While everyone was buzzing over the Apple iPad and the Macmillan-Amazon skirmish over the weekend, publishers are still putting out paper books and they still want to create buzz among booksellers--and the 500 booksellers heading to San Jose, Calif., for the ABA's Winter Institute 5 this week are very desirable targets, especially for fiction. The tradition goes back to the first Winter Institute, when Algonquin distributed galleys of Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, which the house credits with making the book a bestseller.
This year the galley that is getting the most advance buzz is The Passage by Justin Cronin (Ballantine, June). Known for literary fiction such as The Summer Guest and the PEN Hemingway Award–winning collection Mary and O'Neil, Cronin was challenged by his nine-year-old daughter to write a not-boring book about a girl who saves the world. Ballantine paid $3 million for the resulting trilogy, and Ridley Scott bought the film rights for the first book, The Passage, for Fox. Ballantine has created a 700-page galley for The Passage loaded with in-house blurbs written by just about everyone at Random House--in time to whet bookseller appetites at WI5.
If anyone had told Sheryl Cotleur, a buyer at Book Passage, Corte Madera, Calif., she'd stay up late reading a vampire book, she'd never have believed it, she said; but that's what happened when she started reading her galley of The Passage. But rather than Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books, she and other readers of The Passage compare it to Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Stephen King's The Stand.
Another major title getting buzz already is Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who took 30 years to write this novel based on his experience as a Marine. In a letter featured on the back cover of the galley that explained how Grove/Atlantic came to co-publish Matterhorn with the Berkeley, Calif., nonprofit El Leon Literary Arts, publisher Morgan Entrekin likened the book to a title he unveiled a decade ago--Black Hawk Down--for its gripping depiction of young men at war.
Booksellers who say they never read war novels or who might think that the Vietnam War's been done enough report that they just can't put Matterhorn down--and at just under 600 pages plus a glossary, that's saying something.
Jenn Northington at breathe books, Baltimore, Md., got a galley from Grove's Eric Price and said she was willing to take a look, but it was a Twitter posting by Joe Foster from Maria's Bookshop in Durango, Colo., that really piqued her interest in Matterhorn, which publishes in April.
"Every day someone else is tweeting about it," Northington said. "It has a very strong opening that sucked me right in."
Geoffrey Jennings at Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kan., has read a lot about the Vietnam War and predicted that Matterhorn will become the definitive book on the subject. "The second I finished reading it, I e-mailed Morgan and told him he had another Cold Mountain," Jennings said. He added that not even the acclaimed The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien and We Were Soldiers Once... and Young by Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway nailed Vietnam like Marlantes has.
Booksellers do look at those carefully worded galley letters and in-house blurbs. Gayle Shanks at Changing Hands in Tempe, Ariz., said a handwritten note from her Norton sales rep, Meg Sherman, prompted her to read The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall, author of The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint.
"It is brilliant and though it certainly deals with the Big Love issues of polygamy, it is really about lives devoid of attention and enough love to feel loved and what one does to compensate," Shanks said. "He's insightful and captures the essence of the West and how it plays into the characters' lives as they attempt to move in their crowded world."
Cathy Langer at the Tattered Cover, Denver, Colo., said Udall has written "a tour de force that ranks with the best of John Irving." But she stressed that The Lonely Polygamist, which comes out in May, is not just a regional title.
Another good galley letter writer is Knopf's Gary Fisketjon, whom Jennings called Rumpelstiltskin: "He finds them and turns them into gold." This year, he found Mr. Peanut, a debut novel by Adam Ross. Fisketjon wrote that the novel is "dark yet alluring, with a plot that's a hugely suggestive blend of passion and commitment, popular culture and true crime."
Sometimes reps tout books that aren't on their own lists, which really makes booksellers take note. This happened recently again when Emily Pullen at Skylight Books, Los Angeles, heard about the debut novel The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow from a non-Algonquin rep. Readers have described this as a beautifully written account of a mixed-race girl who survives the fall from the roof that claimed her mother and siblings' lives, and the young boy who witnesses what may be a suicide. Skylight will launch the book in Los Angeles later this month, and Pullen said she is looking forward to seeing the author (who won Barbara Kingsolver's $25,000 Bellwether Prize) at WI5.
Indies booksellers are especially fond of discovering new work by a writer who deserves more attention; Pullen's enthusiasm for Emily St. John Mandel's novel The Singer's Gun (Unbridled, May) is in this category. Pullen said she loved Mandel's previous Last Night in Montreal and hopes the new book will break her out.
"I read The Singer's Gun in three days," says Pullen. "It's really clear and concise but also very gripping. I think she's a great new writer." This will be Mandel's second Winter Institute.
The Marrowbone Marble Company by Glenn Taylor, an Ecco title, gets an honorable mention here because booksellers are eager to read the new novel by the NBCC finalist for The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart. Word is that Harper has some galleys of Marrowbone to give away at WI5 to get buzz going for the May book that has become an in-house favorite. Book Passage's Cotleur said Taylor's book is "high on my list."
Altogether, 42 authors will be presented at WI5. Among them: Bloomsbury is bringing Anchee Min, who has written a novel about Pearl S. Buck; Houghton will have Howard Norman of The Bird Artist fame; Hyperion is bringing indie bookseller darling Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, who has written a novel about what happens among the people trapped in a passport office after an earthquake. It all makes for what Tattered Cover's Langer called "a bounty."--Bridget Kinsella
