Do all those Fall book previews look the same to you?

You’re not alone, says Slate’s “Words Correspondent” Katy Waldman, “The mechanics of the books industry make it difficult to escape the sense of literary groupthink … the system’s imperfect, but I’m not sure what a good alternative would look like.”  Thus the lists end up repeating the names Jonathan Franzen,  Margaret Atwood, Patrick DeWitt, Mary Gaitskill, Gregory Maguire, Sloane Crosby [oops — we meant Crosley — thanks for the correction!], and Salman Rushdie.

To add to those, Waldman offers a list of seven mostly titles that “sound good” (that is the problem with these previews; they end up being based on how things sound or the reputations of the authors) but haven’t made it onto other lists.

Most of the titles will appeal to more literary tastes, but she does include one popular author, Judith Viorst’s Wait for Me: And Other Poems About the Irritations and Consolations of a Long Marriage, (S&S, Oct), a “lovely collage of cartoons and poems from the author of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day [that] follows Viorst through more than 50 years of matrimonial commitment to her husband.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2015 at 9:46 am and is filed under 2015 -- Fall. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.