Tag Archives: forthcoming releases
Coming Up Next…
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Two for the Road
Riverhead Books is releasing two books, a memoir and a nonfiction book about a personal obsession, on April 14, 2011. You will have to wait until then to buy and read them, but you can try right now to win a galley copy of these books. Based on the responses received to this giveaway, Munchy the cat may decide to give one galley each to two readers, or both of them to one lucky reader. (These galleys are pre-publication paperback versions of books that will be released in hardbound form.)
The first of the two books is a memoir, The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke. Here is the official synopsis:
What does it mean to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother’s death, Meghan O’Rourke found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow. In the first anguished days, she began to create a record of her interior life as a mourner, trying to capture the paradox of grief – its monumental agony and microscopic intimacies – an endeavor that ultimately produced this book. With poignant lyricism and unswerving candor, O’Rourke captures the fleeting moments of joy that make up a life, and the way memory can lead us out of the jagged darkness of loss. The Long Goodbye is not only an exceptional memoir, but a necessary one.
“The Long Goodbye is emotionally acute, strikingly empathetic, thorough and unstintingly intellectual… and elegantly wrought. …It’s above all a useful book, for life — the good bits and the sad ones, too.” Richard Ford
Meghan O’Rourke is the author of the award-winning book of poems, Halflife. She is a culture critic for Slate.
The second book is The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure, subtitled My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie. Here’s a summary:
Wendy McClure is on a quest to find the world of beloved Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder – a fantastic realm of fiction, history and places she’s never been yet somehow knows by heart. She retraces the pioneer journey of the Ingalls family – looking for the Big Woods among the medium trees in Wisconsin, wading in Plum Creek, and enduring a prairie hailstorm in South Dakota – and immerses herself in all things Little House. This is a loving, irreverent, spirited tribute to a series of books that have inspired generations of American women. The Wilder Life is also a story about what happens when we reconnect with our childhood touchstones – and find that our old love has only deepened.
Wendy McClure is the author of I’m Not the New Me.
To enter this giveaway, please provide your answer to this question: Which of these books would you like to win, and why? You can post your response here (with your name and an e-mail address), or you can choose to send an e-mail with your answer to Josephsreviews@gmail.com . This will count as a first entry. For a second entry, give us the title and author of the very best or very worst book that you’ve read in 2010-2011, and explain why you loved it or hated it.
In order to be eligible to win a galley in this giveaway, you must live in the continental United States and be able to supply a residential mailing address. You have until Thursday, April 14, 2011 at midnight PST to submit your entry or entries. Munchy will use his feline instincts and judgment to pick the winner or winners. The winner(s) will be contacted via e-mail.
As always, be careful out there. Good luck and good reading!
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Hello Goodbye
Antonia Fraser is known in England as Lady Antonia Fraser, her father having been an Earl. Her forthcoming book Must You Go? – My Life with Harold Pinter will be released in the U.S. on November 2, 2010 by Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday. Fraser’s memoir centers on her 33-year love affair with, and marriage to, the celebrated playwright and poet Harold Pinter.
We’ll have a review up by the release date of Must You Go? but, in the interim, it’s worth noting that this memoir is getting fantastic write-ups on the other side of the pond. Here’s a small sampling.
“Writing with exemplary clarity and courage… Fraser keeps her gaze steady and her heart open.” – The Independent
“The book is intimate without being confessional, and on certain subjects (Fraser) prefers to say nothing. But she’s not so discreet as to be dull, and there’s a lot of humour.” – Blake Morrison, The Guardian
“It may lack sensational revelations but Antonia Fraser’s memoir of married life with Pinter is eccentric and hilarious.” – Rachel Cooke, The Observer
“It is neither autobiography nor biography but a love story, romantic, poignant and very funny, illuminating her husband’s character and creativity.” The Times
“This book works, just as it appears their lives (together) worked, as the most touching and enduring of love stories… The ending is… almost unbearably moving. The whole of this lovely book fills you with a gratitude that happenstance can, once in a while, not screw up and find the right girl for the right boy.” – Dominic Dromgoole, Financial Times
“It’s enormously enjoyable to read… because this is a book that’s intimate without being confessional, and that’s a very unusual thing today. At the end of it you feel you’ve had an insight into a great romance… She’s really pulled off something of enormous subtlety.” Tina Brown, The Daily Beast
“This book – full of funny and tender things – satisfies on more than one level. It is an intimate account of the life and habits of a major artist; it is a pencil sketch of British high society in the second half of the 20th century; and it is, more than either of these things, and much more unusually, a wonderfully full description of the deep pleasures and comforts of married love.” – The Spectator
“The final third of Must You Go? is dominated by Pinter’s ill-health, his award of the Nobel prize, and his courageous struggle still to speak out on the issues that concerned him. In many ways they are the best part of the book.” – Robert Harris, The Sunday Times
Interested? Lady Antonia Fraser will appear at the Los Angeles Public Library (630 W. 5th Street) at 7:00 p.m. on November 8, 2010; and at the San Francisco City Arts & Lectures Herbst Theatre (401 Van Ness Avenue) on November 9, 2010 at 8:00 p.m.
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