On NPR’s Morning Edition today, Nancy Pearl presented her favorite “under the radar” reads. She also asked listeners to come up with a name for an emerging genre; ” fiction that is mostly realistic, but every once in a while zigs confidently into fantasy.” Some call this magical realism, but that term seems to be confined to books from Latin America. She’s looking for a name to apply to book like Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay (Roc, April), and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury, 2004).

Send suggestions to nancy@nancypearl.com.

Her under-the-radar reads range from older books (the recently republished 1962 memoir, Instead of a Letter by Diana Athill (Norton) to newer (Michael Guber’s Good Son, Holt, May and S.J. Boton’s Blood Harvest, Minotaur, June).

Listen here, after 9 a.m. EDT.

BusinessWeek, of all places, looks at developing subgenres of romance; quilting, Amana (ultraconservative Amish) and military romances. Says one agent, “Such substratification might suggest… that readers have gone insane,” but Harlequin’s Katherine Orr says that readers are looking for tight-knit communities; “There is a tremendous desire for community. Somehow in this world, where everyone is constantly communicating, people have lost real friendships.”

Examples of the subgenres include:

The True Love Quilting Club (Avon Romance) Lori Wilde Retail Price: $7.99 Mass Market Paperback: 384 pages Publisher: Avon – (2010-04-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061808903 / 9780061808906

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The Bridge of Peace: A Novel (An Ada’s House Novel) Cindy Woodsmall Retail Price: $13.99 Paperback: 352 pages Publisher: WaterBrook Press – (2010-08-31) ISBN / EAN: 1400073979 / 9781400073979

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Moonlight Road (Virgin River) Robyn Carr Retail Price: $7.99 Mass Market Paperback: 400 pages Publisher: Mira – (2010-03-01) ISBN / EAN: 077832768X / 9780778327684

Wondering why  “This summer belongs to Stieg Larsson”?

USA Today‘s Deirdre Donahue gives ten reasons.

On next week’s NYT best sellers list (8/1), the books show amazing longevity by          topping three of them — hardcover fiction, mass market paperback and trade paperback.

NPR continues to add new titles to its 2010 Summer Books section. Up this week is Fun In The Sun: Laugh-Out-Loud Summer Books. One of the selections is an EarlyWord favorite, The Frozen Rabbi.  NPR says the author,

…cleverly weaves together a zany search for spiritual meaning in a depraved society with an unusual romp through the miserable history of Jews in the 20th century in this wonderfully entertaining, inventive new novel that evokes Amy Bloom, Michael Chabon and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

The Frozen Rabbi Steve Stern Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 384 pages Publisher: Algonquin Books – (2010-05-11) ISBN / EAN: 156512619X / 9781565126190

Amazon just released their list of the Best Books of 2010.

That is, the Best of 2010…So Far.

It consists of four lists; the overall Editors’ Top Ten, plus the top ten in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Kids and Teens, of the books published from January through June.

Many on the Editor’s Top Ten list are already familiar titles (The Passage leads the pack), but there are some unexpected picks. The one with the lowest Amazon sale ranking is Country Driving, which is described by the editors this way,

Peter Hessler has observed the past 15 years of change in China with the patience and perspective–and necessary good humor–of an outsider who expects to be there for a while. He takes to the roads, as so many Chinese are doing now for the first time, driving on dirt tracks to the desert edges of the ancient empire and on brand-new highways to the mushrooming factory towns of the globalized boom. He’s an utterly enjoyable guide, with a humane and empathetic eye for the ambitions, the failures, and the comedy of a country in which everybody, it seems, is on the move.

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Peter Hessler Retail Price: $27.99 Hardcover: 448 pages Publisher: Harper – (2010-02-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061804096 / 9780061804090

Which titles will be book club favorites when they come out in trade paperback next year? Kaite Stover asked this question in her Booklist Book Group Buzz column recently, placing her bets on two current hardcovers, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simondson (Random House, March, 2010) Bloodroot by Amy Greene (Knopf, Jan, 2010) and one that isn’t coming out until January, Pictures of You by Caroline Leavitt (Algonquin).

We love the idea of making these predictions, and wanted to join in. Our pick is Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. Back in January, USA Today made this attention-getting comparison,

Readers entranced by Kathryn Stockett’s The Help…will be equally riveted by Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Wench, a brutally told fictional account of slave women forced to be the “mistresses” of their white masters in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Like The Help, Wench immerses readers in its characters’ complex emotional lives.

For some reason, it didn’t follow The Help to bestsellerdom, but we’re predicting it will when it comes out in trade paperback this January. There’s several good indicators, including heavy holds in libraries. Book clubs are already reading it and Dolen-Perkins is available for phone-ins with groups via Skype (for more, check here). There’s even a reading group guide on O, the Oprah magazine site.

Wench: A Novel Dolen Perkins-Valdez Retail Price: $24.99 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Amistad – (2010-01-01) ISBN / EAN: 006170654X / 9780061706547

Unabridged Audio: Books on Tape
Audio and eBook downloadable from OverDrive
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Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s tour schedule is peppered with library events, including several opportunites to see her at the upcoming ALA:

Sunday, June 27th, WCC, 142
1:30-3:30
ALTAFF Program: Authors Come in All Colors

8:00 – 10:00
BCALA Membership Meeting

Monday, June 28
11:00-12:00
Booth signing — HarperCollins booth, #2513

12:00-12:30
Dolen Perkins-Valdez at the LIVE Stage

Having trouble keeping up with the monster mashup craze? The Huffington Post offers a handy guide, complete with the opportunity to vote on your top five favorites.

The current front runner is the just-published Jane Slayre, from the newly-formed Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster.

Of course, the iconic line has been recast as “Reader, I buried him.”

Jane Slayre Charlotte Bronte, Sherri Browning Erwin Retail Price: $15.00 Paperback: 400 pages Publisher: Gallery – (2010-04-13) ISBN / EAN: 1439191182 / 9781439191187

Blackstone Audio:

12 CDs;1441752161; $109.00
1 MP3CD;1441752192; $29.95
1 Playaway; 1441752222; $69.99
11 Tapes; 1441752154; $79.95

OverDrive WMA Audiobook

It’s impossible stay on top of all the books that are published, even just the popular ones; that’s why we’re always on the lookout for shortcuts. Newsweek and the Daily Beast both have columns that work as handy RA cheat sheets.

Newsweek gets right to the point with the title of their regular feature, “We Read it [So You Don’t Have To].” The editors recently decided to create a book club around it, complete with Twitter and Facebook pages as well as its own archive on the Newsweek site. Currently, it includes 7 nonfiction titles, ranging from the current crop of political scandal books (The Politician by Andrew Young, Staying True by Jenny Sanford and The Death of American Virtue by Ken Gormley) to the sleeper success, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Click on each title and you’ll get a brief annotation, “Buzz Rating” and a critique to make your own.

The Daily Beast has been running a weekly column with a similar thrust, “Do I Have to Read…?” The columnist, “William Boot,” promises,

This isn’t your typical book-review column. I’m reading the bestsellers: the Grishams, the Cornwells, the Higgins Clarks. Moreover, I’ll render the kind of blunt verdict you get when reading about toasters in Consumer Reports… If you want a different approach, try The New York Review of Books.

Who is William Boot? Hard to know, since Boot is a pseudonymn (presumably to avoid hate mail from outraged publishers, agents and authors — when Boot hates a book, he sounds like Virginia Kirkus having a bad day), taken from the protagonist in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop (the Daily Beast itself takes its name from the fictional newspaper in that book).

Scoop Evelyn Waugh Retail Price: $14.99 Paperback: 336 pages Publisher: Back Bay Books – (1999-09) ISBN / EAN: 0316926108 / 9780316926102

Boot considers only about 38 of James Patterson’s I, Alex Cross readable. On the other hand, of the 279 pages of Anne Tyler’s Noah’s Compass, he recommends 285 of them (he went back and reread a section which he enjoyed the second time around).

He may be more of a populist than the crowd at the New York Review of Books, but not by much.

This week, Boot steps outside his brief and covers a book that’s not a current bestseller, Dick Francis’ Comeback.

The full list of titles Boot has considered is available here.

The tragedy in Haiti has brought new attention to Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains (2003, Random House) about Dr. Paul Farmer’s work to solve the country’s public-health problems. It’s been in the top 100 on Amazon for the past 7 days. Farmer’s organization, Partners in Health is behind the Stand on Haiti relief effort (check out the video on the site by librarian Cliff Landis, who created a matching grant of $10,000 for the organization. Warning: don’t watch it if you don’t want to be caught crying in front of your computer).

It’s included in the Daily Beast‘s list of  The Best Books on Haiti (one testy comment points out that it’s actually the best books in English on the country) and the more extensive list on the “Shelf Renewal” blog at Library Journal:

• Understanding Haiti, Part 1 — Nonfiction
• Understanding Haiti, Part 2 — Fiction

There will obviously be more books published on Haiti and specifically on the earthquake. Time magazine has already announced a book by their reporters and photographers; at least $75,000 of the profits will go to Haiti relief efforts. It will be released first as a “bookazine” on 1/29 and as a hardcover in February. Bibliographic information is not yet available.

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World Tracy Kidder Retail Price: $18.00 Paperback: 352 pages Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks – (2009-08-25) ISBN / EAN: 0812980557 / 9780812980554

Also in unabridged audio from Books on Tape

Book and audio available from OverDrive.

What’s the best one-line description you’ve ever heard, or used, for a book?

A friend of mine just described Larry McMurtry’s Rhino Ranch this way, “When I was done, I thought I’d grown up with all of his characters.”

Makes me want to pick it up.

Rhino Ranch: A Novel Larry McMurtry Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: Simon & Schuster – (2009-08-11) ISBN / EAN: 1439156395 / 9781439156391

Before the Booker Prize winner Wolf Hall was published here, many felt that Americans would not be able to follow its story of Tudor palace intrigue.

A bit of help is on its way. Anne Weir’s forthcoming The Lady in the Tower serves as a “useful companion piece,” says Janet Maslin in the NYT, to Mantel’s “delectably arch portrait of Anne [Boleyn].”

The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn Alison Weir Retail Price: $28.00 Hardcover: 464 pages Publisher: Ballantine Books – (2010-01-05) ISBN / EAN: 0345453212 / 9780345453211

Audio; Recorded Books; Anticipated Release: Feb 13, 2010

• Unabridged CD; $123.75
• Unabridged Cassette; $113.75

Annual “best books” roundups always reflect a mix of love and duty, as any book reviewer or awards judge knows. On the theory that many of the lesser-known picks on these lists are actually the best-loved, we took another look at the year’s “Best Books,” trying to spot books with broad appeal that slipped under our radar this year, and perhaps yours, too. Some of these titles don’t have holds list, so you may actually find them on the new book shelves.

(Check out our list of Under-the-Radar Literary Picks too!)

The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire by C. E. Mayo

Library Journal chose this historical novel about the short-lived career of Austrian archduke Maximilian as Mexico’s emperor in the 1860s for their best books longlist. It also got a fair amount of coverage from book bloggers –  including Bookslut and others – after Unbridled Books sent the author on a lively blog tour. According to World Cat, 239 libraries have the book. Those we checked had 4-6 copies with no reserves.

The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire C. M. Mayo Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 448 pages Publisher: Unbridled Books – (2009-05-05) ISBN / EAN: 193296164X / 9781932961645

The Art Student’s War by Brad Leithauser

This paean to Detroit and one of its immigrant families in the decodes after WWII by a native son and author of five novels was a New York Times Notable Book and is available in 151 libraries in modest quantities with modest reserves. The full review in the Times called it

“One of the finest novels about Detroit’s history to come along in years. With its generous and cleareyed vision of the city’s grand past, it will particularly resonate with readers who remember the glory days of the American Rust Belt.”

The Art Student’s War Brad Leithauser Retail Price: $28.95 Hardcover: 512 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2009-11-03) ISBN / EAN: 0307271110 / 9780307271112

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy

This story collection set in Montana about characters adept at creating misery for themselves was the only short story collection to appear on the New York Times Top 10 list for 2009, in a year the critics acknowledge was a superlative one for short stories. It’s in 558 libraries, says World Cat; those we checked had 20 or fewer copies, with up to twice as many reserves.

The full New York Times review praises Meloy’s wry humor and exceptional restraint,  while the Los Angeles Times review notes that “Meloy’s richest territory is the fork in the road at right and wrong, the moment when a person’s moral compass wavers.”

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It Maile Meloy Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 240 pages Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover – (2009-07-09) ISBN / EAN: 159448869X / 9781594488696

Big Machine by Victor LaValle

A Publishers Weekly Top 10 pick, Victor LaValle’s second novel is about about faith and the monsters and mental sustenance it can create, particularly among America’s underclass. World Cat says 401 libraries have it, some with modest reserves.

The Washington Post places LaValle’s work in an “increasingly high-profile and important cohort of writers who reinvent outmoded literary conventions, particularly the ghettos of genre and ethnicity that long divided serious literature from popular fiction.”

Big Machine Victor LaValle Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 384 pages Publisher: Spiegel & Grau – (2009-08-11) ISBN / EAN: 0385527985 / 9780385527989

Lowboy by John Wray

This novel about a paranoid schizophrenic teenager who spends his days riding the New York City subways was on the Amazon.com editors’ Best Books longlist. More libraries have it than any other book on this list – 875 libraries, according to World Cat – yet reserves are low, despite solid coverage in highbrow print venues like the New York Times and New York magazine and hipster blogs like Largehearted Boy.

Lowboy John Wray Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 272 pages Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux – (2009-03-03) ISBN / EAN: 0374194165 / 9780374194161

If one of the functions of book awards is to bring attention to books that may not have received it otherwise, then the National Book Awards achieved that goal with one of the nonfiction nominees, The Poison King. In the Washington Post, Carolyn See reviewed it, saying,

I read this biography as a layperson, not a scholar, but I can say without reservation that it’s a wonderful reading experience, as bracing as a tonic, the perfect holiday gift for adventure-loving men and women…it’s drenched in imaginative violence and disaster, but it also wears the blameless vestments of culture and antiquity.

Put that in your nonfiction readers advisory bag.

The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy Adrienne Mayor Retail Price: $29.95 Hardcover: 472 pages Publisher: Princeton University Press – (2009-10-18) ISBN / EAN: 0691126836 / 9780691126838