Dear Reader:

Gobbledygook versus Substance, Marty’s June 15 blog, begins by stripping away the optimistic doubletalk coming from Len Riggio, Barnes & Noble’s CEO, goes on to differentiate between the reality and the headlines generated at the recent Book Expo that was held in New York last month,  and concludes by documenting the connections between the greatest crime writer America has ever produced, Elmore Leonard (44 novels to his credit) and Chris Knopf (four novels to his credit, with four more scheduled in 2010/2011), whose career seems to be following a similar path. We hope you will find it of interest.

Speaking of Chris Knopf, his third novel in the Sam Acquillo mystery series, Head Wounds, was awarded the Independent Publishers Association’s Ben Franklin Award for Best Mystery during Book Expo—at the same time as Chris was signing copies of Hard Stop, the fourth in this series, which was released at the same time.

Other successes have had to do with receiving an offer from a Spanish publisher for Daniel Klein’s The History of Now. This is the third sub-right sale for Danny’s wonderful philosophical novel that takes place in a small town in New England—a book that reminded several reviewers of Richard Russo’s fiction—the first sale being made to Blackstone Audiobooks and the second to China.

And then there was the surprise of having Mitch Cullin’s Branches, which we published in 2000 (and was described by Jon Breen, writing in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine as “A chillingly effective novel-in-verse told by a murderous rural Texas sheriff who is bound to remind readers of the narrator of Thompson’s 1952 classic The Killer Inside Me.”) adopted for a course in the novel at the English Department of the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Branches has always been such an unusual cross-over: getting reviewed as a mystery, as poetry, as a literary novel, as well as having been optioned for film for several years by three different producers… with a fourth in waiting. This is truly a novel—and a mystery—that will not die.  

Lastly, there were two excellent advance reviews for Amy Boaz’s second novel, Beat, due in August: a starred review in Kirkus (“Boaz follows her debut—A Richer Dust, 2008— with another finely wrought novel rooted in literary history. Satisfyingly subtle and rich.”), and a fine one in Publishers Weekly (“Boaz's 2008 debut followed a near-deaf painter through three eras of her life; her second novel uses a smaller canvas to draw a convincing picture of a woman caught between stifling domesticity and physical passion, and it all adds up to a compelling picture of love and its attendant travails.” ).

Look for our next update in mid-July.