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PW Pick of the Week – Week 24
Publisher’s Weekly
Pick of the Week
Week 24
A Killing in the Hills by Julia Keller
At the start of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Keller’s outstanding first novel, 17-year-old Carla Elkins is waiting for her divorced mother, Bell Elkins, Raythune County’s prosecuting attorney, at the Salty Dawg, a chain restaurant in Acker’s Gap, W.Va., when three old men are shot dead at a nearby table. Carla catches only a glimpse of the killer at the Salty Dawg’s entrance before he flees. Bell, who’s been crusading with the local sheriff against the growing illegal traffic in prescription drugs and the violence it spawns, investigates the triple slaying, as does rebellious Carla. Meanwhile, the drug boss orders the assassin to kill the meddling prosecutor. Keller does a superb job showing both the natural beauty of Appalachia and the hopeless anger of the people trapped there in poverty. Some characters turn out to be better than they appear, some much worse, but the ensemble cast is unforgettable. So is this novel.
PW’s Pick of the Week
Publishers’ Weekly: Pick of the Week
3 May 2010
Lost Rights by David Howard
This remarkable American story by Howard, executive editor of Bicycling magazine, follows the long, shadowy trail of a single document, North Carolina’s wayward copy of the Bill of Rights. With ratification of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution in 1789, 14 elegantly handwritten copies were drafted, one for each of the original states and one for the federal government. Seventy-six years later, at the end of the Civil War, it is believed a soldier with Sherman’s army pilfered North Carolina’s copy and carried it home to Ohio. The following year it ended up in the possession of Indiana businessman Charles Shotwell, who bought it for only $5. After 134 years in the Shotwell family’s possession, the document in 2000 was purchased for $200,000 by a boastful Connecticut antique collector and an ethically dubious business partner, both hoping to sell it for millions. How the parchment ended up back in North Carolina state archives is an intricate tale involving high-powered antique dealers, businessmen, historians, manuscript experts, auction houses, elite attorneys, governors of three states, the FBI, a U.S. Attorney’s office, and Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center. The tale pulsates with dynamic personalities greatly affected by their connection to one of the rarest, most influential and valuable documents in American history. Howard has produced a marvelously compelling read.
PW’s Pick of the Week
Publishers’ Weekly: Pick of the Week
19 April 2010
A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth
In her debut novel, Ashworth takes on a formidable task: an insane yet sympathetic protagonist whose efforts at self-help spell disaster. Annie Fairhurst is a socially inept and obese Briton who has murdered her husband and child—which is alluded to but not confirmed until later in the story. She moves into a duplex occupied by an unmarried couple, Neil and Lucy, and Annie immediately becomes obsessed with Neil, who unfortunately makes the mistake of being friendly. In Annie’s warped mind, Neil is sending her secret signals of love, although no rational human being would agree from the evidence presented. Annie clashes with Lucy from the start and as their relationship devolves, Annie’s strange and aggressive behavior—putting trash through Neil and Lucy’s mail slot, stealing Lucy’s dress, listening to Lucy and Neil’s conversations through the shared wall of their duplex—escalates from childish to, finally, criminal, in a shocking series of actions. Interspersed throughout are glimpses of Annie’s past, her troubled marriage and stilted feelings toward her infant daughter, Grace. The beautiful, provocative prose and dangerous, quirky protagonist mark Ashworth as a writer to watch.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/456646-PW_Pick_of_the_Week_A_Kind_of_Intimacy_by_Jenn_Ashworth.php
PW’s Pick of the Week
Publishers’ Weekly: Pick of the Week
12 April 2010
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
Mitchell’s rightly been hailed as a virtuoso genius for his genre-bending, fiercely intelligent novels Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas. Now he takes something of a busman’s holiday with this majestic historical romance set in turn-of-the-19th-century Japan, where young, naïve Jacob de Zoet arrives on the small manmade island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor as part of a contingent of Dutch East Indies officials charged with cleaning up the trading station’s entrenched culture of corruption. Though engaged to be married in the Netherlands, he quickly falls in hopeless love with Orito Aibagawa, a Dutch-trained Japanese midwife and promising student of Marinus, the station’s resident physician. Their “courtship” is strained, as foreigners are prohibited from setting foot on the Japanese mainland, and the only relationships permitted between Japanese women and foreign men on Dejima are of the paid variety. Jacob has larger trouble, though; when he refuses to sign off on a bogus shipping manifest, his stint on Dejima is extended and he’s demoted, stuck in the service of a vengeful fellow clerk. Meanwhile, Orito’s father dies deeply in debt, and her stepmother sells her into service at a mountaintop shrine where her midwife skills are in high demand, she soon learns, because of the extraordinarily sinister rituals going on in the secretive shrine. This is where the slow-to-start plot kicks in, and Mitchell pours on the heat with a rescue attempt by Orito’s first love, Uzaemon, who happens to be Jacob’s translator and confidant. Mitchell’s ventriloquism is as sharp as ever; he conjures men of Eastern and Western science as convincingly as he does the unscrubbed sailor rabble. Though there are more than a few spots of embarrassingly bad writing (“How scandalized Nagasaki shall be, thinks Uzaemon, if the truth is ever known”), Mitchell’s talent still shines through, particularly in the novel’s riveting final act, a pressure-cooker of tension, character work, and gorgeous set pieces. It’s certainly no Cloud Atlas, but it is a dense and satisfying historical with literary brawn and stylistic panache.
PW Pick of the Week: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
PW’s Pick of the Week
Publisher’s Weekly: Pick of the Week
5 April 2010
Extra Lives by Tom Bissell
Extra Lives is a shrewd, cutting, spirited, highly personal, and very funny inquiry into what makes video games so habit-forming and compelling—and how, as creative artifacts, they fall short. He describes the pure plotless joy of Left 4 Dead, the mind-bendingly awful dialogue of Resident Evil, the beautiful but heartless chaos of Far Cry 2, and the peerless cinematic characterization of Grand Theft Auto IV—a game whose charms escort Bissell to the point of near ruin. Alongside the book’s critical project, Bissell candidly examines his own emotional connection to these games, which shifts over time from carefree escapism to bitter and self-destructive compulsion.
Combining personal experience with interviews of some of the leading game designers at work today, Extra Lives is an insightful—and highly entertaining—appraisal of this ubiquitous form of popular art. Even those who don’t play video games will, after reading this book, acknowledge their creative and artistic legitimacy.
Random House: Extra Lives by Tom Bissell – read full article
PW’s Pick of the Week
Publisher’s Weekly: Pick of the Week
29 March 2010
These Children who Come at You with Knives by John Knipfel
Read the Publisher’s Weekly short review: Pick of the Week: These Children Who Come at You with Knives by Jim Knipfel
