Picks of the Week

  • Benjamin Black: The Lemur: A Novel

    Benjamin Black: The Lemur: A Novel
    Anyone who thinks John Banville lacks a sense of humor clearly did not read his serial for the New York Times magazine, available in novella-ish format in July. The story has all the basic crime ingredients - blackmail, adultery, murder, betrayal, that sort of thing - but it is so, so clear how much fun Banville had writing this pseudonymous exercise, loading up sentences filled with bizarre but well-placed metaphors and gently (or not so gently!) lampooning his characters as he moves them around his narrative chess board.

  • Cassandra Clare: City of Bones

    Cassandra Clare: City of Bones
    I read this on the flight home from the LA Times Festival of Books and it really is about the perfect airport read: fantastic storytelling, characters whose adventures and melodramas wrap you in their spells and really ass-kicking action scenes involving demons and all manner of underworld types. Sure, Clare clearly owes a huge debt to Buffy and Harry Potter, but dammit, I want to find out what will happen next to Clary, Jace, Simon & co. - and that's exactly the button that's supposed to be pushed.

  • Ibi Kaslik: ANGEL RIOTS

    Ibi Kaslik: ANGEL RIOTS
    Reading this novel was like being transported back to the mid-1990s Montreal I knew during my college years. But it also affords an inside look at the ups and downs, the politics and the dramas, the hookups and breakups endemic to a rising rock band. It's clear, whether told from the vantage point of the young violin prodigy with a boy's name or her bandmate looking to redefine himself outside the orbit of his best friend (and leader) that Kaslik knows this world cold, and we're privileged to share in this knowledge.

  • Irene Nemirovsky: David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair (Everyman's Library (Cloth))

    Irene Nemirovsky: David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
    I'd recommend this simply based off of the utter gobsmacking brilliance that is LE BAL, one of the most crystalline and shocking novellas I've ever read, but the other three works simply confirm Nemirovsky's literary brilliance. THE COURILOF AFFAIR is a wonderful surprise for mystery readers because it's her version of a spy novel, tackling the moral quandaries of terrorism for a so-called greater good by personalizing the narrator's deeds and misdeeds. In other words, Nemirovsky's entire backlist can't be translated fast enough for me.

  • Sarah Hall: Daughters of the North

    Sarah Hall: Daughters of the North
    Goddamn, Hall can write, and her chosen dystopian subject matter gives her the chance not only to show off her sentence-by-sentence chops but to demonstrate how few steps removed our current culture is from the apocalyptic fervor of her world, where the reproductive rights of women are trampled on so definitively it takes an army of women to try, however futile the exercise might be, to take some independence back. I can't think of enough good things to say about this except that it should be read, now and years to come.

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April 20, 2005

Sara Gran breaks out

Well, not yet, but she's certainly being situated to do so very soon:

Sara Gran's DOPE, a genre-bending exploration of noir that takes us deep into the hellish heroin culture of New York in the 1950s, described as "Patricia Highsmith meets William Burroughs," to Dan Conaway at Harper, by Simon Lipskar at Writers House (NA).

Harper also acquired reprint rights to the author's previous novel, COME CLOSER, from Soho Press paperback, which is being jointly developed for film by Harvey and Bob Weinstein's new company and Disney, with a script by Hossein Amini (The Wings of the Dove).

I'd already heard some rumblings about this book as the UK deal (with Atlantic) was reported first. And COME CLOSER, which was a creepy, utterly unnerving psychological thriller, was a marvel. I'd wondered what Gran was working on next, and hopefully it won't be too long before DOPE is in stores.

Interestingly, Lipskar and Conaway are developing into quite the team, as they are jointly responsible for Michael Gruber (TROPIC OF NIGHT and VALLEY OF BONES) as well.

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Comments

Hey, I don't know if Sara reads this blog, but this is great news--congratulations. Also, great that COME CLOSER has the pb deal--I loved that book!!

Hello Sarah Weinman and Jason Starr,

First, Sarah, thank you for your kind words, and for mentioning me on your blog -- which I think has an hourly readership higher then that of all my books combined, so it's quite a coup for me! I really appriciate it.

And Hi, Jason, and thank you too! You started a wave of good mojo for me when you gave me my first positive response to the book.

Best wishes,

Sara Gran

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