June 15, 2008
THIS SEASON AT THE GERNERT COMPANY

Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s THE PIRATE’S DAUGHTER and Sadie Jones’s THE OUTCAST have both been selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club in the UK.

Sadie Jones’s THE OUTCAST was shortlisted for the 2008 Orange Prize in the UK; Stella Duffy’s THE ROOM OF LOST THINGS and Lauren Liebenberg’s THE VOLUPTUOUS DELIGHTS OF PEANUT BUTTER AND JAM made the longlist.

V.V. Ganeshananthan’s LOVE MARRIAGE, Sadie Jones’s THE OUTCAST, and Hillary Jordan’s MUDBOUND, have all been picked by Barnes & Noble for its Discover Great New Writers Program for Summer 2008.

Hillary Jordan’s MUDBOUND is on NPR’s Summer Reading List, and has been chosen as one of three inaugural selections for the Progressive Book Club.

Toby Barlow’s SHARP TEETH is a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award.

Mike Lawson’s HOUSE RULES is a Book Sense selection for July.

Jodi Lynn Anderson’s PEACHES won the Young Readers’ Choice Award, Senior Division, from the Pacific Northwest Library Association.

Stewart O’Nan’s LAST NIGHT AT THE LOBSTER was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was selected as one of the New York Public Library’s “25 Books to Remember” from 2007. In addition, it was one of Entertainment Weekly’s Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year, one of NPR’s Critic’s Picks for 2007, one of The Washington Post’s Best Books of 2007, and one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Notable Books of 2007.

Field & Stream’s Bill Heavey was nominated for a third time for a National Magazine Award in the category of Leisure Interests, while Christopher Howard and Fiona McFarlane were nominated in the fiction category for stories in McSweeney’s and Zoetrope: All-Story, respectively.

Manny Howard’s “My Empire of Dirt,” a September 2007 cover story in New York Magazine and the basis for his forthcoming book on the subject, won the James Beard Foundation Journalism Award.

Summer 2008 Publications:
Mike Lawson, HOUSE RULES (Grove/Atlantic, June 10)
Michael Harvey, THE CHICAGO WAY paperback (Vintage Crime, July 8)
John Grisham, PLAYING FOR PIZZA paperback (Bantam Dell, July 22)
Sarah-Kate Lynch, HOUSE OF DAUGHTERS (Plume, July 29)
Margaret Cezair-Thompson, THE TRUE HISTORY OF PARADISE paperback (Random House, Aug. 5)
Yael Goldstein Love, THE PASSION OF TASHA DARSKY paperback (Doubleday, Aug. 5)
Olen Steinhauer, VICTORY SQUARE paperback (St. Martin’s Minotaur, Aug. 5)
Susan Bell, THE ARTFUL EDIT paperback (Norton, Aug. 11)
Amanda Petrusich, IT STILL MOVES: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music (Faber & Faber, Aug. 19)
Michael Harvey, THE FIFTH FLOOR (Knopf, Aug. 26)

Spring 2008 Publications:
Hillary Jordan, MUDBOUND (Algonquin, Mar. 4)
David Levien, CITY OF THE SUN (Doubleday, Mar. 4)
Sadie Jones, THE OUTCAST (Harper, Mar. 11)
David Elliott, JEREMY CABBAGE and The Living Museum of Human Oddballs and Quadruped Delights (Knopf Children’s, Mar. 11)
Billy Mott, THE BACK NINE paperback (Anchor, Mar. 11)
Catherine Delors, MISTRESS OF THE REVOLUTION (Dutton, Mar. 13)
V.V. Ganeshananthan, LOVE MARRIAGE (Random House, Apr. 8)
Larry Doyle, I LOVE YOU BETH COOPER paperback (Harper Perennial, Apr. 15)
John Darnielle, BLACK SABBATH’S MASTER OF REALITY: 33 1/3 (Continuum, Apr. 15)
György Dragomán, THE WHITE KING, trans. by Paul Olchvary (Houghton Mifflin, Apr. 21)
Kieran Scott, GEEK MAGNET (Puffin, May 29)

Books we have read recently, purely as fans, and highly recommend:
BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA, Dorothy Allison
HOUSE OF MEETINGS, Martin Amis
FAT CITY, Leonard Gardner
A WOMAN OF INDEPENDENT MEANS, Elizabeth Forsyth Hailey
MAXIMUM CITY, Suketu Mehta
LIKE YOU’D UNDERSTAND, ANYWAY, Jim Shepard
OLIVE KITTERIDGE, Elizabeth Strout