Word: riverhead
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Someone in the publishing industry has sauteed up an ingenious scheme: spear a celebrity for a book deal, cut ghostwriter costs by churning out recipes instead of paragraphs and voila!, instant profit. Riverhead editor Mary South puts it in gentler terms: "Cookbooks are a great way for celebrities to do a biography without having to do a tell-all." South will help Patti LaBelle, who was been known to rustle up a mean meal on the road, dish out her culinary secrets next year. Even a reed-thin celebrity who was never seen in an apron will...
...fine, dreamlike first novel, The Light of Falling Stars (Riverhead; 308 pages; $23.95), J. Robert Lennon does start off with an air crash, not far from a Montana town he calls Marshall. But he declines his own generous offer of melodrama (and of irony too, for that matter) and proceeds to a far more interesting narration that amounts to a kind of anti-melodrama. The plane falls, townspeople grieve and attend funerals. But enemies are not reconciled, deep perceptions are not arrived at, lovers do not see each other more clearly and dearly. Paul and Anita, a shakily married couple...
Once upon a time, animals and words were intimate: in the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, the letter m was an eagle owl, the letter a a white Egyptian vulture. Such curious jewels pop up on every page of Susan Brind Morrow's first book, The Names of Things (Riverhead; 232 pages; $25.95). Taking herself into the Egyptian desert, Morrow works as a kind of archaeologist of the living world, digging for meanings as she watches cranes, catches "sundogs" and learns that the saddle-bill stork in the first hieroglyphs represented the soul. Language, she recalls, quoting Emerson, is "a sort...
...impact point of our age's need to believe and its need to know, and generating best sellers both for its fervent proponents and (lately) its detractors, the historical Jesus movement (Flash! Virgin birth a cover-up! Resurrection a fraud!) hardly wants for print. Yet in his Gospel Truth (Riverhead Books; 305 pages; $24.95), Russell Shorto provides a useful addition: an up-to-date survey and smart lay analysis of the theories that together constitute one of the stickiest challenges to traditional Christianity...
...eerie echo of Jack Kerouac's rambunctious 1957 novel, On the Road, begins to sound about halfway through The Beach (Riverhead; 371 pages; $23.95), by British writer Alex Garland, 27. The reason it takes half of Garland's moody tale for Kerouac's ghost to tap the reader on the shoulder is that the feel of the two novels could not be more different. On the Road was loony, funny, electric; The Beach is listless, pallid, drifting without object...