The following is just a sampling of Algonquin's fall list, which Craig Popelars called "hands down our strongest list ever." For her part, librarian extraordinaire Nancy Pearl praised the company's "little gems of novels, like Sharpshooter Blues and Wolfe Whistle by Lewis Nordan and more recent works of fiction like those by Jonathan Evison, Joseph Skibell and Brock Clarke."
West of Here by Jonathan Evison, due in early February, was one of the books discussed at BEA's Editors' Buzz panel; it's a favorite of Algonquin editor Chuck Adams.
The book is set in fictional Port Bonita on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State and focuses both on the founders of the town in 1890 and their descendants in 2006. "It shows a pioneer spirit that in many ways is insatiable," Popelars said. It's a spirit that echoes down through the generation but remains unfulfilled.
Evison is the author of All About Lulu, published by Soft Skull Press. Algonquin has bought his next novel, Fundamentals of Caregiving.
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A Curable Romantic by Joseph Skibell, coming in September, is "a huge sweeping novel that covers 50 years of European history and is funny, and character driven," Scharlatt said. Beginning in Vienna in 1895, the book is narrated by Dr. Jakob Sammelsohn, who was raised in a tiny Polish village and married twice, divorced in one case and widowed in the other--at the age of 12. Sammelsohn meets Dr. Sigmund Freud, who is just building his practice, and is smitten by Emma Eckstein, one of Freud's most famous and earliest patients.
A theme of the book is language: Sammelsohn later falls in love with a beautiful woman who is part of the Esperanto movement, and his father shows his piety by speaking only in words and phrases that appear in the Torah, which makes for one of the most hilarious passages in literature, when he gives his son a talk about sex.
The book begins: "I fell in love with Emma Eckstein the moment I saw here from the fourth gallery of the Carl Theater, and this was also the night I met Sigmund Freud. My seat cost me nearly half a krone. For a full krone, I could have stood in the parterre, but that would have meant going hungry all the following day."
Algonquin is also publishing Skibell's A Blessing on the Moon in September, first published in 1997, "a magical tale about the Holocaust."
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Blind Your Ponies by Stanley Gordon West is about a high school basketball team in a rundown town in Montana and the English teacher who coaches them. After two stars come to town, the team rebounds. West published the book himself and sold more than 40,000 copies "out of his trunk," Popelars said. "Our Pacific Northwest rep kept hearing about it and the rep's mother heard a reading"--the rest is history.
This is Algonquin's first self-published title, which is also Peter Workman's "pick of the list," Popelars said.
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Nothing Left to Burn by Jay Varner is a memoir of a family that includes a fire chief father and arsonist grandfather. Find some enlightment through this trailer.
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A 2008 Giller Prize finalist, Barnacle Love by Anthony De Sa is a series of stories that "fit together and add up to a novel," Scharlatt said. The tale follows two generations of fishermen who emigrate from Portugal to Canada, "a wonderfully portrayed immigrants' story."
Colm Tóibín commented: "In Barnacle Love, Anthony De Sa moves with skill and ingenuity between folk tale, myth, and narratives of contemporary displacement. The tone is spare and elegiac; the stories are filled with carefully chosen details and sharply drawn characters. They have immense emotional and truthful power."
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The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey has led to an addition in Algonquin staff: Snookie and The Situation, two snails who are teaching the staff all about the lives and ways of Gastropoda. Read more about them via senior publicist Kelly Bowen's blog post.
The book is a true story about the author's friendship with a snail that takes up residence on her nightstand while Bailey is bedridden. "Everyone who reads this will be totally surprised and enamored," Scharlatt said. "It's a very quiet little book that is full of revelation."
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Land sakes alive. Reflecting Algonquin's more national approach, the annual New Stories from the South, in its 25th anniversary edition this year, will continue to focus on work by Southerners across the country, but for the first time the guest editor is from the North: Amy Hempel.