BookOpinion

Bunches Of Books has sent us a coupon code to save $5 off your next order or get free shipping.

Offer: $5 off orders of $50 or more
Expires: Oct. 1, 2007
Coupon Code: READER5

Offer: Free shipping on orders of $25 or more
Expires: Oct. 1, 2007
Coupon Code: BOBOOKS

Only one promotional code per order.

The Goldmans may have finally found a publisher for O.J. Simpson’s “If I Did It” book, but finding distribution may be the next hurdle. Barnes & Noble announced they won’t be carrying the book when it releases this October.

“Our buyers don’t feel there will be enough of a demand to carry it in our stores,” Barnes & Noble spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

The Goldman’s publisher responded. “It is Barnes & Noble’s decision, not my decision, and the marketplace will determine whether they are right or not,” Eric Kampmann, the owner and president of Beaufort Books,” told the AP. “But I think it’s sad if they’re making their decision based on the HarperCollins experience, which was a totally different situation.”

HarperCollins eventually destroyed its 400,000 copies of the “fictionalized” account of the murders.

Borders Group Inc. said they plan on stocking the new book with one stipulation. Spokesperson Ann Binkley said in the AP that Borders “will not promote or market the book in any way.”

The Goldmans won rights to the book in federal bankruptcy court. They plan on publishing what they view as O.J.’s confession. They will include additional commentary of their own.

“A relentlessly good read,” writes the N.Y. Times. “Absolutely stunning,” says Publisher’s Weekly. And so it goes. “Away” by Amy Bloom hits bookstores nationwide Aug. 21 and is already No. 5 on Amazon’s list of new releases.

The Los Angeles Times writes that “‘Away’ testifies to the truism that execution is all. Bloom isn’t fighting traditional forms; in some respects her second novel is one more standard American immigration tale. But her execution is exquisite, and exquisite execution is rare — not only in books but (alas) in almost any undertaking.”

The New York Times is equally high in praise: “Away is a modest name for a book as gloriously transporting as Amy Bloom’s new novel. Alive with incident and unforgettable characters, it sparkles and illuminates as brilliantly as it entertains. The accomplishment is even more remarkable given the seeming drabness of the story Ms. Bloom tells.”

Publishers Weekly summarizes Away’s storyline: “Life is no party for Lillian Leyb, the 22-year-old Jewish immigrant protagonist of Bloom’s outstanding fifth novel: her husband and parents were killed in a Russian pogrom, and the same violent episode separated her from her three-year-old daughter, Sophie. Arriving in New York in 1924, Lillian dreams of Sophie, and after five weeks in America, barely speaking English, she outmaneuvers a line of applicants for a seamstress job at the Goldfadn Yiddish Theatre, where she becomes the mistress of both handsome lead actor Meyer Burstein and his very connected father, Reuben. Her only friend in New York, tailor/actor/playwright Yaakov Shimmelman, gives her a thesaurus and coaches her on American culture. In a last, loving, gesture after receiving word that Sophie is living in Siberia, Yaakov secures Lillian passage out of New York to begin her quest to find Sophie.”

The quest then takes over the story. “This whole novel reads like dry wood bursting into flame: desperate and impassioned, erotic and moving — absolutely hypnotic,” writes the Washington Post. “Once Lillian hears that Sophie may be alive, her only ambition is to leave America and find her daughter in Siberia. The old immigrant tale suddenly becomes a wild emigrant adventure…Because travel over the Atlantic Ocean and the European continent is impossibly expensive, a friend concocts a crazy plan to send her across North America, over the Bering Strait and then directly into the Soviet Union. ”

BookOpinion has found an excerpt of the first chapter of Amy Bloom’s Away:

Chapter 1

And Lost There, a Golden Feather in a Foreign, Foreign Land

It is always like this: the best parties are made by people in trouble.

There are one hundred and fifty girls lining the sidewalk outside the Goldfadn Theatre. They spill into the street and down to the corners and Lillian Leyb, who has spent her first thirty-five days in this country ripping stitches out of navy silk flowers until her hands were dyed blue, thinks that it is like an all-girl Ellis Island: American-looking girls chewing gum, kicking their high heels against the broken pavement, and girls so green they’re still wearing fringed brown shawls over their braided hair. The street is like her village on market day, times a million. A boy playing a harp; a man with an accordion and a terrible, patchy little animal; a woman selling straw brooms from a basket strapped to her back, making a giant fan behind her head; a colored man singing in a pink suit and black shoes with pink spats; and tired women who look like women Lillian would have known at home in Turov, smiling at the song, or the singer. Some of the girls hold red sparklers in their hands and swing one another around the waist. A big girl with black braids plays the tambourine. A few American-looking girls make a bonfire on the corner, poking potatoes in and out of it. Two older women, pale and dark-eyed, are pulling along their pale, dark-eyed children. That’s a mistake, Lillian thinks. They should ask a neighbor to watch the children. Or just leave the children in Gallagher’s Bar and Grille at this point and hope for the best, but that’s the kind of thing you say when you have no child. Lillian makes herself smile at the children as she walks past the women; they reek of bad luck.

Lillian is lucky. Her father had told her so; he told everyone after she fell in the Pripiat twice and didn’t drown and didn’t die of pneumonia. He said that smart was good (and Lillian was smart, he said) and pretty was useful (and Lillian was pretty enough) but lucky was better than both of them put together. He had hoped she’d be lucky her whole life, he said, and she had been, at the time.

He also said, You make your own luck, and Lillian takes Judith, the only girl she knows, by the hand and they push their way through the middle of the crowd and then to the front. They are pushed themselves, then, into the place they want to be, the sewing room of the Goldfadn Theatre. They find themselves inches away from a dark, angry woman with a tight black bun (“Litvak,” Judith says immediately; her mother was a Litvak).
Continue Reading »

Some quick reading for you from around the world of books this weekend. 

The New York Times looks at the original scroll of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”:

On the Road Again

In 1951, Jack Kerouac feverishly pounded out the first draft of “On the Road” in three weeks on a single huge roll of paper. This believe-it-or-not item earns a place on the heroic roster of spontaneous literary combustions — Stendhal writing “The Charterhouse of Parma” in 52 days, for example…

…Contrary to legend, the scroll was not a roll of teletype paper but a series of large sheets of tracing paper that Kerouac cut to fit and taped together, and it is not unpunctuated — merely unparagraphed, which makes a certain physical demand on the reader, who is deprived of the usual rest stops. Also contrary to received ideas, Kerouac by his own admission fueled his work with nothing stronger than coffee. The scroll is slightly longer than the novel as it was finally published, after three subsequent conventionally formatted drafts, in 1957. The biggest immediate difference between the first draft and the finished product, though, is that while we know “On the Road” as a novel — the great novel of the Beat Generation — the scroll is essentially nonfiction, a memoir that uses real names and is far less self-consciously literary. It is a dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, and, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos, as well as of gratuitous punctuation supplied by editors more devoted to rules than to music, it seems much more immediate and even contemporary…

…Besides changing all the names (arguably necessary for legal reasons) and cutting or veiling the depictions of sex (very necessary in 1957), Kerouac altered the scroll to make it a novel mostly by garnishing it with sprigs and drizzles of literature. One of the most famous passages in the novel appears here — the ellipses are Kerouac’s — as “the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing … but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.” In the novel he inserts “mad to be saved,” while the roman candles become “fabulous” and they are “exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ ” Concerned that he might not have sufficiently overegged the pudding, Kerouac then adds, “What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany?” None of this sort of eager-beaver poeticizing litters the scroll, which just keeps its head down and runs, and is all the more authentically literary thereby.

Read Full Story

USA Today reviews “Immortalists,” which looks at two of famous 20th century men and the dark side of their shared dream:

‘Immortalists’ exposes Achilles’ heel of two famous figures

Here are two alternative subtitles for David Friedman’s fascinating new book, The Immortalists: “Geniuses Do the Creepiest Things.” Or “Brains Aren’t Everything.”

Friedman’s non-fiction account, in stores Tuesday, describes the long collaboration between American aviator Charles Lindbergh and French scientist Alexis Carrel, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1912. It examines the two men’s shared dream: to defeat death and pursue immortality.

This passion would lead Carrel and Lindbergh down the disturbing path of eugenics. They became fixated on the idea of saving the “superior” white race from “inferior” brown people. (The dynamic 21st-century economies of India and China would be a big surprise to these two.) There were also horrifying experiments on animals.

Read Full Story

William Gibson talks with the NPR in an 8-minute podcast:

Science fiction novelist William Gibson has a talent for making the future seem like the present. But his newest book, Spook Country, does the opposite. It follows a half-dozen characters as they chase after the contents of a mysterious container.

Listen to Podcast

Lastly, J. K. Rowling has been spotted working on a new book, a detective novel:

LONDON - J.K. Rowling has been spotted at cafes in Scotland working on a detective novel, a British newspaper reported Saturday.

The Sunday Times newspaper quoted Ian Rankin, a fellow author and neighbor of Rowling’s, as saying the creator of the “Harry Potter [website]” books is turning to crime fiction.

“My wife spotted her writing her Edinburgh criminal detective novel,” the newspaper, which was available late Saturday, quoted Rankin as telling a reporter at an Edinburgh literary festival.

“It is great that she has not abandoned writing or Edinburgh cafes,” said Rankin, who is known for his own police novels set in the historic Scottish city.

Rowling famously wrote initial drafts of the Potter story in the Scottish city’s cafes. Back then, she was a struggling single mother who wrote in cafes to save on the heating bill at home.

Read Full Story

This week, Play Dirty by Sandra Brown was released and is now among Amazon’s top 25 bestselling new books. Publishers Weekly calls the book a “tightly told tale of modern temptation.” BookOpinion has compiled a review, a chapter excerpt and a recent video featuring Brown.

Publishers Weekly summarizes the plot of Play Dirty: “Foster Speakman, an eccentric Texas paraplegic millionaire, offers $500,000 to Griff Burkett, a disgraced former NFL quarterback fresh out of prison after serving a five-year sentence for racketeering, to impregnate Foster’s wife, Laura. Foster insists the child be conceived naturally (The way God intended). Broke with no prospects, Griff takes the job. Meanwhile, Stanley Rodarte, the crooked detective behind Griff’s arrest, is bent on pinning an unsolved murder on him and takes to terrorizing Griff and those close to him in the hopes of nailing him when he self-destructs. After Griff’s stint as stud takes a bad turn, the ex-footballer must track down the one man who can secure his freedom.”

Here is a brief video feature on Brown that came out a few weeks ago in anticipation of this book release:

BookOpinion has found a first chapter excerpt of Play Dirty:

Chapter 1

“That it?”

“That’s it.” Griff Burkett tossed a small duffel bag onto the backseat of the car, then got into the front passenger seat. “I didn’t bring much with me. I’m sure as hell not taking souvenirs.” He wanted no memorabilia from his stint in BIG — official code name for the Federal Correctional Institute in Big Spring, Texas.

He made himself comfortable on the plush leather, adjusted the air-conditioning vent to blow straight at him, then, realizing they weren’t moving, looked over at the driver.

“Seat belt.”

“Oh. Right.” Griff stretched the belt across his chest and latched it. Tongue in cheek, he said, “Wouldn’t want to break the law.”

As lawyers went, Wyatt Turner was okay. But if he possessed a sense of humor, he kept it under lock and key. He didn’t crack a smile at Griff’s wry remark.

“Come on, Turner, lighten up,” Griff said. “This is a special day.”

“Unfortunately, we’re not the only ones commemorating it.”

Turner drew Griff’s attention to an ugly, olive green car parked in a handicapped space. Illegally it seemed, since there was no tag hanging from the rearview mirror. Griff didn’t recognize the make or model of the car because it was younger than five years old. Nothing distinguished the no-frills sedan except the man sitting behind the wheel.
Continue Reading »

A1 Books is offering our BookOpinion back-to-school users a special discount.

All customers using their .edu email address to complete a purchase on A1Books.com automatically get 5% off their order.

For more information on this offer, use this link.

Customers shopping between now till 30th September 2007 automatically get registered in our iPhone giveaway - in which the are giving away an iPhone to a lucky winner every week.

After obtaining the rights to O.J. Simpson’s “If I Did It” book in a Florida bankruptcy proceeding, the Goldman family has signed a deal with Beaufort Publishing and set a release date for Oct. 3, 2007.

The Goldmans, the publisher, and their agent, Sharlene Martin, will contribute portions of sales proceeds to the Ron Goldman Foundation for Justice.

“I am very proud to be part of my clients’ effort to expose this confessional to the rest of the world. Once I read it, I knew I wanted to help get this book out so any illusions of ‘fiction’ would be dismissed,” Martin said. “Our decision to go with Beaufort Books,” added Martin, “was based upon Eric Kampmann’s stellar reputation in the publishing industry and his passion for justice for the Goldmans.”

The Goldmans will add their own commentary to the original manuscript.

Eric Kampmann, president of Beaufort Books, said in a press release, “The team at Beaufort Books will be working closely with the Goldman family to bring this book to the attention of the American public. We will be working diligently to not only publish this book well, but to honor the memory of the victims of this terrible crime: Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.”

HarperCollins originially printed 400,000 copies of the book before withdrawing and destroying them after public outrage.

More on this story can be heard here at NPR.