Articles tagged "Outline"
“Great Book-Group Reads” Booklist Webinar — Macmillan Titles (08/01/17)
So you missed Booklist‘s “Great Book-Group Reads” Webinar… We got you! Here are the titles we covered:
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things by Bryn Greenwood
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah
The Hush by John Hart
After Anna by Lisa Scottoline
One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus
The Vengeance of Mothers by Jim Fergus
The North Water by Ian McGuire
Outline by Rachel Cusk
Transit by Rachel Cusk
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
Download the full slide deck here.
Happy #BookBday (1/17/17 Edition)
It’s an all-star #BookBday!
TEARS WE CANNOT STOP: A Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson
One of Kirkus Reviews‘s Most Anticipated Books of 2017! As the country grapples with race with anguish and anger at a level not seen since the 60s, one of America’s leading black voices speaks out honestly and provocatively to white America. “TEARS WE CANNOT STOP is a fiery sermon, and an unabashedly emotional, personal appeal. The result is one of the most frank and searing discussions of race I have ever read.” — New York Times Book Review
LILLIAN BOXFISH TAKES A WALK by Kathleen Rooney
A February 2017 Indie Next pick with two starred reviews! “Inspired by Margaret Fishback, poet and Macy’s ad-writing phenom of the 1930s, Rooney imagines an extraordinary walk through the streets of New York City on the last night of 1984, one that triggers a flood of memories for fictional ad woman Lillian Boxfish. Elegantly written, Rooney creates a glorious paean to a distant literary life and time—and an unabashed celebration of human connections that bridge the past and future.” — Publishers Weekly, boxed & starred review
Follow Lillian on her walk in NYC and listen to audiobook excerpts in this interactive map! readmoreremove
Fiction Stars!
Six forthcoming works of fiction have received several starred reviews. Make sure to clear some space on your library’s shelves!
LILLIAN BOXFISH TAKES A WALK by Kathleen Rooney — 3 stars!
“Inspired by Margaret Fishback, poet and Macy’s ad-writing phenom of the 1930s, Rooney imagines an extraordinary walk through the streets of New York City on the last night of 1984, one that triggers a flood of memories for fictional ad woman Lillian Boxfish. Elegantly written, Rooney creates a glorious paean to a distant literary life and time—and an unabashed celebration of human connections that bridge the past and future.” — Publishers Weekly, boxed & starred review
“Poet and novelist Rooney found sublime inspiration, thanks to a librarian friend, in real-life ad writer and poet Margaret Fishback. Rooney’s delectably theatrical fictionalization is laced with strands of tart poetry and emulates the dark sparkle of Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Truman Capote. Effervescent with verve, wit, and heart, Rooney’s nimble novel celebrates insouciance, creativity, chance, and valor.” — Booklist, starred review
“Rooney takes us on a delightful stroll with a colorful character, inspired by the life of poet and ad woman Margaret Fishback, sprinkling just the right details and arch bons mots appropriate to Lillian’s reputation as a woman of words.” — Library Journal, starred review
MARLENA by Julie Buntin — 3 stars!
“In Buntin’s vivid debut, Cath, now a New York City public librarian in her thirties, tells the story of the friendship that changed her forever. Though Cath tells her story in flashbacks, Buntin’s prose is emotional and immediate, and the interior lives she draws of young women and obsessive best friends are Ferrante-esque.”
— Booklist, starred review
“In her impressive debut novel, Buntin displays a remarkable control of tone and narrative arc. Buntin is particularly sensitive to the misery of adolescent angst, and Cat’s growing happiness in Marlena’s friendship runs like an electric wire through the narrative. The novel is poignant and unforgettable, a sustained eulogy for Marlena’s ‘glow… that lives in lost things, that sets apart the gone forever.’”
— Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Sensitive and smart and arrestingly beautiful, debut novelist Buntin’s tale of the friendship between two girls in the woods of Northern Michigan makes coming-of-age stories feel both urgent and new. Devastating; as unforgettable as it is gorgeous.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review
For Your Consideration: January 2017 LibraryReads Titles
Download, read, and nominate your favorite December 2016 AND January 2017 titles for the January 2017* LibraryReads list!
*Nominations are due November 20! Click here for the full list of 2017 deadlines.
THE DRY by Jane Harper
* A Library Journal “Summer Promise — Debut Novels” pick *
* THREE starred reviews *
“Luke lied. You lied. Be at the funeral.”
This is the note Federal Agent Aaron Falk receives after hearing that his childhood best friend Luke has been found dead after committing a terrible crime in Jane Harper’s first mystery. When Falk reluctantly returns to his hometown amid the worst drought in a century to see if there’s more to Luke’s death than there seems to be, a long-buried mystery from Falk’s past resurfaces and he finds that small towns have always hidden big secrets.
“A stunner… It’s a small-town, big-secrets page-turner with a shocker of an ending… Recommend this one to fans of James Lee Burke and Robert Crais, who mix elements of ‘bromance’ into their hard-boiled tales.” — Booklist, starred review
Download the e-galley from Edelweiss
THE NOWHERE MAN by Gregg Hurwitz
In “bestseller Hurwitz’s stellar sequel to 2016’s ORPHAN X,”* Evan Smoak, a.k.a. “The Nowhere Man,” is captured, drugged, and spirited off to a remote location, heavily guarded from all approaches. His captors think they have Evan trapped and helpless, but they don’t realize that they’ve locked themselves in with one of the deadliest and most resourceful Orphans. “Evan’s efforts to elude Van Sciver and company will keep readers on the edge of their seats, but it’s Hurwitz’s engaging, sympathetic characters who place this thriller above the pack.” — *Publishers Weekly, starred review
Download the e-galley from Edelweiss
THIS IS HOW IT ALWAYS IS by Laurie Frankel
Based on Frankel’s own experience as the mother of a transgender second-grader, THIS IS HOW IT ALWAYS IS is the story of a family whose youngest son decides he wants to be a girl and passes as Poppy… until she doesn’t. “A big, brave, messy modern family struggles with the challenges of raising a transgender child. As thought-provoking a domestic novel as we have seen this year.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Available on NetGalley. To be pre-approved for an e-galley, please email library@macmillanusa.com with the subject “This is How it Always Is”*
BEHIND HER EYES by Sarah Pinborough
“Pinborough, an accomplished author of horror, mysteries, dark fantasy, and psychological suspense, has drawn on all her gifts to tell her latest story, a masterpiece of suspense centered on a bad marriage. Give this intense book to patrons freely, but especially target those who are fatigued with the current spate of female-driven psychological suspense. It will be enough to shake things up for them (it even has a hashtag campaign, #WTFThatEnding).”
— Booklist, starred review
Download the e-galley from Edelweiss.
To request an Advance Listening Copy, please email library@macmillanusa.com with the subject “Behind Her Eyes” with your mailing address.* readmoreremove
Booklist Editors’ Choice 2015
Yesterday Booklist revealed their Editors’ Choice Books of 2015, including these 11 Macmillan titles:
Adult Books
CHILDREN OF THE STONE: The Power of Music in a Hard Land by Sandy Tolan
This is an engrossing and powerful story, moving skillfully amid the failure of the never-ending battles and “peace” talks between Israel and Palestine and the determination of one brave young man to change his world through music.
LISTENING TO STONE: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera
Herrera sensitively portrays Isamu Noguchi as an artist of “unstoppable creative energy” whose mixed heritage caused him endless anguish, including time in a WWII Japanese American internment camp, reinvigorating appreciation for Noguchi’s dramatic life and evocative art.
BLACK MAN IN A WHITE COAT: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine by Damon Tweedy
African American psychiatrist Tweedy incisively illuminates the intersection of race and medicine in a compelling blend of statistics, personal anecdotes, and patient histories.
DO NO HARM: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh
English neurosurgeon Marsh looks back on his three-decade career with bracing candor, dramatically and informatively detailing brain surgery’s high risks and difficult emotional terrain.
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FSG Dominates the NYTBR Top 10 Books of 2015 List!
Earlier this week we told you about the New York Times Notable Books of 2015, but today the New York Times Book Review unveiled their 10 Best Books of 2015 and 4 of them are published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux!
A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin
Berlin, who died in 2004, left behind a substantial but little-known trove of stories that in her lifetime appeared mostly in literary journals and small-press books. This revelatory collection gathers 43 of them, introducing her to a wider audience as an uncompromising and largehearted observer of life whose sympathies favor smart, mouthy women struggling to get by much as Berlin herself — an alcoholic who raised four sons on her own — frequently did. With their maximalist emotions and sparse, unadorned language, Berlin’s stories are the kind a woman in a Tom Waits song might tell a man she’s just met during a long humid night spent drinking in a parking lot.
OUTLINE by Rachel Cusk
Cusk’s subtle, unconventional and lethally intelligent novel, OUTLINE, her eighth, is a string of one-sided conversations. A divorced woman traveling in Greece, our narrator, talks — or rather listens — to the people she meets, absorbing their stories of love and loss, deception, pride and folly. Well-worn subjects — adultery, divorce, ennui — become freshly menacing under Cusk’s gaze, and her mental clarity can seem so penetrating, a reader might fear the same risk of invasion and exposure. readmoreremove
New York Times Notable Books of 2015
The gray lady picked 20 Macmillan titles:
Fiction & Poetry
THE BEAUTIFUL BUREAUCRAT by Helen Phillips
An administrative worker’s experiences pose existential questions in Phillips’s riveting, drolly surreal debut novel.
CITIZEN: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
A meditation, in prose poems, images and essays, on what it means to be black in our racially divided society.
A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin
In these unadorned linked stories, Berlin examines women under duress and figures on America’s fringes.
OUTLINE by Rachel Cusk
Cusk’s heartbreaking portrait of poise, sympathy, regret and rage suggests a powerful alternate route for the biographical novel. readmoreremove
2016 Carnegie Medals Longlist
The 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction Longlist was announced today and we’re proud to have 6 nominees:
Fiction
OUTLINE by Rachel Cusk
PURITY by Jonathan Franzen
Nonfiction
GIVE US THE BALLOT: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman
LISTENING TO STONE: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera
DO NO HARM: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh
BEYOND WORDS: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina
The shortlist will be announced on October 19 and the 2016 Carnegie Medal winners will be announced on Sunday, January 10 at the RUSA Book and Media Awards at ALA Midwinter in Boston.
Three Stars for Rachel Cusk’s OUTLINE
A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking—about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives.
Rachel Cusk’s OUTLINE is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss.
OUTLINE takes a hard look at the things that are hardest to speak about. It brilliantly captures conversations, investigates people’s motivations for storytelling, and questions their ability to ever do so honestly or unselfishly. In doing so it bares the deepest impulses behind the craft of fiction writing. This is Rachel Cusk’s finest work yet, and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years.
PRAISE for OUTLINE:
“An expertly crafted portrait that asks readers to look deeply into the text for discovery. Those who accept that challenge will be rewarded for the effort.”–Booklist, starred review
“[B]rilliant novel … These 10 remarkable conversations, told with immense control, focus a sharp eye on how we discuss family and our lives.”–Publishers Weekly, starred review
“This book about love, loss, memory, and the lies we tell ourselves and others exudes a contemplative, melancholy atmosphere tempered by British author Cusk’s wonderfully astute observations of people and the visual impressions created by her exquisitely structured sentences.“–Library Journal, starred review
