to #8.

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War Karl Marlantes Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 592 pages Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press – (2010-03-23) ISBN / EAN: 080211928X / 9780802119285

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Audio available from OverDrive

This entry was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2010 at 10:23 am and is filed under Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.