For this year's BEA Editors' Buzz panel, moderator John Freeman, American editor of Granta, had only one rule for the participants shilling for their books in 10 minutes or less: no bland adjectives. Freeman kept the editors on track, perhaps most comically by not letting Twelve's Cary Goldstein skip over a three-page sex scene between a chimpanzee and a woman in Benjamin Hale's novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore.
While editors hope these will be the books indies will be handselling, booksellers hope to learn something about these titles that they can't get from a catalog description.
Algonquin's Chuck Adams said he was grabbed on page one by the voice in Jonathan Evison's novel West of Here, and was equally taken with how the author understood we are part of an entertainment business. "I see a lot of good writers, but I don't see a lot of good stories," said Adams, who has been acquirin books since 1969. "I think this is the best that I've ever, ever worked on."
West of Here is a parallel story about the founders of a town in 1890 Washington State and the 2006 residents who are "living all the mistakes their ancestors made." In the end, all the pieces from the parallel stories come together, as in a Robert Altman film, said Adams. The Algonquin editor already bought Evison's next novel, Fundamentals of Caregiving, and said he hopes to work with the author for the next 40 years.
FSG's Mitzi Angel spoke about how Ben Goldacre--whose Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks and Big Pharma Flacks is already a bestseller in the U.K.--is on a mission to expose bad science and help readers make sense of the complicated realities of science so that "we all might be able to understand it."
Angel said Goldacre is "brilliant" for taking everyone to task, from doctors (he himself is a physician), to homeopathic practitioners and journalists who perpetuate what can be dangerous consequences of bad science. After Goldacre was sued by a vitamin company that claimed it had a cure for AIDS, the publisher pulled that chapter in the U.K. edition, but restored it in the U.S. edition when the author won the case. 
At Little, Brown, Judy Clain said, people are always hesitant to compare anything to The Lovely Bones, but Emma Donohue's Room managed to get under the collective skin of everyone inhouse in much the same way.
As five-year-old Jack tells of his simple life with "Ma" in a room they share, it gradually becomes clear that the mother was abducted when she was 19, and Jack is the product of that awful relationship. "Even though you want them to get out of this room you also love the place," explained Clain. As a blurb from Audrey Neffeneger (who knows neither the editor or author) says, "When it's over you look up and the world looks the same but you are somehow different."
As for that chimpanzee and woman in The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, Cary Goldstein said, "It's not bestiality, it's love." The background: after writing two shelved first novels while working at a bakery early mornings and writing in a "state of pshychotic exhaustion" when time allowed, author Benjamin Hale was able to combine his lifelong passion inspired by Jane Goodall and an obsession with chimpanzees in Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo to create this "fictionalized memoir narrated by the world's first talking chimpanzee."
In Siddartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Scribner's Nan Graham said the author started out writing a history but realized he was "not writing about something, but someone" and here presents a compelling biography of cancer that ranges from the Greco-Persian wars to contemporary people managing to live with cancer.
Graham called Mukherjee an "extraordinary man," who at 40, "knows his mice and also a great deal about history." Every reader, Graham said, comes up with new comparisons for the book, from The Noonday Demon to The Hot Zone. As Mukherjee goes through the evolution of the disease, Graham said, "you actually feel that you are making the leap" to understanding cancer throughout time.
When Ballantine's Susanna Porter took her turn to talk about the historic, romantic novel Juliet, she recalled how bookseller reaction to a buzz pick at a previous BEA helped make the historic, romantic novel Loving Frank a bestseller.
Written by Anne Fortier, Juliet is about a contemporary woman who discovers she is descended from the real-life inspiration for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Background: while growing up, the author and her mother escaped the "grey conformist Denmark" by vacationing in Verona--where Romeo and Juliet is set. As Verona became spoiled by tourists, mother and daughter ventured to Sienna, where, as it turns out, the real-life dueling families of the star-crossed lovers lived. Unfortunately, by the time Fortier was ready to write her novel, she had a job working in Washington, D.C., with only two-week American vacations. So she relied on her mother for some of the hands-on research in Sienna.
Juliet has already sold in 29 territories and is number six in the bestseller list in Germany. Guess it's up to the bookseller to see how Juliet--and all of this year's buzz books—fare as they are released into the American market.--Bridget Kinsella