Jonathan Nasaw
THE BOYS FROM SANTA CRUZ
(Attria, February 2010)
The author of Girls He Adored and, most recently, When She Was Bad delivers another nail biting thriller featuring FBI agent E.L. Pender. Thrilling and suspenseful, yet buoyed by a perverse and quirky humor, Boys From Santa Cruz examines a case of murder and revenge set among the tall trees and New Age gurus of northern California. Jonathan Nasaw sharply portrays three equally intense characters—troubled teenager Luke Steele, a deviant killer who may or may not be Luke Steele, and the charmingly disheveled veteran FBI agent on their trail—in this original and page-turning thriller.
“THE BOYS FROM SANTA CRUZ is a character-driven novel, with Pender being the character in every sense of the word. A true fish out of water, he is good at what he does — catching people — but, as this tale reveals, he can be very wrong as well. There is a gallows humor that informs his dialogue, which is hysterically funny in spots, but there is a tragic pathos that lies just beneath the surface of every scene, threatening to break through. If you’re unfamiliar with Pender or with Nasaw’s work in general, THE BOYS FROM SANTA CRUZ is a dark and fabulous place to start.”
–Bookreporter.com
“This brilliant and painfully suspenseful thriller features FBI agent E.L. Pender, a disabled private eye named Skip Epstein, a serial killer and his transgendered wife, two psychopaths escaped from a mental institution and a roving band of carrion-munching turkey vultures. I doubt any mystery fan will put this shocking and unbearably tense book down unfinished.The exploration of a seriously twisted mind is fascinating, as is the good-natured humor between co-protagonists, and the major twist comes not at the climax but two-thirds through. If you’ve not yet enjoyed the elegant writing of Nasaw, you’re falling behind. Grade: A”
–Cleveland.com
Domenic Stansberry
NAKED MOON
(St. Martin’s Press, March 2010)
From Edgar-Award winning author Domenic Stansbury, comes Naked Moon, the tender, intimate brutal, and the final and most chilling tale in the Dante Mancuso cycle.
“This series…revitalizes the classic detective story, injecting it with a noir sensibility that evokes the old masters and seems altogether new.”
–Booklist
“We’ve said it all along: whereas others play at noir, Stansberry delivers the real thing. That was true with the marvelous Ancient Rain (2008), and it’s even more true with this latest entry in the Dante Mancuso series. This time the San Francisco P.I.’s shady past (working for a clandestine government security outfit called the Company) comes back to haunt him. Ordinarily, you don’t ever quit the Company, but Dante managed it through some tricky leverage; now the Company has its own leverage in the form of Dante’s cousin, who has turned to the group for help when his warehousing business goes south. “It was nice to think you had a choice, that your actions made a difference one way or another,” Dante muses, but he knows better. Think of the end of For Whom The Bell Tolls–Robert Jordan with a Gaitling gun between his legs and the Fascists coming up the mountain en masse–and you’ll have some idea of just how dark the world looks to Dante’s shrouded eyes (and, unlike Jordan, Dante harbors no illusions about honor). As always, Stansberry combines his unrelenting noir world view with remarkably lyrical prose. You want a similar title? Try Mozart’s Requiem.”
–Booklist (Starred Review)
Philip Kearney
UNDER THE BLUE FLAG: MY MISSION IN KOSOVO
(Phoenix Books, March 2010)
David Lebovitz
READY FOR DESSERT
(Ten Speed Press, April 2010)
“Bring any of David’s desserts forward at the close of a meal, and you’ll have a hard time remaining humble under showers of praise. But what I especially like about David’s book, aside from the results his recipes promise, is David himself — that he and his desserts are so approachable, relaxed, and friendly.”
–Deborah Madison, author of Seasonal Fruit Desserts from Orchard, Farm, and Market
“If you already know David and love his simple, straightforward style and his full-flavored desserts, you’ll be delighted to see his favorites polished and brought up to the moment. And if you’re just discovering David’s recipes, all I can say is ‘Lucky you!’ This collection brings you the best of his best and hours of sweet pleasure.”
--Dorie Greenspan, author of Baking: From My Home to Yours
“David has put into his fantastic new book all of the ingredients that make him so great: 1 part talented pastry chef + 1 part comic + 1 part great writer. I’m excited to try his best-of recipe collection.”
--Elizabeth Falkner, chef/owner of Citizen Cake and Orson and author of Demolition Desserts
Lynn Schooler
WALKING HOME: A TRAVELER IN THE ALASKAN WILDERNESS, A JOURNEY INTO THE HUMAN HEART
(Bloomsbury, May 2010)
“An outdoorsman ventures alone into remote territory. Schooler (The Last Shot: The Incredible Story of the C.S.S. Shenandoah and the True Conclusion of the American Civil War, 2005, etc.) narrates his journey along the western side of Mount Fairweather in Alaska, a trek that completed, in combination with earlier adventures, his circumnavigation of the mountain. An accomplished wilderness guide, the author builds a dramatic mood and some suspense into his tale with steady pacing and vivid scene-setting. He uses history and natural history to describe the enormously challenging elements that he faced—ice-filled bays to be entered from seaward, rivers to be forded, formidable, rocky terrain to be crossed, bears to be carefully and respectfully avoided. His descriptions of the terrain are peopled with indigenous tribes and earlier explorers and settlers, and even a 500-year-old body found in the ice. The tale is further enriched by pointed observations about the natural world, such as how various species of birds made it their home and what they must do to survive such extreme conditions. These notes are interesting but also serve to dramatize the tests that Schooler faced along his way, including an encounter with a grizzly that stalks him part of the way. Without sentimentality or self-pity, he also writes about personal losses and struggles that occurred before his journey and how they motivated him to set off into the wilderness in lieu of working on other pressing projects, including a partially finished house he was building for himself and his increasingly distant wife.
A rich account of a man’s solo adventure into the wilderness, and what he learned about that place and himself.”
--Kirkus Reviews
Kate Racculia
THIS MUST BE THE PLACE
(Henry Holt & Co., July 2010)
Indie Next List Notables for August
“The Darby-Jones boardinghouse in Ruby Falls, New York, is home to Mona Jones and her daughter, Oneida, two loners and self-declared outcasts who have formed a perfectly insular family unit: the two of them and the four eclectic boarders living in their house. But their small, quiet life is upended when Arthur Rook shows up in the middle of a nervous breakdown, devastated by the death of his wife, carrying a pink shoe box containing all his wife’s mementos and keepsakes, and holding a postcard from sixteen years ago, addressed to Mona but never sent. Slowly the contents of the box begin to fit together to tell a story—one of a powerful friendship, a lost love, and a secret that, if revealed, could change everything that Mona, Oneida, and Arthur know to be true. Or maybe the stories the box tells and the truths it brings to life will teach everyone about love—how deeply it runs, how strong it makes us, and how even when all seems lost, how tightly it brings us together. With emotional accuracy and great energy, This Must Be the Place introduces memorable, charming characters that refuse to be forgotten.”
--Amazon
Antonya Nelson
BOUND
(Bloomsbury, November 2010)
What binds us together into families? What is the nature of love? Antonya Nelson probes for answers in her latest novel set in the Midwest. Two teenage girls – best friends from opposite worlds – learn about violence, sex, and alcohol and then disappear from each other’s lives. Years later, Catherine, living a comfortable life with her entrepreneur husband, learns simultaneously of her best friend Misty’s death and her own newfound responsibility as guardian for Cattie, Misty’s complicated and rebellious teenage daughter. Nelson’s characters always have troubled lives, secrets they withhold even from loved ones, public and private personas. And in Bound, Nelson explores what draws us together or breaks us apart.
“Nelson writes with wonderful grace and skill, each word carefully chosen, each passage carefully constructed. This beautiful collection is another remarkable accomplishment for a writer often hailed as one of our most talented storytellers.”
–Publisher’s Weekly (Starred Review for Nothing Right)
Lynn D’Urso
HEARTBROKE BAY
(Berkley, November 2010)
“Anyone who relishes good old-fashioned storytelling will find much to admire in Lynn D’Urso’s Heartbroke Bay. D’Urso’s characters are sufficiently sympathetic and full-blooded for us to hope they attain the wealth and happiness they’re seeking, but flawed enough that we fear a far more dire outcome. The tension that arises between our hope and our fear is what makes Heartbroke Bay such a deeply suspenseful and entertaining novel. It’s a fantastic story, told with real mastery.”
–Scott Smith, author of A Simple Plan
David Foster Wallace
FATE, TIME, AND LANGUAGE
(Columbia University Press, November 2010)
Long before he probed the workings of time, human choice, and human frailty in Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace wrote a brilliant philosophical critique of Richard Taylor’s argument for fatalism. In 1962, Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositions to imply that humans have no control over the future. Not only did Wallace take issue with Taylor’s method, which, according to him, scrambled the relations of logic, language, and the physical world, but he also called out a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor’s argument.
Wallace was a great skeptic of abstract thinking made to function as a negation of something more genuine and real. He was especially suspicious of certain paradigms of thought-the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever gimmickry of postmodernism-that abandoned “the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community.” As Wallace rises to meet the challenge to free will presented by Taylor (and a number of other philosophical heavyweights), we experience the developing perspective of this major novelist, along with the beginning of his lifelong struggle to establish solid logical ground for his soaring convictions. This volume reproduces Taylor’s original article and other works on fatalism cited by Wallace in his critique. James Ryerson, an editor at the New York Times Magazine, draws parallels in his introduction between Wallace’s early work in philosophy and the themes and explorations of his fiction.
Elena Mauli Shapiro
13 RUE THÉRÈSE
(Little, Brown, February 2011)
As Trevor examines and documents the relics the box offers up, he begins to imagine the story of Louise Brunet’s life: her love for a cousin who died in the war, her marriage to a man who works for her father, and her attraction to a neighbor in her building at 13 rue Thérèse. The more time he spends with the objects though, the truer his imaginings of Louise’s life become, and the more he notices another alluring Frenchwoman: Josianne, his clerk, who planted the box in his office in the first place, and with whom he finds he is falling in love.
Penelope Rowlands
PARIS WAS OURS: TWENTY-TWO WRITERS REFLECT ON THE CITY OF LIGHT
(Algonquin Books, February 2011)
Paris is “the world capital of memory and desire,” concludes one of the writers in this intimate and insightful collection of memoirs of the city. Living in Paris changed these writers forever. In thirty-two personal essays–more than half of which are here published for the first time–the writers describe how they were seduced by Paris and then began to see thins differently. They came to write, to cook, to find love, to study, to raise children, to escape, or to live the way it’s done in French movies, they came from the United States, Canada, and England; from Iran, Iraq, and Cuba; and–a few–from other parts of France. And they stayed, not as tourists, but for a long time; some are still living there. They were outsiders who became insiders, who here share their observations and revelations. Some are well-known writers: Diane Johnson, David Sedaris, Judith Thurman, Joe Queenan, and Edmund White. Others may be lesser known but are no less passionate on the subject.
Penelope Rowlands was born in London, raised there and in New York, and has also lived in Paris. A journalist and critic, she has contributed to Vogue, Architectural Digest, The New York Times, and The Daily Beast, among other publications. Her most recent book, A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and Her Life in Fashion, Art, and Letters, was a biography of the legendary editor of Harper’s Bazaar.