Classic Donald E. Westlake Series Reissued

via www.bookgasm.com
The University of Chicago Press is reissuing Richard Stark's Parker novels, giving one of the great crime series of our time a facelift that Parker himself would approve. Full Story

Powell's Books:
The Hunter
The Man with the Getaway Face
The Outfit

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

via www.washingtonpost.com
A brilliant concierge and a precocious girl consider the secrets of life. Full Story

Powell's Books:
The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Great American Publishers, Their Editors and Authors

via www.nytimes.com
...Al Silverman has come along with an amiable and doggedly researched history, "The Time of Their Lives," in which he makes a strong case for a Golden Age of Publishers and Editors (with writers trailing along behind them), stretching from 1946 into the early 1980s. Full Story

Powell's Books:
The Time of Their Lives

Classic Espionage Anthology Reissued

via latimes.com
Graham Greene divided his novels into serious works and 'entertainments.' They might just as easily have been categorized as stories about Catholicism and espionage, topics that actually were near neighbors in Greene's labyrinthine but fertile inner geography. Both categories will come to mind reading 'The Spy's Bedside Book,' a charming curiosity from 1957 now happily reissued by Random House's Bantam imprint. Full Story

Powell's Books:
The Spy's Bedside Book

Ms. Hempel Chronicles

via bookforum.com
Scholars have argued that childhood is a relatively recent invention, a concept that didn’t exist until the seventeenth century. If that’s the case, perhaps adulthood is equally suspect. Wouldn’t we be better off admitting that “grown-ups” are merely oversize, car-driving, money-juggling kids, instead of pretending to an ascendancy we rarely merit? The idea that we’re all just aging, idiosyncratic children snatching at happiness is central to Ms. Hempel Chronicles, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s gently, deeply affecting second novel. Full Story

Powell's Books:
Ms. Hempel Chronicles

The Way We Work

via www.post-gazette.com
Mary Boyes and Peter Scheckner were teaching college students composition when they realized there was one thing with which every student had experience and about which they all had opinions. It was work. When they assigned an essay on working, every student in their classes could come up with something original. It set them to thinking. Full Story
Excerpts (PDF)

Powell's Books:
The Way We Work

The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

via seattletimes.nwsource.com

In "Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum," author/paleontologist Richard Fortey takes readers into the inner sanctum of one of the world's most remarkable collections of natural-history specimens, tended to by a dedicated corps of eccentric scientists who investigate its mysteries. Full Story

Powell's Books:
Dry Storeroom No. 1

Superdove

(Photo by Alan D. Wilson)

via www.nytimes.com

Whither the pigeon? Ubiquitous beast, rat of the sky, object of children's chase — how did this "un-bird," as some ornithologists deride Columba livia, become part of every city's natural environment? The answers span geography, evolution and culture, but the excellent "Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan . . . and the World" goes beyond, to explore what pigeons reveal about human nature. It isn't always pretty. Full Story

Powell's Books:
Superdove
Pigeons

A Manuscript of Ashes

via www.latimes.com
Five years ago, the English language publication of an astonishing novel, "Sepharad," announced to American readers that Spanish letters had given rise to a previously overlooked European master, Antonio Muñoz Molina. Full Story

Powell's Books:
A Manuscript of Ashes
Antonio Munoz Molina

Murder Ink: A Killer Collection

via www.washingtonpost.com
Murder, let's face it, is as American as cherry pie. That's the unavoidable conclusion one reaches after reading the Library of America's huge, bloody, fascinating, often depressing yet sometimes grimly funny anthology of 350 years of true-crime writing. Full Story

Powell's Books:
True Crime

Who the Hell is Pansy O'Hara?

via seattletimes.nwsource.com

A bibliophile couple from Australia compiled beloved books' back stories in "Who the Hell Is Pansy O'Hara?" Full Story

Powell's Books:
Who the Hell is Pansy O'Hara?

Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic

via www.salon.com
The bronze figure of Giordano Bruno that stands at the center of Rome's Campo de' Fiori may be the most successful commemorative monument in the world. The average statue in a park or square usually rates no more than a glance: Either you already know who the guy is, or you don't care. But the hooded and manacled effigy of Bruno, with its haunted stare, immediately catches the eye, and the gruesome story attached to it -- Bruno was burned at the stake in that very spot, for the crime of heresy -- cements him in memory. Full Story

Powell's Books:
Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic
Giordano Bruno

B. S. Johnson's Remarkable 'Book in a Box'

via www.nytimes.com

When "The Unfortunates" by the English novelist B. S. Johnson appeared in England in 1969, it was, like the three novels that preceded it and the three that followed, critically praised and commercially ignored. Full Story

Powell's Books:
The Unfortunates
Like A Fiery Elephant by Jonathan Coe

New Richard Matheson Collection

via www.bookgasm.com
As I've said before, Richard Matheson has probably influenced more writers than any other author alive. Three generations of men and women have borrowed both his singular storytelling skills and the peerless ways he structures his fiction, short and long alike. Full Story

Powell's Books:
Matheson Uncollected
Richard Matheson

Heinrich Heine’s Travel Pictures

via www.moreintelligentlife.com

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) wanted to have his cake and eat it too. In his writing he succeeded on this point, and mostly splendidly. He was hugely knowing and not a little naive; an eccentric who had lucid and prophetic insights about his time; an ardent defender of liberal causes yet an anarchic humorist who laughed at most things under the sun. Full Story

Powell's Books:
Travel Pictures
Heinrich Heine

Inverted World by Christopher Priest Reissued

via npr.org

Priest is probably best known for his prize-winning 1995 novel The Prestige, later adapted into a hit Christopher Nolan film. But in science-fiction circles, he's known as one of the best living British writers. Full Story

Powell's Books:
Inverted World

Classic Vampire Novel Reissued

via www.bookgasm.com

If Suzy McKee Charnas' 1980 vampire novel THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY is such a classic of the genre, why haven't I heard of it before? Now that it's been reissued in paperback by Orb, I can echo all the praise that's been heaped upon it for years. Yeah, it's that good, worth devouring in a single weekend afternoon. Full Story

Powell's Books:
The Vampire Tapestry

Ian Rankin on 'Justified Sinner'

via living.scotsman.com

James Hogg's genius deserves to be enjoyed by a new generation. Full Story

Powell's Books:
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

The Father of Magic Realism

via www.villagevoice.com
The Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández (1902–1964)—considered the father of magic realism for his influence on García Márquez, Cortázar, and Calvino—was fond of dimly lit rooms, veils, hats in general, and the way blind people strike matches. Full Story

Powell's Books:
Lands of Memory