Readers Shiver With Antici...pation

Every good book snob knows that you have to read the book before you see the movie, so it's no surprise that, in anticipation of Martin Scorsese's film adaptation, Dennis Lehane's SHUTTER ISLAND has hit #11 on both the Publishers Weekly and The New York Times mass market bestseller lists!

When C.J. Met R.J.

At the 20th Annual Kappa Kappa Gamma Book and Author Dinner in Denver, C.J. Box made friends with another handsome cowboy (or at least someone who's played one in the movies), Robert Wagner.

Chuck writes, "After the talks at the event tonight (650 people were there), R.J. came up to me and said, very graciously, 'I've never been upstaged by a writer before,' which thrilled me to no end. Then we spent a few hours in the bar talking fly-fishing."

So, Chuck, when are you going to introduce us?

It Might Be Dark, But That Star Will Brighten Things Up A Bit

We're pleased to tell you that BOSTON NOIR, edited by Dennis Lehane, has received a starred review in Publishers Weekly!

They write:

In the best of the 11 stories in this outstanding entry in Akashic's noir series, characters, plot and setting feed off each other like flames and an arsonist's accelerant. These include Lehane's own "Animal Rescue," about a killing resulting from a lost and contested pit bull; John Dufresne's "The Cross-Eyed Bear," in which a pedophile priest is caught between the icy representative of the archdiocese and one of his now adult victims; and Don Lee's "The Oriental Hair Poets," which charts a literary feud that escalates into a police case. Two populations that define the city for outsiders -- the elite WASP "Brahmins" and the hundreds of thousands of college students surging through to earn their degrees -- appear only in passing. While Lehane expresses the fear in his introduction that Boston is becoming "beiger," less tribal and gritty and more gentrified and homogenized, this anthology shows that noir can thrive where Raymond Chandler has never set foot.

The anthology comes out in November from Akashic Books.

Book Nerds Unite!

Although it might have been overshadowed by all the hubbub surrounding the juicier National Cheeseburger Day and arrrrr-ier National Talk Like A Pirate Day, Book Blogger Appreciation Week also occurred last week. While we love burgers and parrots as much as the next literary agency blog, we think that BBAW should also get its due, even if we're a bit late in pointing it out.

Fortunately, ARLA author Kathleen McCleary was on top of things and wrote a great article for the occasion entitled "Why Book Blogs Matter." She posits that they matter because "all of us who love reading -- who may be introverts or extroverts, insanely happy or in despair, athletic or clumsy, beautiful or not-so-much -- have, through the common bond of reading books, the chance to know we're not alone."

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Collecting Some Nice Reviews

Next month, Sasquatch Books will publish THE COLLECTOR by Jack Nisbet, a fascinating look at the life of a 19th-century botanist, and we're pleased that Booklist has already had some nice things to say about it:

Intrepid. Indefatigable. Enthusiastic. Enduring. The adjectives used to describe pioneering botanist David Douglas are nearly as extensive as the list of plants this resourceful explorer introduced to the world. From the towering fir that bears his name to lowly alpine mosses, Douglas's extensive horticultural discoveries fueled the insatiable British and European appetite for exotic plants and secured his legacy as one of the most prolific and fearless plant-hunters of the nineteenth century. Historian and naturalist Nisbet traces the unlikely evolution of this audacious adventurer from his early days as an apprentice gardener in his native Britain to the rough-and-tumble years spent traversing the daunting terrain of the Pacific Northwest and beyond in search of new species of trees, shrubs, flowers, and herbs. The result is an exhilarating biography that provides an entertaining portrait of the unfettered determination that drove one of the giants in the field of botanical exploration and infused the young nation he viewed with a keen and zealous spirit.

Target Targets Nellie Hermann's Book

We're pleased to tell you that Target has chosen THE CURE FOR GRIEF as one of their Breakout Books selections!