The memoir category continues to grow, as proved by the large selection coming next week.

Already making headlines is Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragoso (FSG), the memoir of the author’s seduction and molestation, beginning at age 7, by a serial child rapist in his 50s, it follows their 15-year relationship. New York magazine reviewed it this week, calling  it “an unstable mixture of bildungsroman, dirty realism, and child pornography” and calls it “beautiful and appalling.”

Andre Dubus‘smemoir of his childhood, Townie (Norton), an EarlyWord favorite since his appearance at ALA Midwinter, has already garnered admiring reviews.

A natural outgrowth of the public fascination with celebrity chefs and their cookbooks is the celebrity chef memoir. Next week brings two with strong backing from their publishers:

Gabrielle Hamilton recently confirmed her chops as a writer with an excerpt in the New Yorker from Blood, Bones and Butter, which recounts her trajectory from a 1970s Pennsylvania childhood that disintegrated in divorce to opening her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune.

The memoir has also wrested rare praise from New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, who says,

…the book is hardly just for foodies. Ms. Hamilton, who has an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, is as evocative writing about people and places as she is at writing about cooking, and her memoir does as dazzling a job of summoning her lost childhood as Mary Karr’s “Liars’ Club” and Andre Aciman’s “Out of Egypt” did with theirs.

Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef Gabrielle Hamilton Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Random House – (2011-03-01) ISBN / EAN: 140006872X / 9781400068722

Grant Achatz, whose Chicago restaurant Alinea was crowned the best in America by Gourmet magazine, also delivers Life, on the Line: A Chef’s Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat. Co-written by Nick Kokonas, the book has a 75,000 copy first printing. An excerpt in the new issue of People (March 7) chronicles Achatz’s struggle with tongue cancer.

Life, on the Line: A Chef’s Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat Grant Achatz, Nick Kokonas Retail Price: $27.50 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: Gotham/Penguin – (2011-03-03) ISBN / EAN: 1592406017 / 9781592406012

Other Notable Nonfiction On Sale Next Week

Getting to Heaven: Departing Instructions for Your Life Now by Don Piper and Cecil Murphey (Berkley) is an “instruction book” regarding the Christian idea of the afterlife by the author of the multimillion-selling 90 Minutes in Heaven.

Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction That Changed America by Les Standiford and Joe Matthews (Ecco) is the story of the 1981 kidnapping and murder of six-year-old Adam Walsh—son of John Walsh, host of the Fox TV series America’s Most Wanted—which went unsolved for a quarter of a century. It will get a major round of publicity, including a March 1 Q&A with the authors in USA Today, a March 2 appearance by Joe Matthews and the Walshes on the Today show; and a March 3 segment on Nightline.

Revolt!: How to Defeat Obama and Repeal His Socialist Programs by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann (Broadside Books) advocates no tax increases, weakening federal regulations and cutting social programs in the name of deficit reduction.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer (Penguin Press) chronicles the training process of a once forgetful U.S. Memory Champion. The author was interviewed on All Things Considered on Wednesday.

The New York Times Book Review will post an additional, online-only picture book review each week. The first one is for Il Sung Na’s book about the change of seasons,  Snow Rabbit, Spring Rabbit.

Snow Rabbit, Spring Rabbit: A Book of Changing Seasons Il Sung Na Retail Price: $15.99 Hardcover: 24 pages Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers – (2011-01-11) ISBN / EAN: 0375867864 / 9780375867866

Also available in library binding

Library holds are rising rapidly for The Paris Wife by Paul McClain. More will be coming; it’s a People Pick in the 3/7 issue and has risen to #37 on Amazon sales rankings. A fictionalized version of the love story between Ernest Hemingway and his first wife and their lives in Paris in the 20’s (which Hemingway paid tribute to in A Moveable Feast, published after his death), People says it is “impossible to resist.”

The Paris Wife Web site provides historical background material as well as a photo gallery.

The Paris Wife: A Novel Paula McLain Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Ballantine Books – (2011-02-22) ISBN / EAN: 0345521307 / 9780345521309

Audio; Random House and Books On Tape

OverDrive; WMA Audio and Adobe EPUB eBook

In today’s New York Times, Dwight Garner offers a review of Andre Dubus’s memoir, Townie, that is nearly a love letter,

Townie is a better, harder book than anything the younger Mr. Dubus has yet written; it pays off on every bet that’s been placed on him. It’s a sleek muscle car of a memoir that — until it loses traction in clichés about redemption at its very end — growls like an amalgam of the best work by Richard Price, Stephen King, Ron Kovic, Breece D’J Pancake and Dennis Lehane, set to the desolate thumping of Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town.”

Laura Miller gives it an equally strong review, but for different reasons, in Salon, underscoring that there are many things readers will take away from this book.

Since the book offers an insightful look at the male perspective on growing up (Dubus makes you understand why some boys are drawn to brawling and weight lifting), it would be a great choice for a male/female and father/son book clubs.

Dubus will appear on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show on 2/28, the book’s official publication date.

Libraries we checked are showing heavy holds on modest orders.

Townie: A Memoir Andre Dubus III Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company – (2011-02-28) ISBN / EAN: 0393064662 / 9780393064667

Audio: Blackstone; UNABR, simultaneous; read by the author

Joyce Carol Oates’ memoir, A Widow’s Story, shares the cover of the new NYT BR, following on the heels of much media attention (fetures in USA Today, and Time magazine this week). More attention will be coming, including an interview with Charlie Rose and a feaure in Newsweek.

It is now at #55 on Amazon sales rankings.

A Widow’s Story: A Memoir Joyce Carol Oates Retail Price: $27.99 Hardcover: 432 pages Publisher: Ecco – (2011-03-01) ISBN / EAN: 0062015532 / 9780062015532

Cowboys and Aliens by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg is a graphic novel about an alien invasion of Arizona in 1873, and the basis for a big movie coming this summer. The movie trailer shown during the Super Bowl generated so much discussion that director Jon Favreau (Iron Man), fearing people didn’t get it defended it to MTV.

Our guess is that the combination of star Harrison Ford and Jon Favreau (Iron Man) will result in a hit. But whether that will make people want to read the comic is anyone’s guess. Still, libraries haven’t ordered it and may want to give it serious consideration.

Cowboys and Aliens Scott Mitchell Rosenberg Retail Price: $24.99 Hardcover: 112 pages Publisher: It Books – (2011-03-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061646652 / 9780061646652

Fiction Worth Watching

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain (Ballantine), a fictionalized portrait of Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage can be seen as A Moveable Feast from Hadley Richardson’s point of view. Entertainment Weekly gives it an A-, saying, the “biographical and geographical research is so deep, and [McLean’s] empathy for the real Hadley Richardson so forthright (without being intrusively femme partisan), that the account reads as very real indeed.”

The ARC was featured at the Random House booth at Midwinter. Cuyahoga P.L. has taken a strong stand on the book, partly because the author is local (she’s from Cleveland Heights). Cuyahoga’s Coll. Dev. Manager Wendy Bartlett read the ARC and says it’s got “book discussion group” written all over it.

The Sweet Relief of Missing Children by Sarah Braunstein (Norton) is a “complex and multifaceted study of children who conquer bad childhoods—and children who cannot,” according to Library Journal, which declares,”Braunstein paints gorgeous portraits of a wide variety of characters, all fully realized.” The author won the 2007 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award and was named as one of the National Book Foundations 5 under 35, which recognizes five young fiction writers chosen by National Book Award winners and finalists.

Usual Suspects

Gideon’s Sword by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Grand Central) is the first in a new thriller series about the newly hired employee of a secretive government contractor. PW says the “tired and predictable story line isn’t helped by a protagonist lacking the quirks of the authors’ popular series hero, FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast.” Kirkus largely concurs, but adds, “Crew is a great character, and this series holds promise.”

Treachery in Death by J.D. Robb (Putnam) is the 33rd novel with New York homicide detective Eve Dallas. Booklist says, this “entry in Robbs gritty, futuristic procedural series is one of the best yet: a sexy, high-stakes, high-adrenaline read that will delight series stalwarts, hook readers new to Eve Dallas, and please both mystery and romance readers.”

Pale Demon by Kim Harrison (Harper Voyager) is book nine in the supernatural Hollows series. Library Journal says, “This one features plenty of action and a strong central character, but it is a little bit lighter in tone than the last few installments in the series. Urban fantasy and paranormal romance fans will undoubtedly place plenty of holds, so purchase accordingly.”

Nonfiction

Despite an embargo, news is already breaking about Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown’s memoir, which includes the story of his abusive childhood, Against All Odds (Harper). We will be hearing a great deal more in the coming days; he is scheduled to appear on 60 Minutes this Sunday, followed by The Early Show, Today and The View the next day, plus more media attention throughout the week. As The Atlantic points out this month, politicians have only recently found political capital in writing about childhood traumas (just twenty years ago, a George Bush, Sr. spokesman famously said, “Real men don’t get on the couch”). On the other hand, the Boston Herald accuses Brown of hypocrisy.

A Simple Government: Twelve Things We Really Need from Washington (and a Trillion That We Don’t!) by Mike Huckabee (Sentinel) advocates a significantly smaller federal government.

Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril by King Abdullah II of Jordan (Viking) chronicles the life of the king of Jordan and possible peace plans for the region.

We expected to see A Discovery of Witches on best seller lists, but we didn’t know it would land so high. You can expect to see it at #2 on the upcoming NYT Print Fiction list this week, based on the fact that it appears on the new USA Today Best Seller list at #8, making it the #2 hardcover fiction title.

A Discovery of Witches: A Novel Deborah Harkness Retail Price: $28.95 Hardcover: 592 pages Publisher: Viking Adult – (2011-02-08) ISBN / EAN: 0670022411 / 9780670022410

Large type; Thorndike; March (9781410436337).
Audio: Recorded Books

Author Deborah Harkness, who in addition to teaching the history of science at the University of Southern California, also writes the blog Good Wine Under $20, gives advice on what to serve a vampire in the following video,

On NPR’s Fresh Air last night, Maureen Corrigan said that Allison Pearson’s I Think I Love You may be a slow build,

But, as the novel gets under way, Pearson pulls off something extraordinary…For any middle-aged woman out there (and there must be hundreds of thousands of us) who long ago cried herself to sleep because Bobby Sherman or Donny Osmond or Davy Jones of The Monkees was sooo cute and sooo out of reach, I Think I Love You is both an anguished trip back to the mad possessiveness of puppy love and a respectful acknowledgment that it mattered.

As a result, the book rose to #165 (from #449) on Amazon. Libraries that ordered it modestly are showing heavy holds to copy ratios.

I Think I Love You Allison Pearson Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2011-02-08) ISBN / EAN: 1400042356 / 9781400042357

OverDrive; AdobeEPUB eBook

The book trailer features various publishing people revealing how embarrassing it is to remember their teenage crushes, but how much they mattered. Included are Judith Jones, Julia Childs editor.

Corrigan leads her review by talking about Pearson’s first book, I Don’t Know How She Does It. It opens with a scene that, she says, “was so dead-on in its depiction of the screwball anxieties fueling the mommy wars that it instantly signaled that [it] was going to be a winner.”

The movie version is now being filmed near EarlyWord headquarters in Brooklyn (here’s a reason to welcome to film crews; they cleared the lingering, and very ugly, snow from the streets). It stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Christina Hendricks, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Munn, Kelsey Grammer, Greg Kinnear and Jane Curtin. No release date has been set.

In its current issue, Newsweek features a full-length photo of economist Dambisa Moyo in a clingy dress and heels under the headline, “The Siren of the Financial Meltdown.”

Her second book, How the West Was Lost, went on sale yesterday. In it, says Newsweek, she argues,

…we have become feckless, overborrowed, and obsessed with consumer goods. Our governments have fed our foolishness with policies that meant well but ended badly. Meanwhile China and the other emerging economies…have been catching up fast and have so far made few of the same mistakes

How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly–and the Stark Choices Ahead Dambisa Moyo Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 240 pages Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux – (2011-02-15) ISBN / EAN: 0374173257 / 9780374173258

Audio: UNABR; Tantor

This is just the beginning of the media attention; an interview has been taped for NPR’s Morning Edition, more print coverage is coming (The National Review, among others) as well as several public appearances.

In An Exclusive Love, Johanna Adjoran tries to understand her grandparents, survivors of the Holocaust, who committed double-suicide in 1991. On the NPR Web site, Heller McAlpin calls it, a “haunting, beautifully composed book” and likens it to Francine du Plessix Gray’s Them, and Edmund de Waal’s The Hare With Amber Eyes (a Nancy Pearl favorite).

An Exclusive Love: A Memoir Johanna Adorján Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 192 pages Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company – (2011-01-31) ISBN / EAN: 0393080013 / 9780393080018

Roseanne Barr appears on the Oprah Show today. Her latest book came out in January.

Roseannearchy: Dispatches from the Nut Farm Retail Price: $26.00 Paperback: 284 pages Publisher: Gallery Press/S&S – (2011 -01-04) ISBN 9781439154823

Appropriately, there are a torrent of leaks from Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website by former WikiLeaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg, which goes on sale today (Friday, February 11).

Among the revelations: Wired magazine reports that “when Domscheit-Berg left WikiLeaks, he took the organization’s encrypted submissions system with him, and Assange’s site has been unable to accept new material since.”

And Gawker says the book claims that Assange has fathered at least four “love children” around the world.

Libraries we checked had modest holds on modest orders.

Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website Daniel Domscheit-Berg Retail Price: $23.00 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Crown – (2011-02-15) ISBN / EAN: 030795191X / 9780307951915

Other Notable Nonfiction On Sale Next Week

A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco) gets an “A” from Entertainment Weekly: “In a narrative as searing as the best of her fiction, Oates describes the aftermath of her husband Ray’s unexpected death from pneumonia.” Oates has already appeared on NewsHour, and a raft of features are due next week everywhere from the USA Today to Newsweek. It will also be featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review on February 20.

True You: A Journey to Finding and Loving Yourself by Janet Jackson and David Ritz (Pocket Books/Karen Hunter) reveals that Jackson’s brothers verbally abused her and her father beat her, according to a Los Angeles Times report on Meredith Viera’s interview with the singer, which will air on NBC’s Today on Friday, February 11 and Monday, February 14, and on “Dateline” on Sunday February 13.

33 Men: Inside the Miraculous Survival and Dramatic Rescue of the Chilean Miners by Jonathan Franklin (Putnam) is an inside (though above-ground) account of the Chilean mine collapse and rescue operation last year, based on more than 110 interviews with the miners, their families, and the rescue team.

Worth Watching:

History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life by Jill Bialosky (Simon & Schuster) is the poet, novelist and Norton editor’s account of her sister’s early death at age 21, in 1990. PW calls it “a beautifully composed, deeply reflective work, [drawing] from literary and psychological examples to honor her sister through a thoroughly examined life.”

Inconceivable: A Medical Mistake, the Baby We Couldn’t Keep, and Our Choice to Deliver the Ultimate Gift by Carolyn Savage and Sean Savage (HarperOne) chronicles a couple’s spiritual struggle after learning a fertility clinic implanted the wrong embryo. Booklist says, “The story is compelling and well told, although the Savages come across as martyrs more than saints.”

The #1 Indie Pick for February, West of Here by Jonathan Evison, arrives next week. Also a popular choice on EarlyWord‘s Galley Chat, the novel follows the past and present residents of a fictional town on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. Reader ratings are also high on GoodReads.com.

Entertainment Weekly gives it a “B+”: “Characters occasionally blur together, and some of the more interesting ones don’t get the attention they warrant, as the large scope hinders any close-ups. Still, if you take a step back, the big picture is pretty impressive.”

More media is bound to pay attention, since the book was highlighted on the BEA Editor’s Buzz Panel. And as we’ve mentioned before, this titles earned a rare triumvirate of starred reviews from Booklist, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. LJ sums up, “Fans of Jess Walter and Jim Lynch will be thrilled to find another author whose love for the Pacific Northwest and its people shines through with humor and clarity.”

At libraries we checked, there are modest holds on modest orders.

West of Here Jonathan Evison Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 496 pages Publisher: Algonquin Books – (2011-02-15) ISBN / EAN: 1565129520 / 9781565129528

Audio: Highbridge; 9781615731169; $39.95

Usual Suspects On Sale Next Week

A Heartbeat Away by Michael Palmer (St. Martin’s) is medical thriller with a 200,000 copy printing, in which terrorists release a virus in the Capitol during the State of the Union address. Booklist says, “Palmer’s track record (15 medical thrillers, 15 international best-sellers) assures a full-court press on the promotional front, and his latest, though disappointing, will get it, from national print and radio ads to an electronic avalanche.”

The Twelfth Insight: The Hour of Decision by James Redfield (Grand Central) is the fourth entry in the Celestine series.

Red Wolf by Liza Marklund (Atria) is the fifth novel featuring journalist Annika Bengtzon by the co-author of The Postcard Killers with James Patterson. Library Journal says, “Marklund blends the sociology and politics of contemporary Sweden with a taut mystery, capturing the Scandinavian chill as she builds suspense to an eminently satisfying conclusion.”

Dirtier Than Ever by Vickie Stringer (Atria) takes readers on another bumpy ride in this urban fiction outing with Red, Bacon, and Q–the love-hate triangle from Dirty Red and Still Dirty.

Lucky Stiff by Deborah Coonts (Forge) is the sequel to the chick-lit-gone-wild debut Wanna Get Lucky?, featuring Las Vegas casino troubleshooter Lucky O’Toole. Library Journal says, “watching Lucky navigate the dangerous shoals of the male-dominated world of gambling is a delight. Las Vegas is the perfect setting for this witty tale of misdirection and larger-than-life characters. Fans of J.A. Konrath’s Jack Daniels series will love this.”

Young Adult

Angel by James Patterson (Little Brown) is the seventh Maximum Ride novel, in which evil scientists are still trying to convince Max that she needs to save the world, this time by providing the genetic link in speeding up the pace of evolution.

Worth Watching

Instruments of Darkness by Imogen Robertson (Pamela Dorman/Viking) was an October Sneak Peak on BookReporter.com, which compared this historical novel about a British commander’s wife who trades life at sea for the English countryside to Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith.

We’re struck that two reviews this week expressed their love for sentences.

The lead review in the new issue of Entertainment Weekly singles out several favorite phrases from the memoir, House of Prayer No. 2 by Mark Richard, who, says the reviewer, writes “effortlessly killer prose.”

Earlier this week, Dwight Garner, threatened to fill his review of another memoir, Day of Honey, with the author’s “sensual, smart, wired-up” sentences.

Maybe Stanley Fish has made reviewers more attuned to sentences, with his book How to Write a Sentence and his contest for readers favorites.

It seems to work; both reviews make you want to get your hands on the books as soon as possible.

House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer’s Journey Home Mark Richard Retail Price: $23.95 Hardcover: 224 pages Publisher: Nan A. Talese – (2011-02-15) ISBN / EAN: 038551302X / 9780385513029

…………………………

Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Annia Ciezadlo Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: Free Press – (2011-02-01) ISBN / EAN: 1416583939 / 9781416583936

An EarlyWord debut favorite,Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown, will arrive on the lower rungs of the 2/20 NYT Fiction Best Seller list. Quite a feat; the only other debut on that list is The Help, now on the list for an astounding 97 weeks (both titles are from the Amy Einhorn imprint at Putnam, which is also responsible for The Postmistress, underscoring that it is one to watch. Check out what is coming this summer from Einhorn in the Putnam catalog).

Back in November, we covered Weird Sisters on GalleyChat and are pleased to see that most of those titles are hitting big now (join us for the next GalleyChat ,Tuesday, March 1, 4 to 5 pm Eastern).

Remember the sisters’ motto; “There is no problem a library card can’t solve.”

The Weird Sisters Eleanor Brown Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam – (2011-02-17) ISBN / EAN: 0399157220 / 9780399157226

Penguin Audio; UNABR; 9780142428948; $39.95
Books on Tape; UNABR; 9780307881724; $39.95
Large Type; Thorndike; May, ISBN 13: 9781410437051, $30.99
OverDrive WMA and MP3 Audiobook coming soon