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Recent and Upcoming Titles
Toby Ball
St. Martin’s Press, September 2010
Set in the mid-1930s, at the height of the most corrupt administration ever known in “The City,” the novel opens with a mysterious duplicate file discovered deep in the Vaults—a cavernous hall containing all of the municipal criminal justice records of the last seventy years. From here, the story follows: Arthur Puskis, the Vault’s sole, hermit-like archivist, who brings an almost mystical faith to a system he believes must cohere; Frank Frings, a high-profile investigative journalist with a self-medicating reefer habit; and Ethan Poole, a socialist private eye with a penchant for blackmail. All three independently uncover evidence of something called “The Navajo Project”. But the mayor, his violent henchmen, and the group of wealthy businessmen who form the mayor’s inner circle are going to have serious a problem with this discovery…
""(An) impressive thriller debut.... The plot steamrolls to a dramatic conclusion. Ball's "City," in which despair and graft are almost palpable, is an imaginative achievement on par with Loren Estleman's Gas City."
Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"Had George Orwell and Dashiell Hammett ever decided to collaborate on a book, they might have come up with something like The Vaults. Toby Ball's novel is superbly plotted, stylishly written and entirely unique. A wonderful debut from a writer to watch."
Michael Harvey, author of The Chicago Way
Kate Bernheimer
Penguin, October 2010
Michael Cunningham, Francine Prose, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, and more than thirty other extraordinary writers celebrate fairy tales in this thrilling new volume. Inspired by everything from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” and “The Little Match Girl” to Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard” and “Cinderella” to the Brother Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel” and “Rumpelstiltskin” to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino and from China, Japan, Vietnam, Russia, Norway, and Mexico, here are stories that soar into boundless realms, filled with mischief and mystery and magic, and renewed by the lifeblood of invention. Although rooted in hundreds of years of tradition, they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature.
"I cannot remember a time I had more fun reading a book! Many of these contemporary tales rival the originals in creepiness, joy, and impact."
Darcey Steinke
Kate Bernheimer
Coffee House Press, September 2010
In Kate Bernheimer’s familiar and spare—yet wondrous—world, an exotic dancer builds her own cage, a wife tends a secret basement menagerie, a fishmonger’s daughter befriends a tulip bulb, and sisters explore cycles of love and violence by reenacting scenes from Star Wars.
Enthralling, subtle, and poetic, this collection takes readers back to the age-old pleasures of classic fairy tales and makes them new. Their haunting lessons are an evocative reminder that cracking open the door to the imagination is no mere child’s play, that delight and tragedy lurk in every corner, and that we all “have the key to the library . . . only be careful what you read.”
"These stories are the product of a vivid imagination and crafty manipulation by their skillful creator."
Publisher's Weekly
"Each of these spare and elegant tales rings like a bell in your head. memorable, original, and not much like anything you’ve read."
Karen Joy Fowler
"Horse, Flower, Bird rests uneasily between the intersection of fantasy and reality, dreaming and wakefulness, and the sacred and profane. Like a series of beautiful but troubling dreams, this book will linger long in the memory. Kate Bernheimer is reinventing the fairy tale."
Peter Buck, R.E.M.
"My admiration for [Bernheimer's] talent as a writer, and the dazzling use to which she puts it, is of the highest order."
Kathryn Davis
"Bernheimer’s fiction offers a unique and delicate gift, the tempting mirage of a grace that constantly escapes."
Lydia Millet
"A strange and enchanting book, written in crisp, winning sentences; each story begs to be read aloud and savored."
Aimee Bender
Chandra Hoffman
Harper Collins, September 2010
In Chosen, a novel in the spirit of Jodi Picoult and Anna Quindlen, a young caseworker increasingly entangled in the lives of adoptive and birth parents faces life-altering choices when an extortion attempt goes horribly wrong.
It all begins with a fantasy: the adoption caseworker in her “signing paperwork” charcoal suit, paired with the beaming adoptive parents cradling their adopted newborn, against a fluorescent-lit delivery room backdrop. It’s this blissful picture that keeps Chloe Pinter, director of The Chosen Child’s domestic adoption program happy juggling the high demands of her boss and the incessant needs of both birth and adoptive parents.
But the job that offers her refuge from her turbulent personal life and Portland’s winter rains soon becomes a battleground itself involving three very different couples: the Novas, college sweethearts who suffered fertility problems but are now expecting their own baby; the McAdoos, a wealthy husband and desperate wife for whom adoption is a last chance; and Jason and Penny, an impoverished couple who have nothing—except the baby everyone wants. But when a child is kidnapped, dreams dissolve into nightmares, and everyone is forced to examine what went wrong...
"Gripping"
Kirkus
"This riveting debut novel from Chandra Hoffman will keep you on edge until its final glorious pages. Enlightening, terrifying, and big hearted, Chosen is a terrific book!"
Ann Hood, bestselling author of The Red Thread
"Gritty and suspenseful, Chosen draws us into the obstacle-strewn path of domestic adoption. Hoffman's characters are complex and sympathetic in strikingly different ways, even those who appear at first glance to be irredeemable."
Juliette Fay, author of Shelter Me
"With sensitivity and keen insight, Chandra Hoffman's absorbing first novel Chosen explores the demanding, uplifting, and emotionally explosive world of adoption. Interweaving the stories of three very different couples and their paths to adopting a child - or "choosing" an adoptive home - with caseworker Chloe Pinter's own turbulent existence, Ms. Hoffman beautifully illuminates the inner workings of the adoption process, its blessings as well as its sometimes painful costs. Touching, immediately involving, as well as propulsively readable, Chosen heralds a powerful and distinctive new voice in contemporary women's fiction."
Liza Gyllenhaal, author of Local Knowledge
"Chandra Hoffman's Chosen is a finely tuned page-turner. With unwavering clarity and genuine empathy born of experience, Hoffman turns the spotlight on her so-real characters, exposing the raw edges of their love and longing and fears. There is no perfect happiness here; instead, there is the unexpected grace of discovering that getting what we want is so often less ideal than wanting what we get. This is an outstanding debut."
Therese Fowler
Lucy Jackson
St. Martin's Press, August 2010
When New York City native Desirée Christian-Cohen flees her sometime-boyfriend, unhappy mother, Nina (who’s recently learned her soon-to-be ex-husband Patrick is gay), and failing grandfather, she picks the flight plan by randomly dropping her finger on a map and hitting: Honey Creek, Kansas, population 1,623. And if being a “tourist” in Honey Creek weren’t noticeable enough, try hanging out in the Sweet Tooth luncheonette, where you’re referred to as “half a Jew.” Wary of, but wanting to, fit in with the local populace, Desirée is forced to defend herself and define herself in a world that feels vastly different from her own. Her Yale boyfriends were never like Bobby McVicar, the son of two ageing hippies, who finds all he needs in his pinprick of a hometown. And never—even as an only child of typically doting Manhattan parents—has anyone paid so much attention to Desirée.
Over one surprising, transformative and sometimes very funny summer, Desirée Christian-Cohen, member-in-good-standing of the Self Esteem Generation, discovers how an impulsive escape from home and family turns out to be much more than that.
"Jackson’s diverting, fast-moving tale balances Desiree’s unique journey to adulthood with the intricacies and frustrations of family and romance."
Booklist
"The fact: Lucy Jackson's Slicker is just a straight-up, super fun read. Smart, funny as hell, wryly observant and supremely readable, it's categorically impossible not to connect to the delightful, original characters in these pages. There's nothing not to love. End of story."
Elizabeth Crane, author of You Must Be This Happy To Enter
Belle Boggs
Graywolf Press, June 2010
Winner of the 2009 Bakeless Prize for Fiction
Set on the Mattaponi Indian Reservation and in its surrounding counties, the stories in this linked collection detail the lives of rural men and women with start realism and plainspoken humor. A young military couple faces a future shadowed by injury and untold secrets. A dying alcoholic attempts to reconcile with his estranged children. And an elderly woman’s nurse weathers life with her irascible charge by making payments on a decrepit houseboat—the Mattaponi Queen. The land is parceled into lots, work opportunities are few, and the remaining inhabitants must choose between desire and necessity as they navigate the murky stream of possession, love, and everything in between.
"“Boggs’ debut collection of interwoven stories is simultaneously sharp-edged and pastoral, downcast and humorous…The reader feels privy to each conversation, so pitch-perfect is Boggs’ feel for the godforsaken place her characters inhabit."
Booklist
"Mattaponi Queen moves quietly and with confidence. Boggs’s stories are connected subtly and organically, filled with damaged creatures who live out their tough, wise-cracking existences in Virginia’s semi-rural Mattaponi River region…They define bittersweet."
The Rumpus
"...[Belle Boggs] writes with subtlety, empathy and command, so that every page features small surprises: jolts of recognition, pungent dialogue, keen observations. Unfussy, understated and richly varied stories -- a promising debut."
Kirkus
"Strongly imagined, finely controlled, and well crafted. These stories are good because they are true, true in that way that only good fiction can be."
Percival Everett, Bakeless Fiction Judge
"Belle Boggs infuses these stories of sometimes hardscrabble, dreams-deferred lives with a finely crafted, absolutely confident elegance. Boggs is a writer who knows how deep and how hard we can love and live. Her characters are too real to ever forget."
Marita Golden, author of After
"Mattaponi Queen is one of the best things I've read all year. I looked forward each night to a new story, and by the end, felt as if I'd been sitting in a car or on a porch with a cousin or neighbor, listening to how things went wrong, or how they could have gone right, or how they might still look up. The setting was so perfectly rendered that I saw the river, the dirt roads, the woods, and most of all, the way each character moved in that landscape. The interwoven stories remind me of Annie Proulx crossed with Ernest Gaines-- the dry humor, the understatement, and the wonderful dialogue that sounds as if I'm hearing it while sitting on a folding chair in a yard."
Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales
"Belle Boggs is an immensely gifted writer, and this is a remarkable debut collection-- each nuance of emotion, of insight, of dialogue and character, is pitch-perfect and surprisingly resonant."
Mary Yukari Waters, author of The Favorites
"The Mattaponi River is the confluence of three rivers and is also the stunning metaphor for a place where three races have lived inextricable histories for generations. Indeed, the stories in Mattaponi Queen gather liek converging waters until the narrative world is coursing and undeniable. A few lives leak away from the Mattaponi, others never leave its banks, but character and place are one in this world so unapologetically evoked by Belle Boggs' beautiful, direct prose, and tension is not so much a few events as it is a constancy that is occassionally emerged from, the water moccasin head above the water...and then not..."
Michelle Latiolais, author of Even Now and A Proper Knowledge
Nancy Woodruff
Amy Einhorn Books/Penguin, April 2010
A smart, sexy novel about a woman's search for her former self on the London stage.
Georgie and Peter, very much in love, move to London with their three children. Once there, Georgie's dormant acting career takes off and she wins the role of Dora Jordan in a one-woman show. Dora Jordan was the most famous comic actress of the eighteenth century (she had thirteen illegitimate children, including ten by the future king of England).
As Georgie rehearses for her part, she becomes increasingly drawn to Dora Jordan, who she sees as a working mother with struggles exactly like her own. And when Georgie can no longer fight her attraction to the playwright, she begins an affair with tragic results.
Narrated by Peter, a failed-writer-turned-businessman, My Wife's Affair is about infidelity, passion, duty, and about finally getting what you want and then wanting still more.
"Woodruff leaves not a dry eye in the house in this gripping ode to theater and the love it can command—and crush.... It's brutal and lovely."
Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
"I was at once heartbroken and mesmerized by the raw beauty of My Wife's Affair. Nancy Woodruff looks at love in its various incarnations – the carnal, the romantic, and perhaps most poignantly, the maternal. The story unfolds as it must, while nothing escapes the author’s honest gaze."
Jean Reynolds Page, author of The Last Summer of Her Other Life
"Wise, moving, eloquent and written with an economy that is deceptively simple, this is a novel illuminated by an eye as bright and penetrating as a theatre spotlight. Dazzling."
Beatrice Colin, author of The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite and The Glimmer Palace
"My Wife's Affair has that rare appeal of a classic novel: The luminous, specific beauty of the writing and the story itself, which is powerful and heartbreaking. Nancy Woodruff is a wise and wildhearted chronicler of family life."
Mary O’Connell, author of Living With Saints
Deborah Schupack
Plume, May 2010
Deborah Schupack tells a provocative and suspenseful tale about what happens when cold, hard cash moves in next door. With page-turning storytelling, graceful prose and deep, true emotion, Sylvan Street explores the ultimate power—and limitations—of money. What these friendly residents of a Hudson Valley cul-de-sac do with their newfound money, and what the money does with them, builds toward a revelatory conclusion: how the tensions between benevolence and greed, duty and desire, inform our every action and interaction. Readers of thrillers and character-driven dramas alike will find a sweet payoff in these pages.
"Sylvan Street is a work of pure magic, as funny as it is wrenching, as mysterious as it is revealing, and ultimately an astonishing feat of social observation. Deborah Schupack has created a brilliant cast of complex, compelling characters in a riveting literary novel that raises timeless questions about money, class, and the daily deceptions among friends and neighbors, husbands and wives."
Kate Walbert, author of A Short History of Women
Jennifer Chiaverini
Simon & Schuster, April 2010
Another season of Elm Creek Quilt Camp has come to a close, and Bonnie Markham faces a bleak and lonely winter ahead, with her quilt shop out of business and her divorce looming. A welcome escape comes when Claire, a beloved college friend, unexpectedly invites her to Maui to help launch an exciting new business: a quilter’s retreat set at a bed and breakfast amid the vibrant colors and balmy breezes of the Hawaiian Islands. Soon Bonnie finds herself looking out on sparkling waters and banyan trees, planning quilting courses, and learning the history and intricacies of Hawaiian quilting, all the while helping Claire run the inn.
As Bonnie’s adventure unfolds, it quickly becomes clear that Claire’s new business isn’t the only excitement in store for her. Her cheating, soon-to-be ex-husband decides he wants her stake in Elm Creek Quilts, which threatens not only her financial well-being but her dearest friendships as well. Luckily she has the artistic challenge of creating her own unique Hawaiian quilt pattern to distract her—and new friends like Hinano Paoa, owner of the Nä Mele Hawai‘i Music Shop, who introduces Bonnie to the fascinating traditions of Hawaiian culture and reminds her that love can be found when and where you least expect it.
"With homey details and a strong sense of the connections that bind women, friends, and families, Chiaverini (Circle of Quilters) lovingly crafts her tale about a woman stitching together a new life and a new project. Series fans will enjoy this latest entry, and those new to the quilting bee should have no problem finding their groove."
Publisher’s Weekly
Katie Crouch
Little, Brown, April 2010
From the author of the New York Times bestseller GIRLS IN TRUCKS, a hilarious and moving novel about loyalty, family, and a prodigal daughter's return home.
When Hannah Legare was 11, her father went on a fishing trip in Charleston harbor and never came back. And while most of the town and her family accepted Buzz's disappearance, Hannah remained steadfastly convinced of his imminent return.
Twenty years, later Hannah's new life in San Francisco is unraveling. Her marriage is on the rocks, her business is bankrupt. After a disastrous attempt to win back her husband, she ends up back at her mother's home to "rest," where she is once again sucked into the mystery of her missing father. Suspecting that those closest are keeping secrets -- including Palmer, her emotionally closed, well-mannered brother and Warren, the beautiful boyfriend she left behind -- Hannah sets out on an uproarious, dangerous quest that will test the whole family's concept of loyalty and faith.
"Snappy... darkly funny... and there's just enough mystery to keep the pages turning."
Publishers Weekly
"Prepare to have your heart broken while laughing out loud at this breathtaking, scathingly sardonic novel...In the hands of a less adept author, this tightly wound tale of one woman's unraveling and redemption might seem more grim than guffaw-worthy. But with Crouch in charge, the reader is assured of a reflective yet riotous ride."
People
"...as in her best-selling Girls in Trucks, [Crouch] writes with a dark, twisty, but approachable Southern charm."
Library Journal
"riveting...dive right in."
Complete Woman
"You know your life is a mess when instead of keeping a 'to-do' list, you have a 'Things I Need to Stop Doing' list. The outlook is especially dire if those things include drinking, waking up in drool and kissing old boyfriends. That's the case for 35-year-old Hannah Legare, the screwed-up protagonist of Men and Dogs, Katie Crouch's wonderful follow-up to her best-selling debut, Girls in Trucks...What makes Hannah sympathetic and recognizable is that she means well, despite her tendency toward self-sabotage. Hannah might be exhausting to the people she loves, but there's something quite sweet about her vulnerability. It's hard not to root for this prodigal daughter as she finds her way...a compelling family drama...with enough dark humor tosssed in at unexpected moments, thus avoiding melodrama. Crouch blends these elements seamlessly—and rather than deliver an eye-rolling happy ending, she gives us exactly the ending we hope for."
San Francisco Chronicle
"[Hannah] is equal parts southern charm and fatal attraction&mdashshe's hard to like when she's lolling on the couch, getting plastered and whining. But multiple plot twists parallel Hannah's growth, and cameos by characters from Crouch's 2008 debut, Girls in Trucks, add necessary humor. Men and dogs, it turns out, are both loyal to a fault. This book may create the same bond between the author and her fans."
San Francisco Magazine
"In Men and Dogs, Crouch—whose last novel, Girls in Trucks, was a New York Times best-seller—moves nimbly between poetic chapters about Hannah's childhood and a hard-edged look at her life now, staying with her mother and stepfather after her husband has taken up with another woman. Hannah is left to unravel the disappearance of her father, who never returned from a fishing expedition when she was 11; she's never stopped believing he might still be alive. As Hannah careens from her mother's house to her brother's an an ex-boyfriend's—all the while secretly yearning to reconcile with her husband—she is torn between clinging to the myth of her father and stepping into the reality of her life."
Whole Living
"Crouch's writing quite clearly reflects her own history—she is a former Southerner who can't shed the remnants of a sweet-tea-soaked past—but her perspective is thoughtful and multidimensional. Her protagonist demonstrates a real skepticism for a culture that hides rumors and ruckus behind sweater sets and pearls, while her prose exhibits both an understanding and a distrust of the syrupy-sweet culture in which she herself was steeped."
Bookpage
"Katie Crouch’s great gifts—a wry, unflinching intelligence and the ability to create flawed, complicated characters—drive this story of a woman who must reckon with her past in order to move into her future. Hannah is exasperating, difficult, magnetic, and breathtakingly real."
Marisa de los Santos, author of Loved Walked In
"Katie Crouch is an American original...[by] turns, poignant, revealing, hilarious and sad...this is a great pick for book clubs everywhere! Katie's novel will not only inspire a lively discussion, it will ignite one!"
Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of Big Stone Gap, Lucia, and Very Valentine
"Katie Crouch brings honesty and stealthy plotting to this compelling tale of a free-spirited Southern girl’s early mid-life crisis. MEN AND DOGS will keep you hooked."
Lucinda Rosenfeld, author of I'm So Happy For You
"Katie Crouch's novel—about hope, healing and coming home Southern-style—is not only moving and suspenseful and wise, but hilarious! Suffused with sassy intelligence and warmth, Men and Dogs gripped me from the first page and wouldn't let go."
Irina Reyn, author of What Happened to Anna K.
"I couldn't put the book down. I thought it was witty, sharp and warm all at the same time, with exactly the kind of flawed but fascinating characters I love to read about...intelligent yet commercial, with lots of dark humor and real poignancy."
Kate Harrison, author of The Starter Marriage and Old School Ties
Maaza Mengiste
W.W. Norton, January 2010
An epic tale of a father and two sons, of betrayals and loyalties, of a family unraveling in the wake of Ethiopia's revolution.
This memorable heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother's prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu's youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement--a choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia.
Beneath the Lion's Gaze tells a gripping story of family, of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction before. It is a story about the lengths human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic and indelibly tragic, Beneath the Lion's Gaze is a transcendent and powerful debut.
"Mengiste’s social intelligence and historical research allow her to write compassionately about emotions denatured by a brutal regime or calcified by conviction. But the real marvel of this tender novel is its coiled plotting, in which coincidence manages to evoke the colossal emotional toll of the revolution."
The New Yorker
"[A] deeply affecting first novel."
The Boston Globe
"[An] incandescent debut."
Vogue
"A bold literary debut….Mengiste gracefully builds the story to a heart-pumping conclusion."
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Beneath the Lion’s Gaze melds personal detail and postcolonial history in the manner of The Last King of Scotland and The Kite Runner, but it's Mengiste's lush yet economical writing that really sets it apart."
New York Magazine
"Mengiste writes tenderly and beautifully... there is a lightness of touch and a confidence that belies its first novel status."
Bookmunch
"In Mengiste’s hands what was a confusing time... becomes accessible and clear. An important novel, rich in compassion for its anguished characters."
Lorraine Adams, The New York Times Book Review
"This book is stunning... graphic descriptions and masterly prose."
Library Journal
"Told from searing personal viewpoints that humanize the politics from many sides and without slick messages. The author... tells the story in unforgettable detail."
Hazel Rochman, Booklist
"all but un-put-downable... an extraordinary novel, which assembles a dauntingly broad cast of characters and, through them, tells stories that nobody can want to hear, in such a way that we cannot stop listening."
Claire Messud, Bookforum
"An arresting, powerful novel that works on both personal and political levels."
Kirkus Reviews
"Mengiste is as adept at crafting emotionally delicate moments as she is deft at portraying the tense and grim historical material, while her judicious sprinkling of lyricism imbues this novel with a vivid atmosphere that is distinct without becoming overpowering. That the novel subjects the reader to the same feelings of hopelessness and despair that its characters grapple with is a grand testament to Mengiste's talent."
Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
"Literature from the margins is often too poorly lit for us to see, but Mengiste takes us through this dark political hunt with the night vision of a lion. A novel both tender and brutal, fearless, it is accomplished beyond a first book."
Dagoberto Gilb, author of The Magic of Blood and The Flowers
"What a beautiful book! After a few chapters I felt I was a member of this family, a citizen of Ethiopia. Maaza Mengiste is talented and bold and fresh. Already, I'm looking forward to her next book."
Uwem Akpan, author of Say You're One of Them
"With words that make 'a faint, tender bruise,' on the page, and a compassionate imagination that transforms everything it touches on, Maaza Mengiste delivers an important story from a part of Africa too long silent in the World Republic of Letters."
Chris Abani, author of GraceLand and The Virgin of Flames
Will Bunch
Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama
HarperCollins, August 2010
The election of Barack Obama as American president in November 2008 marked a turning point in U.S. politics—both as the election of the first-ever black president in a nation long torn by racial strife and as a repudiation of Obama's predecessor George W. Bush, who'd alienated so much of the world with the invasion of Iraq and the prison camp at Guantanamo, among other abuses. But those who expected that Obama's ascendency would mark a new Aquarian Age for the United States failed to account for one thing—that 46 percent of American voters did not want a new direction for country, and millions of these people are now as mad as hell. Some on the U.S extreme political right even refuse to acknowledge Obama's legitimacy as president. In less than one year of the Obama administration, America has been rocked by angry outbursts and violence at political meetings, by conspiracy theories claiming that Obama is not a U.S. citizen but a closeted Muslim or Communist, and by a series of right-wing shootings that have claimed the lives of police officers, a doctor who performed abortions, and even a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Sales of guns and ammunition have skyrocketed, and some once-respectable politicians in the South are once again at least talking about seceding from the Union, as happened in the Civil War. Has America finally lost its collective mind, or is the rise of right-wing violence and hate speech in the Obama era the harbinger of something even darker to come?
"An exquisitely written expose of a frightening political force that is shaping our elections, our society and our world."
David Sirota, author of The Uprising and Hostile Takeover
"Always compelling, but often disturbing, The Backlash is an essential contribution to our understanding of what’s happening right now on the political scene and what we might expect in the years to come."
David Brock, author of Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of An Ex-Conservative
Dave Philipps
When the New Band of Brothers Came Home
Palgrave, November 2010
They were once known by the famous moniker, “Band of Brothers.” Now, 60 years later, the notorious army unit from Fort Carson, Colorado calls themselves the “Lethal Warriors,” having seen the worst of the violence in Iraq. Many of its members are plagued by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and some, misdiagnosed or untreated since returning from war, embarked on drug-fuelled crime sprees, some of which resulted in murder. Here, David Philipps applies his piercing insight and relentless investigative skills not only to this particular unit, but to the broader issue of PTSD as it rages throughout the country. He highlights the inspiring story of General Mark Graham, a former commander at Fort Carson and one of the few officers who had the vision and guts to recognize PTSD as a growing problem with soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and to do something about it. Graham has opened his doors to the community for help, speaking candidly about the issue and offering a potential lifeline to the soldiers, and a solution to this deadly problem.
Dominic Tierney
Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War
Little, Brown, November 2010
How do Americans think about and understand war? Can these beliefs explain why the public supports some conflicts, but not others, and why the United States wins or loses on the battlefield? How We Fight uses letters, poems, novels, opinion polls, memorials, newspapers, posters, photographs, country music, Star Trek, and even the engravings on Zippo lighters, to explore the American experience of war since the Revolution. The book argues that Americans are addicted to regime change while allergic to the rigors of nation-building. We see wars against foreign countries as glorious crusades to topple enemy tyrants. In stark contrast, we view missions to fight insurgents and stabilize foreign societies as wearying quagmires—whether or not they are actually successful. In a narrative that sweeps from Gettysburg to Manila Bay, from the bloody killing fields of France to the improvised explosive devices in Iraq today, we see the United States roused into a crusading fervor before falling into deep regret, only to be roused yet again for the next conflict. But as we have witnessed all too clearly in the Iraq War, a love of overthrowing tyrants, coupled with an aversion to dealing with the consequences, can yield terrible (and terrifying) results in today’s highly unstable security environment.
Charles King
Genius and Death in a City of Dreams
W. W. Norton, February 2011
Odessa tells the epic story of the rise, decline, and renewal of Russia’s greatest seaport—Odessa—the ancestral homeland of literally tens of thousands of Americans, Israelis, and others. The city was originally scouted by a Spanish-Irish mercenary, named by a randy Russian empress, governed by her one-eyed secret husband, built by a French nobleman on the lam, modernized by a cuckolded Cambridge-educated count, and celebrated by his wife’s Russian-African lover. By the end of the nineteenth century, the city had a population that was a third Jewish, and was later the scene of the greatest act of genocidal violence against Jews ever committed by non-Germans: the deportation and murder of some 60,000 Jews by Romanian fascists during the Second World War. From the 1790s to the 1990s, Odessa has been the site of remarkable cultural achievements—from the lyric poetry of Pushkin to the wry short stories of Babel. Wonderfully written, shaped by a compelling narrative and informed with original research, Odessa brings this singular city and its past to vivid life.
Sheila Isenberg
An American Heiress in the Nazi Resistance
Palgrave, December 2010
Author and biographer Sheila Isenberg peels back the many layers of the fascinating and controversial Muriel Gardiner. A compelling heroine, Muriel was born to a wealthy family in Chicago but moved to Europe after college in the 1930s. Increasingly worried by the growing power of the fascists, she embarked upon vital work for what would become the Austrian underground, using the code name “Mary.” She met one of the leaders of the democratic movement, Josef Buttinger, and amidst their dangerous work together, fell in love. When Hitler annexed Austria in March of 1938, Buttinger, along with Muriel’s daughter, fled Austria, and Muriel stayed behind, bravely working to smuggle Jews and anti-fascists out of Vienna. Ultimately reunited, the family left France for the United States—but even then, Muriel, using her wealth and a network of friends that included Sigmund and Anna Freud, continued to work for the rescue of those trapped behind Hitler’s lines. In the post-war years, Muriel and Josef worked to build the International Rescue Committee into an essential organization devoted to helping refugees around the world. Isenberg weaves a compelling and intimate story of a woman of privilege whose choices in life lent strength and spirit to so many.
J. E. Lendon
The Peloponnesian War Begins
Basic Books, November 2010
Song of Wrath tells the story of Classical Athens’ victorious Ten Years’ War (431– 421 BC) against grim Sparta—the first decade of the terrible Peloponnesian War that turned the Golden Age of Greece to lead. Historian J.E. Lendon presents a sweeping tale of pitched battles by land and sea, sieges, sacks, raids, and deeds of cruelty and guile—along with courageous acts of mercy, surprising charity, austere restraint, and arrogant resistance. Recounting the rise of democratic Athens to great-power status, and the resulting fury of authoritarian Sparta, Greece’s traditional leader, Lendon portrays the causes and strategy of the war as a duel over national honor, a series of acts of revenge. A story of new pride challenging old, Song of Wrath is the first work of Ancient Greek history for the post-cold-war generation.
"Ted Lendon’s polemology of ancient Greece recognizes no bounds—or equals. Honor is a major theme of his new finely researched and inimitably styled analysis of the Ten Years’ War (431-421 BCE) fought between Sparta and Athens and their respective allies, and honor is due to its never less than engaging author."
Paul Cartledge, A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University
"J.E. Lendon must disagree with Thucydides, the greatest of historians, to tell his own dramatic story of the Ten Years’ War while still relying on him for his facts. J.E. Lendon’s learned enthusiasm pulls it off—and many a reader will relish this book."
Edward N. Luttwak, author of The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire
"Honor and shaming are key themes in Lendon’s accomplished account of the first ten years of the Peloponnesian War. A major work of history, this well-written study provides important insights on the classical world that Lendon ably extends to contemporary international relations."
Jeremy Black, author of War: A Short History
Mark Rotella
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2010
Amore is Mark Rotella’s celebration of the “Italian decade”—the years after the war and before the Beatles when Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Dean Martin, and Tony Bennett, among others, won the hearts of the American public with a smooth, stylish, classy brand of pop. In Rotella’s vivid telling, the stories behind forty Italian American classics (from “O Sole Mio,” “Night and Day,” and “Mack the Knife” to “Volare” and “I Wonder Why”) show how a glorious musical tradition became the sound track of postwar America and the expression of a sense of style that we still cherish.
Rotella follows the music from the opera houses and piazzas of southern Italy, to the barrooms of the Bronx and Hoboken, to the Copacabana, the Paramount Theatre, and the Vegas Strip. He shows us the hardworking musicians whose voices were to become ubiquitous on jukeboxes and the radio and whose names—some anglicized, some not—have become bywords for Italian American success, even as they were dogged by stereotypes and prejudice.
Amore is the personal Top 40 of one proud son of Italy; it is also a love song to Italian American culture and an evocation of an age that belongs to us all.
"What a beautiful thing is Amore! Rotella knows these singers like family, and he writes with a passion that turns each of their songs into a grace note about the uphill climb of Italians in America."
David Hajdu , music critic for The New Republic
"A transformative book. Mark Rotella has changed the way I think about American music, opening my eyes to the deep importance of Italian-American song."
Anthony DePalma , author of City of Dust
"Rotella has included a little something for everyone, and has brought both artist and song to life in this beautifully rich composition."
The Italian Tribune
"...full of charming anecdotes and period flavor."
Kirkus
"In this lively, anecdotal history, full of engaging profiles and nice autobiographical touches, Mark Rotella explores how a whole wave of hugely talented Italian-American singers dominated the pop charts in the 1940s and 1950s with sounds that have set a standard ever since."
Morris Dickstein, author of Dancing in the Dark
"By seamlessly blending personal memoir and historical insights into Italian-American singers - all against an ever-changing America - Mark Rotella has produced a book that is bighearted and flat-out beautiful."
Wil Haygood, author of In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Jr.
"This book is a box of candy for those who love American popular songs, as I do -- and those interested in the fate of Italian culture on American soil. In Amore, Mark Rotella has looked through the kaleidoscope of his attractive prose at a major postwar phenomenon -- the emergence of Italian American music for a mass audience. What he finds here will delight readers, who will demand a soundtrack for this highly entertaining volume."
Jay Parini, author of The Last Station
R. Tripp Evans
Knopf, October 2010
Grant Wood called himself “a farmer-painter; the plainest kind of fellow you can find. There isn’t a single thing I’ve done or experienced,” Wood said, “that’s been even the least bit exciting.”
Wood was celebrated for having the common touch, perceived to be a simple man whose simplicity was not an artifice, but the very essence of his character.
In this major new biography of America’s most acclaimed—and misunderstood—regionalist painter, Grant Wood is revealed as anything but plain, or simple...
R. Tripp Evans makes clear that Wood’s 1930 American Gothic and scenes of farmlands, farm workers, and folklore stand in direct contrast to the dark, complex painter he was. We see that although Wood claimed to have been a self-taught painter, he was a sophisticated artist, trained in Paris and Munich in the 1920s. He was known for his heartland traditionalism and piety, but was in fact deeply ambivalent about religion. He maintained lifelong deeply idiosyncratic relations with family and spent most of his life hiding his homosexuality.
Drawing on letters, the artist’s unfinished autobiography, and his sister’s writings, as well as a cache of materials that were in his ex-wife’s possession, Evans brilliantly illuminates both the artist and the man.
"This audacious, ingenious and powerful book blows the lid off the study of Grant Wood, the creator of America’s best-known work of art, aptly titled 'American Gothic.' Evans frankly acknowledges Wood’s homosexuality, which earlier biographers avoided entirely, and mines layer upon layer of meaning in his fascinating paintings that earlier writers completely missed. This is certainly one of the best and most psychologically penetrating studies ever written on an American artist, but it’s more than that. It is a book that transforms our understanding of what goes on in the American heartland—and of the swirling currents and undercurrents of American life."
Henry Adams, author of Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock
"It seems so straightforward. Grant Wood, born in Iowa in 1891, was the overall-clad, all-American artist from the heartland who created one of the world’s best-known and most-parodied paintings, American Gothic, a portrait of a pitchfork-grasping farmer and his dour daughter. But as art historian Evans so momentously and conscientiously reveals, Wood’s folksy persona was formulated to camouflage his homosexuality. Evans tells the full, grievous story of Wood’s struggle to conceal his true self in a harshly homophobic world for the sake of his art and career, presenting startling insights into Wood’s trauma over failing to live up to his stern father’s notion of masculinity…Most arresting is Evans’ bold decoding of the eroticism and caustic social commentary hidden in plain sight in Wood’s hard-edged and profoundly unnerving paintings. A fascinating and heartrending portrait of an artist forced to sacrifice his right to happiness and wholeness."
Booklist (starred review)
Kristin Hersh
Penguin, September 2010
In 1985, Kristin Hersh was just starting to find her place in the world. After leaving home at the age of fifteen, the precocious child of unconventional hippies had enrolled in college while her band, Throwing Muses, was getting off the ground amid rumors of a major label deal. Then everything changed: she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and found herself in an emotional tailspin; she started medication, but then discovered she was pregnant. An intensely personal and moving account of that pivotal year, Rat Girl is sure to be greeted eagerly by Hersh’s many fans.
"Funny, quirky coming-of-age story from a unique musical artist...A thoroughly engrossing work by an original voice—hopefully the first of many."
Kirkus (starred review)
"Rat Girl is the story of a wide-eyed soul coming to maturity in the ridiculous cacophony of modern life…It is an original beauty."
Mary Gaitskill, author of Veronica and Don’t Cry
"Ultra-vivid writing and intense honesty is what you'd expect from Kristin Hersh, one of America's finest songwriters. But Rat Girl is also a startlingly funny and touching memoir of her mid-Eighties moment as the bi-polar, pregnant, intermittently homeless frontwoman of a rising indie-rock band. It's a gripping journey into mental chaos and out the other side."
Simon Reynolds, author of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84
"Funny, freaky, fidgety, Hersh's memoir is the book a fan didn't dare hope for: a beacon in a dark field, illuminating the mysterious and the mundane. Beautifully, honestly, written and as close as you will ever get to being in a Throwing Muses song."
Wesley Stace, author of Misfortune and By George
Martin Lemelman
My Brooklyn Boyhood
Bloomsbury USA, October 2010
Martin Lemelman’s elegiac and bittersweet graphic memoir Two Cents Plain collects the memories and artifacts of the author’s childhood in Brooklyn. The son of Holocaust survivors, Lemelman grew up in the back of his family’s candy store in Brownsville during the 1950s and ‘60s, as the neighborhood, and much of the city, moved into a period of deep decline. In Two Cents Plain, Lemelman pieces together the fragments of his past in an effort to come to terms with a childhood that was marked by struggle both in and outside of the home. But his was not a childhood wholly without its pleasures. Lemelman’s Brooklyn is also the nostalgic place of egg creams and comic books, malteds and novelty toys, where the voices of Brownsville’s denizens—the deli man, the fish man, and the fruit man—all come to vivid life. Between the lingering strains of the Holocaust and the increasing violence on the city’s streets, Two Cents Plain reaches its dramatic climax in 1968, as Lemelman’s worlds explode, forcing him and his family to re-create their lives. Through his stirring narrative and richly rendered black-and-white drawings, family photographs, and found objects, Lemelman creates a lush, layered view of a long-lost time and place, the chronicle of a family and a city in crisis. Two Cents Plain is a wholly unique memoir and a reading experience not soon forgotten.
"Memory comes alive in this compelling amalgam of drawing, narrative and archival photography... It all comes to vivid life through the artist’s drawing and through a narrative that conjures the voices of his dead parents to complement the author’s perspective, which retains a childlike spirit. The family chronicle unfolds against the backdrop of a tumultuous era -- the assassination of a president, the escalation of the war in Vietnam and, perhaps most significant for the family, the changing demographics of a neighborhood that initially brought new waves of customers but saw a rise of anti-Semitism that drove so many families and businesses from what had long been their home.
'Life is the biggest bargain. You get it for free,’ reads one of the Yiddish sayings that introduce the chapters, in a book that is both a celebration and an affirmation of life."
Kirkus (Starred review)
"Two Cents Plain evokes a mythical world that once seemed like it would last forever. But nothing heroic and beautiful ever lasts very long. A sweet, unforgettable account of an impoverished yet oddly magical childhood."
Joe Queenan, author of Closing Time
"I've read many books, even written a couple, about growing up in Brooklyn, but this graphic coming of age memoir brought back memories like none other. Reading it while viewing the pictures took me home, produced tears of nostalgia and let me see, feel, even smell the old neighborhood. I loved it, roaches and all."
Alan Dershowitz, Author of Trials of Zion, October 2010
Natasha Trethewey 
A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast
University of Georgia Press, September 2010
One of our finest poets on memory, loss, and recovery in the wake of Katrina.
Beyond Katrina is poet Natasha Trethewey’s very personal profile of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by hurricane Katrina.
Trethewey spent her childhood in Gulfport, where much of her mother’s extended family, including her younger brother, still lives. As she worked to understand the devastation that followed the hurricane, Trethewey found inspiration in Robert Penn Warren’s book Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, in which he spoke with southerners about race in the wake of the Brown decision, capturing an event of wide impact from multiple points of view. Weaving her own memories with the experiences of family, friends, and neighbors, Trethewey traces the erosion of local culture and the rising economic dependence on tourism and casinos. She chronicles decades of wetland development that exacerbated the destruction and portrays a Gulf Coast whose citizens—particularly African Americans—were on the margins of American life well before the storm hit. Most poignantly, Trethewey illustrates the destruction of the hurricane through the story of her brother’s efforts to recover what he lost and his subsequent incarceration.
"Beyond Katrina examines both the public and personal impact of the tragedy from the perspective of a writer uniquely qualified to undertake such a fraught and challenging project. She brings to the volume an insider’s knowledge and deep-felt affection for the place and its culture, but also an expatriate’s sense of wary detachment. On a grander scale, the book is permeated with the sense that memory and the past can only exist as ruin. This book offers continuing evidence that Natasha Trethewey is one of our most indispensable poets and tells us as well that she is a prose writer of the first order."
David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982–2004
"With Bellocq's Ophelia and Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey demonstrated an uncanny and urgent empathy for overlooked but crucial persons and events in the American past. Beyond Katrina extends that nuanced vision and compassion into multiple dimensions of the past, present, and future of this immeasurable national tragedy. It is a great interpretive pleasure and a significant emotional experience to follow her as she sifts the personal, historical, political, and geographic modes of experience to reveal what Hurricane Katrina has meant -- and can and must mean -- for the Gulf Coast and the nation as a whole."
Anthony Walton, author of Mississippi: An American Journey
Anne Carson
New Directions, April 2010
Nox is an epitaph in the form of a book, a facsimile of a handmade book Anne Carson wrote and created after the death of her brother. The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of Poem 101 by Catullus “for his brother who died in the Troad.” Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches on pages. The poems, typed on a computer, were added to this illustrated “book,” creating a visual and reading experience so amazing as to open up our concept of poetry.
"Nox is a luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of an elegy, which is why it evokes so effectively the felt chaos and unreality of loss … a questioning, unsentimental excursion into the meaning of not understanding."
The New Yorker
"Maybe her best...The book is totally rechercé and weirdly clear, lingered over and neatly boxed, precious in the word's best sense."
The New York Times Book Review
"Nox is a brilliantly curated heap of scraps. It’s both an elegy and a meta-elegy, a touching portrait of a dead brother and a declaration of the impossibility of creating portraits of dead brothers."
New York Magazine
"...a stunning and heartbreaking exhibition of grief and wondering…breathtaking…evidence of visionary publishing at a moment when the book business is increasingly cynical."
Publisher’s Weekly
Kevin Young
:
Poems of Grief and Healing 
Bloomsbury, March 2010
An incomparable resource for those touched by grief—a groundbreaking volume of elegies by the most important names in modern poetry.
We all share life’s passages, from love to grief, and during them often turn to poetry to express the inexpressible. But while anthologies of love poetry abound, The Art of Losing is the very first anthology of its kind, delivering 150 devastatingly beautiful contemporary elegies that embrace the pain, heartbreak, and healing stages of mourning.
Selected and introduced by National Book Award finalist Kevin Young, the poems are artfully arranged to correspond with the grieving process: starting with Reckoning, moving through Remembrance and Rituals, then ending with Recovery and, finally, Redemption. And with contributions from men, women, and a full range of races and faiths, the breadth of human experience is captured. Whether read aloud at a funeral service or privately for comfort, these poems prove a worthy companion to the necessary, and often messy, process of grieving.
A singularly thoughtful gift for those coping with grief, as well as a vital resource for the loved ones, clergy, and hospice workers who guide us through the process of letting go, The Art of Losing will be an essential source of comfort and beauty.
With poems by Elizabeth Alexander, Simon Armitage, John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, John Berryman, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Ted Hughes, Jane Kenyon, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Philip Larkin, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Marianne Moore, Les Murray, Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, Natasha Trethewey, Derek Walcott, James Wright, and others.
"[Young’s] latest anthology is his most topical, and, perhaps, his most useful, gathering poems about suffering and overcoming loss.. While these poems won't offer easy answers to grief, they will keep the kind of company that only poetry can, because only poetry can convincingly say, as Ruth Stone does in the last poem of this book, ‘All things come to an end./ No, they go on forever.’"
Publishers Weekly
"Young offers an original and personal analysis of the modern elegy, and...the poems are as diverse and universal as the emotions of loss. Poems by Dylan Thomas, Sharon Olds, Mary Jo Bang, Nick Flynn, Natasha Trethewey, Cornelius Eady, Gerald Stern, Lucille Clifton, and many others exquisitely and empathically translate pain into beauty, sorrow into catharsis."
Booklist
"'Grief,' wrote Denise Levertov, 'is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.' Here, Kevin Young has thoughtfully gathered many of these sorrowful perambulations and grievous plummets."
Billy Collins, Former U.S. Poet Laureate and author of Sailing Alone Around the Room: New & Selected Poems
"A book for easing the heart in pain. A chorus of poets (the first of its kind) brought together expressly to guide us through dark times when ‘the eye begins to see.’ Kevin Young was the right guy at the right time to do this.... Brilliant."
Mark Matousek, author of When You're Falling, Dive and Ethical Wisdom
Lish McBride
Henry Holt, October 2010
Sam leads a pretty normal life. He may not have the most exciting job in the world, but he’s doing all right—until a fast food prank brings him to the attention of Douglas, a creepy guy with an intense violent streak.
Turns out Douglas is a necromancer who raises the dead for cash and sees potential in Sam. Then Sam discovers he’s a necromancer too, but with strangely latent powers. And his worst nightmare wants to join forces... or else.
With only a week to figure things out, Sam needs all the help he can get. Luckily he lives in Seattle, which has nearly as many paranormal types as it does coffee places. But even with newfound friends, will Sam be able to save his skin?
"This is a scary funny book or a funny scary book. In either case, it is a great book. I love it."
Sherman Alexie, National Book Award winner for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Todd Kliman
A Forgotten Grape and the Untold Story of American Wine 
Clarkson Potter, May 2010
A rich romp through untold American history featuring fabulous characters, The Wild Vine is the tale of a little-known American grape that rocked the fine-wine world of the nineteenth century and is poised to do so again today.
Author Todd Kliman sets out on an epic quest to unravel the mystery behind Norton, a grape used to make a Missouri wine that claimed a prestigious gold medal at an international exhibition in Vienna in 1873. At a time when the vineyards of France were being ravaged by phylloxera, this grape seemed to promise a bright future for a truly American brand of wine-making, earthy and wild. And then Norton all but vanished. What happened?
The narrative begins more than a hundred years before California wines were thought to have put America on the map as a wine-making nation and weaves together the lives of a fascinating cast of renegades. We encounter the suicidal Dr. Daniel Norton, tinkering in his experimental garden in 1820s Richmond, Virginia. Half on purpose and half by chance, he creates a hybrid grape that can withstand the harsh New World climate and produce good, drinkable wine, thus succeeding where so many others had failed so fantastically before, from the Jamestown colonists to Thomas Jefferson himself. Thanks to an influential Long Island, New York, seed catalog, the grape moves west, where it is picked up in Missouri by German immigrants who craft the historic 1873 bottling. Prohibition sees these vineyards burned to the ground by government order, but bootleggers keep the grape alive in hidden backwoods plots. Generations later, retired Air Force pilot Dennis Horton, who grew up playing in the abandoned wine caves of the very winery that produced the 1873 Norton, brings cuttings of the grape back home to Virginia. Here, dot-com-millionaire-turned-vintner Jenni McCloud, on an improbable journey of her own, becomes Norton’s ultimate champion, deciding, against all odds, to stake her entire reputation on the outsider grape.
Brilliant and provocative, The Wild Vine shares with readers a great American secret, resuscitating the Norton grape and its elusive, inky drink and forever changing the way we look at wine, America, and long-cherished notions of identity and reinvention.
"...an outstanding piece of literature..."
Richmond-Times Dispatch
"...an exhaustively researched and thoroughly entertaining new book."
Forbes, “The Booze Blog”
"Who knew a grape could generate so much history, so much commerce, so much entrancing narrative, so much splendid writing. Todd Kliman's The Wild Vine is as brilliantly successful a hybrid as its subject: combining the best characteristics of history and memoir, biography and travelogue, it is an utter delight."
Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
"Todd Kliman's The Wild Vine is beautiful and eye-opening and you'll enjoy it as you would a bracing and wonderful wine. It's a mystery story, a history lesson, a personal journey between hard covers: a great, American vintage."
Darin Strauss, author of Chang & Eng and More Than It Hurts You
"This book will move you in ways that might surprise you, for The Wild Vine is about much more than an obscure American grape; it's about heartbreak, determination, courage, and humanity. If in vino veritas, this may be the truest story ever told, and Todd Kliman tells it with grace and sensitivity."
Don and Petie Kladstrup, authors of Wine and War
"A fascinating, well-written and researched cross-generational journey that follows the DNA of a single grape variety that I had never heard of before. I don't know if the Norton grape will make it as one of the great wines of the world, but its history, and the eccentric characters who carried its hope for a wine that could be grown and vinified in Virginia, of all places, makes for page-turning reading."
Rex Pickett, author of Sideways
"Kliman tells the ups and downs of Norton with equal panache, pointing a bright light on grape hybrids, an important yet little-known part of the wine world, and introducing a cast of interesting characters along the way. While reading this book, I kept wishing that I had a bottle of Norton at my elbow."
George M. Taber, author of Judgment of Paris
"A well-researched and fascinating story that reads like a novel. A true and highly entertaining American tale."
Anthony Dias Blue, The Tasting Panel magazine, WCBS, KABC
"This is a terrific book. If it were a wine, it would be expressive but earthy, subtly spiced, with great structure and a long, lingering finish."
Toby Young, of Top Chef
"Hold on for an entertaining and enlightening 400-year, transcontinental, trans-cultural investigation of the greatest wine you’ve never heard of. Todd Kliman squeezes a hell of a yarn from a grape."
Daniel Evan Weiss, author of The Roaches Have No King and The Swine's Wedding
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