BookOpinion

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.

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…

Read Full Interview

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.”

Link to Story

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

Already among the top selling new releases based on pre-orders, “Tree of Smoke” by Denis Johnson hits bookstores this week. Johnson reportedly spent nearly two decades working on the novel. The New York Times calls it “a tremendous book.” BookOpinion has compiled reviews and an excerpt.

The New York Times summarizes the storylines in its review: “It’s mostly about a man named Skip Sands, a novice in the C.I.A, who begins the book as a young man in 1965, and makes it almost to the end, though by then it’s 1983 and he’s ancient; and his uncle, a Kurtz-like character who starts a little operation of his own, and then dies so ridiculously that no one can believe he’s actually dead; and the Houston brothers, Bill and James, who serve their country and then wander, angry and free, back to Nothing-to-Do, Arizona; and two Vietnamese military men, one from the South and one from the North, who flip this way and that; and another intelligence officer named Storm, who carries the book like the last man in a relay race, delivering it at the finish to a Canadian woman named Kathy, a Seventh-Day Adventist and aid worker, who has encompassed the whole story, who winds up bearing much of the book’s considerable grief, and who gets, as she deserves, its final pages to mourn.”

It seems many reviewers had difficulty summarizing “Tree of Smoke.” The Plain-Dealer writes, “Ambiguity permeates this novel. Conventions of plot and lead character are violated - Skip Sands disappears for more than a third of the book. Almost a dozen others spin substories, each told in a distinct prose style. The sections featuring Vietnamese are particularly impressive, Saigon’s pungent chaos growing vivid to the point of hallucination. And Johnson devotes some of the most gorgeous and desolate writing in the book to a fellow named James Houston, who escapes a marginal Arizona upbringing only to spend three combat tours so far inside the heart of darkness he achieves a horrific enlightenment. Though full of action, drama and significance, these subplots don’t really develop or resolve, despite their scrupulous architecture. Rather than move forward, characters sink down, no matter how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ their intent or action.”

The L.A. Times writes that “‘Tree of Smoke,’ however, lacks that laser sharpness, that ability to parse the distinctions between transcendence and despair. It never brings us close enough to believe that these characters matter, that there is something fundamental — lives, souls, the question of deliverance — at stake.”

In some sense, you have to wonder if that’s a consequence of the desire to produce an epic. “Tree of Smoke” is 614 pages long, and Johnson reportedly worked on it for two decades, which suggests an existential dilemma of its own. Yet in the end this is too easy, also; it’s not the book’s length that is the trouble but its approach.

“The jungle itself screamed like a mosque,” Johnson writes late in the novel, describing a staged ritual in which a former psy-ops sergeant named Jimmy Storm plays a symbolic sacrifice. “Storm lay naked on his back and watched the upward-rushing mist and smoke in the colossal firelight and waited for the clear light, for the peaceful deities, the face of the father-mother, the light from the six worlds, the dawning of hell’s smoky light and the white light of the second god, the hungry ghosts wandering in ravenous desire, the gods of knowledge and the wrathful gods, the judgment of the lord of death before the mirror of karma, the punishments of the demons, and the flight to refuge in the cave of the womb that would bear him back into this world.”

It’s beautiful writing: With Johnson, the writing is always beautiful. Still, for all that it hints at a reality in which physics and metaphysics blend together and we are transfigured by their proximity, mostly what we get here is a sense of being on the outside, which — in Johnson’s universe, anyway — has never been enough.

Read Full Review

The following is an excerpt from Tree of Smoke:

Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed. Seaman Houston and the other two recruits slept while the first reports traveled around the world. There was one small nightspot on the island, a dilapidated club with big revolving fans in the ceiling and one bar and one pinball game; the two marines who ran the club had come by to wake them up and tell them what had happened to the President. The two marines sat with the three sailors on the bunks in the Quonset hut for transient enlisted men, watching the air conditioner drip water into a coffee can and drinking beer. The Armed Forces Network from Subic Bay stayed on through the night, broadcasting bulletins about the unfathomable murder.

Now it was late in the morning, and Seaman Apprentice William Houston, Jr., began feeling sober again as he stalked the jungle of Grande Island carrying a borrowed .22-caliber rifle. There were supposed to be some wild boars roaming this island military resort, which was all he had seen so far of the Philippines. He didn’t know how he felt about this country. He just wanted to do some hunting in the jungle. There were supposed to be some wild boars around here.

He stepped carefully, thinking about snakes and trying to be quiet because he wanted to hear any boars before they charged him. He was aware that he was terrifically on edge. From all around came the ten thousand sounds of the jungle, as well as the cries of gulls and the far-off surf, and if he stopped dead and listened a minute, he could hear also the pulse snickering in the heat of his flesh, and the creak of sweat in his ears. If he stayed motionless only another couple of seconds, the bugs found him and whined around his head.

He propped the rifle against a stunted banana plant and removed his headband and wrung it out and wiped his face and stood there awhile, waving away the mosquitoes with the cloth and itching his crotch absent-mindedly. Nearby, a seagull seemed to be carrying on an argument with itself, a series of protesting squeaks interrupted by contradictory lower-pitched cries that sounded like, Huh! Huh! Huh! And something moving from one tree to another caught Seaman Houston’s eye.

He kept his vision on the spot where he’d seen it among the branches of a rubber tree, putting his hand out for the rifle without altering the direction of his gaze. It moved again. Now he saw that it was some sort of monkey, not much bigger than a Chihuahua dog. Not precisely a wild boar, but it presented itself as something to be looked at, clinging by its left hand and both feet to the tree’s trunk and digging at the thin rind with an air of tiny, exasperated haste. Seaman Houston took the monkey’s meager back under the rifle’s sight. He raised the barrel a few degrees and took the monkey’s head into the sight. Without really thinking about anything at all, he squeezed the trigger.

The monkey flattened itself out against the tree, spreading its arms and legs enthusiastically, and then, reaching around with both hands as if trying to scratch its back, it tumbled down to the ground. Seaman Houston was terrified to witness its convulsions there. It hoisted itself, pushing off the ground with one arm, and sat back against the tree trunk with its legs spread out before it, like somebody resting from a difficult job of labor.

Seaman Houston took himself a few steps nearer, and, from the distance of only a few yards, he saw that the monkey’s fur was very shiny and held a henna tint in the shadows and a blond tint in the light, as the leaves moved above it. It looked from side to side, its breath coming in great rapid gulps, its belly expanding tremendously with every breath like a balloon. The shot had been low, exiting from the abdomen.

Seaman Houston felt his own stomach tear itself in two. “Jesus Christ!” he shouted at the monkey, as if it might do something about its embarrassing and hateful condition. He thought his head would explode, if the forenoon kept burning into the jungle all around him and the gulls kept screaming and the monkey kept regarding its surroundings carefully, moving its head and black eyes from side to side like some-one following the progress of some kind of conversation, some kind of debate, some kind of struggle that the jungle—the morning—the moment—was having with itself. Seaman Houston walked over to the monkey and laid the rifle down beside it and lifted the animal up in his two hands, holding its buttocks in one and cradling its head with the other. With fascination, then with revulsion, he realized that the monkey was crying. Its breath came out in sobs, and tears welled out of its eyes when it blinked. It looked here and there, appearing no more interested in him than in anything else it might be seeing. “Hey,” Houston said, but the monkey didn’t seem to hear.
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Charlie Huston’s latest novel, “The Shotgun Rule,” lands in bookstores this week. The dark and often vulgar coming-of-age novel is set in Northern California. “Huston has the courage to both unsettle and entertain the reader,” Publisher’s Weekly writes, “and his story resonates long after its disturbing final scenes.”

BookOpinion has pulled together a video interview with Huston on the book, an excerpt from the novel and reviews.

Publishers Weekly summarizes The Shotgun Rule: “Four teenage boys, out of school and experimenting with drugs, booze and sex, find trouble fast when they break into the home of the notorious Arroyo brothers to retrieve a stolen bicycle. In the process, they stumble on the Arroyo family’s main operation, a meth lab. In a classic moment of naïve bravado, they steal part of the stash, setting off a downward spiral of events that will reopen the door to the town’s dark past, when an earlier generation of criminals, including one of the boy’s fathers, controlled the streets.”

E.W. also chimes in: “Ooo-wee, what a righteously nasty imagination Charlie Huston has,” says Entertainment Weekly. “If you don’t know this perfervid writer of thrillers (Caught Stealing) and comic books (Moon Knight), this stand-alone novel is a great place to start…The Shotgun Rule is wise about the way boys grow into men, and roots its violence in understandable emotion.”

Here’s a short video with Huston talking about The Shotgun Rule:

The following is an excerpt from The Shotgun Rule:

Piece of Shit Bike

It started with Andy’s piece of shit bike.

—What the fuck were you doing not locking it up?

—I just went in for a second.

—I just went in for a second. How long do you think it takes to steal a bike, dickweed?

—It was right next to the window.

—Yeah, that’ll do it; no one ever steals shit that’s next to a window. Numbnuts.

George is kneeling next to a bucket of water, submerging the half inflated innertube from his bike’s front wheel. He looks once at Paul, then back in the bucket.

—Don’t be such a dick, man, he lost his bike.

Paul picks up a rock from the huge pile that occupies half the driveway. He shakes the rock around in his hand.

—He didn’t lose his bike.

He tosses the rock, bouncing it off Andy’s back.

—He let someone steal it.

Andy feels pressure behind his eyes and fights it. Already cried once coming out of the store and finding the bike gone. Can’t cry again.

He picks up a rock of his own.
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“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).
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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.
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