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Fall 2011 Religion Listings: Religion's Remedies: Humor, Silence
Penn Gillette's forthcoming atheist screed, GOD, NO! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales, may be a late entry in the does-He-or doesn't-He-exist debate, but it's sure to be freshly funny. Playing counterpoint to the magician-comedian is an author who's entertaining enough to have earned a trip to The Colbert Report.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: Sports: Villains, Heroes, Hunter
Competitive sports triggers many complex emotions—joy mixed with tears, suffering stirred to violence. In the same week in June, hockey fans set fire to cars in the Vancouver streets two nights after a nation of basketball fans in the U.S were introduced to the word "schadenfreude" in the NBA finals, when the Mavs beat the Heat.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: Social Science: Young Americans
As the 2012 presidential campaign begins, it's clear that, for all the talk about fiscal issues, the so-called "culture wars" will figure prominently in selecting who will run—and how they will run—against Barack Obama next November. This season's social science books examine deeply topics of conversation that will soon be bandied about loosely on talk radio, cutting to the core of who we are as Americans, with an especially strong focus on generational issues.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: Science: From Big Questions to the Brain
This season in science brings back familiar voices, those writers who have excited our interest in a wide range of subjects, even those we never knew we cared about, like longitude.
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Fall 2011 Announcements Fiction: Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Horror: Shaking Up the Status Quo
The SF/fantasy/horror category, already a chimera, is budding new subcategories right and left. Many authors and publishers have given up on categorization altogether. Words like "amalgamation" and "blending" and "cross-genre" appear in our reviews with increasing frequency, and readers are eagerly gobbling up these unclassifiable books.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: Fiction: Romance: Damsels Who Rescue Themselves
The newest generation of romance writers is shaking things up. Restless, adventurous, determined heroines are perfectly suited to 21st-century readers, and even those constrained by the rules of Regency society or werewolf packs are finding ways to stand on their own two feet, their romances complementing but never overwhelming the lives they've built for themselves.
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Looking at Fall: Fall 2011 Announcements
Last January, in our spring announcements issue, we debuted the fruits of our new title collection method, a portal hosted by Above the Treeline's Edelweiss system through which publishers entered their own titles according to our specifications, and from which PW editors chose notable and representative titles and wrote essays on their top 10 books to watch in 19 categories.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: Politics: The Unraveling
There's an election year—and the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks—around the corner, but fall's big books are too preoccupied to notice. They're looking East. The mood is wistful; the emphasis is on American vulnerability and waning influence in a changing world; and many books are trying to unravel one central riddle.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: Poetry: Big Little Books
In the spring we saw the release of a handful of retrospective collections—"Selecteds," as we call them—by heavyweight poets like Robert Pinsky and Charles Wright; those kinds of doorstoppers are fun, but there are no new poems in them. In the fall, however, we’ll have slim yet substantial volumes of new poems by a few big names as well as lesser known, but not lesser, writers.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: Performing Arts: Lights! Camera! Stardom!
In the entertainment world, there are myriad performers; there are also stars, and then there are stars—and not all of them are people. Expanding the definition, one could term Facebook a star; likewise, Secretariat; and so, in its high-fat way, McDonald's. Herewith, a cross-section of "stars" in the broadest sense.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: Fiction: Mysteries & Thrillers: A Mix of Homegrown and Foreign Crime
James Sallis, a master of literary noir, serves up a hallucinatory, almost visionary novel of suspense set in Phoenix, Ariz., The Killer Is Dying. Three alienated characters must each deal with tough personal situations, including a hired gun dying from an unspecified disease.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: Music: Flashback—the 1970s, and Before
Novelist Tom Wolfe coined the 1970s "The Me Decade"—responding to 1960s hippie communalism with asserted individualism. And singers and musicians from that decade are certainly voicing themselves now 40 years out.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: Memoir: Tell Me a Story
We all have one. And if you're one of the few, or as it seems these many years now, one of the many, who gets that story published, congratulations, you've joined a group that ranges all over the literary map.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: Literary Fiction: Zombies, Flowers, and Fangs
This fall the dead will walk (down Broadway, no less), a family of flash mobbers will incite unease, convicts will change color, and flowers will talk.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: Literary Essays & Criticism: Literature Still Matters
Two simple phrases are all you need to evoke the absurdity of war and of life: "catch-22" and "So it goes." The two 1960s works that gave us these now-indispensable phrases, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, changed our idea of what a war novel could be: irreverent, caustic, comic, yet brutally realistic. Four years after Vonnegut's death, we have bestselling author (Mockingbird) Charles J. Shields's And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life; the 50th anniversary of Catch-22's publication brings Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller by Donald Barthelme's biographer, Tracy Daugherty.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: Cookbooks: Chefs at Home and at Work
What's on for fall once you get past the predictably fun books by celebrity chefs; the guides for making cupcakes, whoopie pies, handheld pies, and other cute little baked goods; and the still-going-strong barrage of titles about eating less meat? Books about eating more meat, of course—provided that meat is grass-fed, organic, local, and singing "If You're Happy and You Know It" on its way to the slaughterhouse. Beneath all that? Take a look: here come the chefs.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: Comics & Graphic Novels: Classics New and Old
The past five years have been a fertile time for reprints of classics from both the comic strip and comic book worlds. This fall, three of the last great uncollected cartoonists get their moment, and two more recent gems get definitive editions. Also looming: what's expected to be a future classic in Craig Thompson's long-awaited Habibi.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: Business & Economics: Digging Out, Moving Forward
With the American economy simultaneously struggling to recover from the worst recession since the Depression while also grappling with the increased presence of technology in all phases of American life, business books set for the fall reflect the debate on how the country can best move forward.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: Lifestyle: Hipster Diets to Crocheting for Mr. Darcy
Maybe after 2012 you won't have to worry if you're overweight or otherwise unhealthy, since we'll all be enlightened with the coming of a new era of consciousness. But until then, you can knit, try a new diet, or simply read all about the evolution of human awareness.
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Fall 2011 Announcements: History: What Is It About the 15th Century?
Individuals make history through their choices and actions, but together those individual actions add up to forces that change our world. This fall presents a range of stories from the personal to the epic that make history so endlessly fascinating—and one century looks pivotal.
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