GalleyCat Reviews

Here are some handpicked titles from our New Books section. Want to include your book? Just read our Facebook Your New or Upcoming Book post. Don’t forget to include your title’s exact release date and a link.

Into This World by Sybil Baker: ”On the day Allison Morehouse walks off her job, her sister Mina calls from Korea, frantic and in tears. Determined to discover the truth about her adopted sister, Allison flies to Seoul, yet Mina—and Korea—are nothing like Allison imagines. Over the next three months, Allison and Mina will unearth thirty years of family secrets—and Allison will discover in Mina the sister she never embraced and in herself, the stronger woman she can be.” (May 2012)

Daemons in the Mist by Alicia Kat Dillman: ”Seventeen year old Patrick Connolly has been hopelessly infatuated with Nualla for years but he is all but invisible to her. Until, that is, he rescues her from a confrontation with her ex. Little does Patrick know he’s just set off a dangerous chain reaction that will thrust him into a world of life altering secrets and things that shouldn’t exist, because the fog and mist of San Francisco is concealing more than just buildings.” (May 2012)

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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Here are some handpicked titles from our New Books section. Want to include your book? Just read our Facebook Your New or Upcoming Book post. Don’t forget to include your title’s exact release date and a link.

Simon Vector by Jak Holding: ”When Zodiac Battle Systems sends an investigator to Alpha Draconis, Ana Bolo is no less a prisoner than the cannibals, serial rapists, and mass murderers this frozen hell confines. Tasked to learn the fate of a secret project once concealed within the bowels of the prison, her corporate masters will kill her if she fails. But as she hunts for clues left behind by the suicidal genius, Doctor Thaddeus Kong, she realizes that Kong’s increasingly erratic logs point to a more sinister truth.” (April 2012)

Matinicus: An Island Mystery by Darcy Scott: ”Steeped in Maine island lore, this century-spanning double mystery pits a renegade fishing community against an unhappy child-bride of the 1820s, a defiant twenty-first-century teen, and a hard-drinking botanist—Dr. Gil Hodges—who escapes to the island of Matinicus to avoid a crazed ex-lover and verify a rumored 22 species of wild orchid, only to find himself hounded by the ghost of a child some two-hundred years dead. If Gil’s hoping for peace and quiet, he’s clearly come to the wrong place.” (May 2012)

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What is the worst book you’ve ever read?

Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic and author Michael Dirda held an epic “Ask Me Anything” interview at Reddit, fielding questions online from readers about self-publishing, Amazon and the worst books he ever reviewed.

At one point, he talked about the worst book he’d ever read. Check it out: “Judith Krantz‘s Dazzle. Even the sex in the book was boilerplate, a totally meretricious work. John Sutherland–a distinguished English authority on the novel and the best seller–once included Dazzle in his list of the 25 worst novels of the century.”

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You can read all the online book reviews in the world, but nothing beats real-world conversations between readers and authors.

In an ongoing effort to build community among readers, writers, and publishing types in real life, we are hosting our next Mediabistro Book Club on May 16, 2012 from 6:30 until 8:30 pm at Stone Creek Bar & Lounge in Manhattan.

Follow this link to RSVP for the free party. Our featured authors include:

Susie DeFord, Dogs of Brooklyn
Jane Hodges, Rent Vs. Own: A Real Estate Reality Check for Navigating Booms, Busts, and Bad Advice
Jillian Medoff, I Couldn’t Love You More

We’ve collected the books debuting on Indiebound’s Indie Bestseller List for the week ending May 13, 2012–a sneak peek at the books everybody will be talking about next month.

(Debuted at #2 in Hardcover Fiction) In One Person by John Irving: “In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a ‘sexual suspect,’ a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 in his landmark novel of ‘terminal cases,’ The World According to Garp.” (May 2012)

(Debuted at #3 in Hardcover Fiction) Home by Toni Morrison: “Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he’s hated all his life.” (May 2012)

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The New Yorker has relaunched its literary blog with a new name and logo: Page-Turner.

The new blog will expand the work of the Book Bench, the magazine’s old books site. “Daily essays will be the blog’s mainstay, with books as an anchor for wide-ranging cultural comment,” explained the introductory post.

Check it out: “Our first day features an essay by Salman Rushdie on the spectre of censorship; a dissenting view on the immortality of “Death of a Salesman,” by Giles Harvey; Mary Norris on the subtle marvellousness of the medieval thorn; and Nick Thompson on the risks of the running life. Check back for interviews with fiction writers, staff reading lists, literary Shouts & Murmurs, cool-headed rants, barely checked enthusiasms, good-natured persiflage, and, with luck, lots of soft owls flying over the lane.”

Here are some handpicked titles from our New Books section. Want to include your book? Just read our Facebook Your New or Upcoming Book post. Don’t forget to include your title’s exact release date and a link.

The Great Peace by Ryan George Kittleman: “A small American city is under siege. A group of starving artists – led by a reclusive, sweatpants-wearing billionaire – is determined to overthrow the government by any means necessary. With little hope for peace, a neurotic young gadabout, fresh off a failed suicide attempt, takes it upon himself to save his hometown from ruin.” (May 2012)

City of Spirits by Eric Wilde: “It’s Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and French Quarter sleuth Wyatt Thomas is dealing with a new client and a very old curse. Wyatt Thomas returns in City of Spirits, the sequel to Eric Wilder’s popular hard-boiled mystery Big Easy. Get ready for a ride!” (May 2012)

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We’ve collected the books debuting on Indiebound’s Indie Bestseller List for the week ending May 06, 2012–a sneak peek at the books everybody will be talking about next month.

(Debuted at #1 in Hardcover Fiction) Deadlocked by Charlaine Harris: “Growing up with telepathic abilities, Sookie Stackhouse realized early on there were things she’d rather not know. And now that she’s an adult, she also realizes that some things she knows about, she’d rather not see—like Eric Northman feeding off another woman. A younger one.” (May 2012)

Debuted at #1 in Hardcover Nonfiction) The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro: “follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career—1958 to 1964.  It is a time that would see him trade the extraordinary power he had created for himself as Senate Majority Leader for what became the wretched powerlessness of a Vice President in an administration that disdained and distrusted him.”

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We’ve collected the books debuting on Indiebound’s Indie Bestseller List for the week ending April 29, 2012–a sneak peek at the books everybody will be talking about next month.

(Debuted at #1 in Hardcover Fiction) The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King: “Roland Deschain and his ka-tet—Jake, Susannah, Eddie, and Oy, the billy-bumbler—encounter a ferocious storm just after crossing the River Whye on their way to the Outer Baronies. As they shelter from the howling gale, Roland tells his friends not just one strange story but two . . . and in so doing, casts new light on his own troubled past.” (April 2012)

(Debuted at #2 in Hardcover Nonfiction) Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake by Anna Quindlen: “From childhood memories to manic motherhood to middle age, Quindlen uses the events of her own life to illuminate our own. Along with the downsides of age, she says, can come wisdom, a perspective on life that makes it satisfying and even joyful.” (April 2012)

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Here are some handpicked titles from our New Books section. Want to include your book? Just read our Facebook Your New or Upcoming Book post. Don’t forget to include your title’s exact release date and a link.

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage by Marly Youmans: “A bright, unusual boy who is disillusioned at a young age, Pip believes that he sees guilt shining in the faces of men wherever he goes. On his picaresque journey, he sweeps through society, revealing the highest and lowest in human nature and only slowly coming to self-understanding.” (March 2012)

What Happened to Tom by Christopher Taffen: ”An allegorical horror story. A psychological/philosophical thriller. A must-read for every man.” (April 2012)

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