BookOpinion

Beginning Sept. 25 Audible will offer the exclusive download of “The Chopin Manuscript.”

Created by Jeffrey Deaver (The Bone Collector), Lee Child (Bad Luck and Trouble), Joseph Finder (Power Play), Lisa Scottoline (Daddy’s Girl) and various other Thriller specialists, “The Chopin Manuscript” is the first major work of fiction released directly as an audiobook and Audible is the only place to purchase it.

“Narrated by actor Alfred Molina,” says Audible, ”The Chopin Manuscript promises to be as riveting as it is ground breaking. To amplify the suspense it will be released piece-by-piece starting with the first three chapters on September 25th, and two chapters each week thereafter for the seven consecutive weeks.”

What’s the story behind the story? Listen here:

BOOKOPINION REVIEW: I could not put “Deception” down. The characters are real, complex and shrouded… the plot is unbelievably twisting and turning and takes you down one blind alley to the next. The story is funny, tragic and grips you with its reality and shakes your own confidence to the point of leaving you naked, vulnerable and questioning. And it’s just a work of fiction… but so full of honest life that you feel after finishing the book that a cool breeze has just passed you by and touched your cheek.

“Sometimes I think maybe what’s wrong with this world is that it’s made up of people like me,” thus speaks Ollie Chandler, homicide detective with the Portland, Oregon, Police Department. A complicated but thoroughly human character, occasionally pathetic but always compelling, Detective Chandler is handed a murder case that puts his life in jeopardy and leaves his relationship with fellow detectives at a new low. Chandler suspects that that murderer is someone in his own department, and, after experiencing several blackouts, possibly even himself.

The victim, a Portland State University professor with a roving eye for his female students, is found strangled and shot. Why multiple causes of death? Ollie wades through the evidence and finds the case to be far more convoluted than he originally suspected. He has leads on everyone from the chief of police to fellow detectives that open the door to the possibility that anyone could have committed this crime.

With encouragement from two friends, Clarence Abernathy and Jake Woods, Chandler pushes through the maze of lies and deceit to find the killer and put him behind bars. But Ollie’s first law, “Things are often not what they appear” proves to be only too true in this baffling, politically damaging and personally dangerous situation.

“Deception” is filled with terrific one liners, ”All your life you’re a wannabe, until you wake up one morning, and you’re a has-been,” that you will love. But the Christian-themed story is really not just about a fascinating murder case and how it’s solved. It’s about the man, Ollie Chandler, grieving widower, estranged father, dog lover and keeper of justice down to the bone.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. You will laugh, cry and be horrified by this unfolding story of a man trapped in his own web. Written in the first person, this novel quickly draws you into the mind and feelings of a wounded human being, with the frailties and concealed qualities that we all possess.

Don’t wait another moment. Do not go to the library, go directly to your local bookstore and pick up “Deception” today. You won’t regret it.

– Elizabeth Channery

This is one of our favorites. Inside each edition of “Bed and Breakfasts and Country Inns” is a certificate good for a free night at a bed and breakfast, when you purchase the first night a the regular price. The savings ranges from $100-$650 depending on which property you choose.

Even more slick, you can use this bed and breakfast search on their site to see which inns participate in the free night program. The web site also has thousands of additional bed and breakfasts to search from off the iLoveInns.com homepage.

We’ve been told by the publishers that the 19th Edition has just come off the presses. You can order it direct from the publisher now. It also makes a great gift item if you know anyone who loves bed and breakfasts or just needs a gettaway.

Bestselling author Robert Jordan, whose “Wheel of Time” series of novels sold millions, died of a rare blood disease Sunday. He was 58.

A message was posted on his blog with the annoucement:

“It is with great sadness that I tell you that the Dragon is gone. RJ left us today at 2:45 PM. He fought a valiant fight against this most horrid disease. In the end, he left peacefully and in no pain. In the years he had fought this, he taught me much about living and about facing death. He never waivered in his faith, nor questioned our God’s timing. I could not possibly be more proud of anyone. I am eternally grateful for the time that I had with him on this earth and look forward to our reunion, though as I told him this afternoon, not yet. I love you bubba.Our beloved Harriet was at his side through the entire fight and to the end. The last words from his mouth were to tell her that he loved her.Thank each and everyone of you for your prayers and support through this ordeal. He knew you were there. Harriet reminded him today that she was very proud of the many lives he had touched through his work. We’ve all felt the love that you’ve been sending my brother/cousin. Please keep it coming as our Harriet could use the support.”

The Associated Press writes:

…He wrote a trilogy of historical novels set in Charleston under the pen name Reagan O’Neal in the early 1980s. Then he turned his attention to fantasy and the first volume in his Wheel of Time epic, “The Eye of the World,” was published in 1990 under the name Robert Jordan.

Jordan’s books tells of Rand al’Thor, who is destined to become the champion who will battle ultimate evil in a mythical land.

Book 11, “Knife of Dreams,” came out in 2005; there was also a prequel, “New Spring: The Novel,” in 2004. The other titles in the series include “The Great Hunt,” “Lord of Chaos” and “The Path of Daggers.” Jordan was working on a 12th volume at the time of his death, Simons said.

“The younger devotees of the series, who seem to be legion, have a habit of dutifully rereading the complete gospel before each addition. … (Jordan) creates a universe simple enough to master and then challenges the characters to do the same in meticulously choreographed battles against chaos and dissolution.”

In a 2004 online chat on the USA Today Web site, Jordan said he hoped to finish the main “Wheel” series in two more books. “It’s not an absolute promise, but I’m very much hoping for it and I think I can do it,” he wrote.

Most of the books made The New York Times list of best sellers.

In an interview with The Associated Press in 2003, Jordan discussed having a best seller. The first time it happens “you go out in the middle of the floor and you do a little dance. Then you go someplace booze is being served and buy a drink for everybody in the house.

“You have to have talent to some extent — I certainly hope I have talent — but you have to have luck as well,” Jordan said. “Once you get that first shot, that will get you noticed for the rest of your books and that will give the rest of your books a better chance.”

He said in the interview that his Southern background came through in his work, even though it is set in a fantasy world.

“What I write is certainly not set in South Carolina, but I have had a number of reviewers comment on the fact that I write with a distinctly Southern voice,” he said.

“It goes beyond more than simply where the story is set. I believe it is something we take in in the air and the water. It’s a matter of word choices — of the rhythms of sentences and the rhythm of speech in particular.”…

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Powell’s published an exclusive interview with Junot Díaz, who will be at the bookstore Sept. 25. Diaz recently finished his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a decade after his collection of short stories made its sensational literary splash, winning awards and becoming a bestseller.

Diaz fans won’t be disappointed by the novel. It has received superb reviews from the L.A. Times, N.Y. Times and places in between. Publisher’s Weekly says, “this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot Diaz.”

Here is an excerpt from the Powell’s interview:

Spend a bit of time in the book business — no, don’t bother, just read a few litblogs — and soon enough you’ll stumble into an evangelist for the story collection Junot Díaz published in 1996. Indeed, Drown delivered ten nuanced, highly original short pieces of fiction. Eleven years ago.

“I don’t write enough,” Díaz admits.

To say that readers have been eagerly awaiting his first novel would be an understatement of significant proportions. Finally, here it is, and — if you can you believe it — The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao arguably exceeds expectations.

Leaping back and forth between the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, pouring across pages in a “combustible mix of slang and lyricism” (quoth Booklist), Oscar Wao bridges several generations and distinct cultures with exhilarating doses of Caribbean history and old-fashioned pulse-pounding drama. Politics, corruption, romance, fantasy, faith, despair — the novel, as Díaz explains, contains multitudes. Kirkus, in a starred review, called it “a compelling, sex-fueled, 21st-century tragi-comedy with a magical twist.”

A few weeks prior to his reading in Portland, Díaz talked about Oscar Wao, bright lights, dialogue that sucks, and the silences that draw writers in.

Dave: Yunior narrates The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, with contributions from Lola. Lola’s mother, Belicia, is a force of nature. So why is Oscar the title character?

Junot Díaz: For Yunior, Oscar is the key that unlocks the whole family. It’s his relationship with Oscar and with Oscar’s sister, but explicitly with Oscar, that makes Yunior’s involvement in the narrative possible.

The other thing is that Oscar is the last victim of the curse, so it made sense to me. He was the life through which I was viewing the entire family’s history.

Dave: The first chapter starts with the curse. Fukú. The curse bridges old world and new, one generation and the next. It gives a cohesion to the various storylines.

Díaz: When I think about this type of curse, I’m thinking about my exposure to them in the Dominican Republic. They’re ominous because of their ability to work generation after generation after generation, and I was always curious about what happens to a generation that doesn’t believe in these sort of narratives.

Can a generation that doesn’t believe in them really understand a generation that believes? Can they understand a generation that used the narrative as a way to understand its personal history?

If Belicia had been the one telling the story, the curse would have gotten a lot more play. Or not even Belicia; La Inca would be a more perfect example. Here you have as a narrator Yunior, who is more skeptical. He’s conflicted and ambivalent about it…

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The O.J. book, now titled “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer” by the Goldman Family, hit bookstores Thursday. Instead of being yanked off the shelves by the publishers, this Goldman version will be yanked
off the shelves by readers. It’s now No. 3 on the Amazon bestsellers list.

Barnes and Noble, which originally said it wasn’t going to publish the book because of a lack of demand, now sees the book as No. 2 on its bestseller list.

With an appearance on Oprah Thursday by the Goldmans, the book publisher moved up its release date to meet the demands. The book contains new commentary from the Goldmans as well as others.

More from The Book Standard:

O.J. Simpson’s ghostwriter Pablo Fenjves wrote the prologue to If I Did It and writer Dominick Dunne contributed an afterword. If I Did It, which goes on sale today, is being released by the family of Ron Goldman and includes Simpson’s original manuscript that gives a hypothetical account of how Simpson would have killed Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Goldman in 1994.

“I was being given an opportunity to sit in a room with O.J. Simpson and listen to his confession, or an ersatz version of a confession, and it was simply too good to pass up,” Fenjves wrote in the prologue, according to an Advanced Reading Copy obtained by The Book Standard. “That he wanted to describe it as ‘hypothetical’ meant very little to me. I’d assumed from the start that he was guilty, and in the years since I’d heard nothing to make me change my mind.”

Fenjves wrote his story of working with Simpson, including what was left out of the final draft, and Dunne, who first met the Goldmans during Simpson’s trial, will also give his perspective of events.

“I was in the courtroom every day of the Simpson trial for almost a year, and I became obsessed with Simpson and the terrible thing he had done,” Dunne wrote in the afterword. “It was hard for me to read this mystifying book by O.J. Simpson, although it is so in his character to have become involved in a crooked scheme to make money on his murders and at the same time defraud the Goldman family of the money the civil trial awarded them. Simpson craves the attention he has irretrievably lost. America rejected his acquittal. There were few victory cheers for him. Overnight, he became unwelcome.”…

…Publisher Beaufort Books, which was originally scheduled an October release date, has crashed the printing of the book, so that copies are already on their way to readers.

“Amazon and B&N.com has stock and is shipping today,” agent Sharlene Martin told The Book Standard. “Books will be available tomorrow around the country in bookstores—including Barnes and Noble. Some will have already received them today as we crashed this printing to coordinate with the Oprah airing.”

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The publisher has added another 25,000 books to its original print run of 125,000 to meet the demands.

Mignon Fogarty, whose popular podcast on grammar rose up the charts of iTunes, now offers this quick, fun and easy-to-follow audiobook. An excerpt from “The Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Clean Up Your Writing” is now available on Amazon, here.

Amazon writes: “Are you a fool for mnemonics? If so, you’ll fall head over nubucks for Mignon Fogarty — a.k.a. the Grammar Girl — and her handy new audio guide to writing and speaking well. It’s chock-full of smart little anecdotes and memory tricks for felling the most common grammatical foes (who can ever remember the difference between ‘nauseous’ and ‘nauseated’ anyway?) and at just an hour long it’s the perfect turn-to resource for students and professionals alike.”

Listen to Amazon’s free audiobook podcast here.