Books: A peek behind the scenes at a publishers dinner, George Saunders, Steve Erickson and more book news
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Months before anyone knows about Sarah Dunn’s book, her publisher Little, Brown is wining and dining the booksellers of Los Angeles. I’m Carolyn Kellogg, books editor, and this is the news in books this week.
THE BIG STORY
Agatha French goes to a publisher’s dinner in Culver City to celebrate Sarah Dunn and her novel “The Arrangement.” The book won’t be out until March, but Little, Brown is doing what many New York publishers do — throwing a Los Angeles meet and greet with a great spread for booksellers. It’s special treatment only a few books will get, one way that a bestseller — or even a mediocre-seller — is made.
BIG FICTION
George Saunders is known for striking a near-impossible balance in his writing: Dark satire that’s also deeply empathetic. Up until now, he’s focused his talents on short stories, but that changes Tuesday with the publication of “Lincoln in the Bardo,” his first novel. “The Lincoln of the title is, of course, our 16th president, and his sorrow is for his favorite son, Willie, who died of typhus at age 11 in February 1862,” explains David L. Ulin in our review. The book, he writes, “is remarkable.”
And then there’s Steve Erickson, the Los Angeles writer whose challenging fiction was “post-millennial long before the millennium ever got here,” writes Scott Bradfield in our review. Erickson’s new novel, “Shadowbahn,” imagines a vision of the twin towers emerging over the Badlands, creating a kind of vortex in a fracturing America that splits around its myths, political and cultural. It’s navigated by siblings on a long car trip, accompanied by a classic American soundtrack.
NOT JUST THE MOUNTAIN GOATS
The indie rock band the Mountain Goats is mostly John Darnielle (he leads or performs solo), but he’s not just a musician. His first novel, “Wolf in White Van,” was longlisted for the National Book Award in 2014; his second is “Universal Harvester,” set in and around an Iowa video store in the 1990s. “What appears to be a chilling horror tale is also a perfectly rendered story about family and loss,” writes Michael Schaub in our review.
BESTSELLERS
Readers across the Southland are intrigued by “The Lost City of the Monkey God,” which is in its third week on our nonfiction bestseller list. In it author Douglas Preston — also known as half of the novelist team behind the bestselling Preston & Child thrillers — joins a team of scientists to search for a legendary, pre-Columbian ruin in Honduras. Technology can help them find it — but it may not be able to protect them from its ancient curse.
BOOK NEWS
Sen. Elizabeth Warren was in the news this week after she was silenced during the confirmation hearings for Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions. Also this week, Metropolitan Books announced that it will be publishing “This Fight Is Our Fight,” Warren’s new nonfiction book, in April. And coming later this year — in September — is “The Golden House,” a new novel from Salman Rushdie, which is described as “a modern-day bildungsroman set against the panorama of American culture and politics since the inauguration of Barack Obama” that will deal with “the rise of the Tea Party, Gamergate and identity politics; the backlash against political correctness; and the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain sporting make-up and colored hair.”
