Category: Upcoming

A new, daily feature, listing the day's most notable new releases. The links below, for informational purposes, take you to Amazon.com, though you might want to consider purchasing elsewhere.

Honeymoon
by James Patterson & Howard Roughan

Monochrome: Art Of The Single Colour
by Barbara Rose

In Fond Remembrance of Me
by Howard Norman

Aunt Lettuce, I Want to Peek Under Your Skirt
by Charles Simic & Howie Michels

While the popularity of reality TV has leveled off, the tell-all book continues to attract attention. The latest addition to the genre? Former Simon & Schuster MD Nick Webb's The Dictionary of Bullshit, described by PN Online as "a book which mocks the corporate culture prevalent in many companies - including that of his former employers."

"There was no sign of a bidding frenzy from the big boys," Webb commented, "but I'm chuffed about [Robson Books'] Jeremy because he is a pleasant bloke who understands what I was getting at." But, whether or not Americans will relate to what someone who says "bloke" calls bullshit, Webb's agent provides GC with its best quote of the day so far:

... Jonathan Lloyd, MD of Curtis Brown, also seems to understand it - at any rate, he was more encouraging about the book's prospects than he was about Webb's still-unsold polemic in defence of atheism, apparently commenting: "I think bullshit is more salable than God."

(John, you listening?)

Via mb's Revolving Door: Kara Jesella, beauty and health director at Teen Vogue, is leaving her position to write a book about Sassy magazine with freelancer Marisa Meltzer for Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

How the hell, GC wonders, has this book not been written already? If there was one teen magazine aimed at the awkward, impressionable, aspiring writer, it was Sassy. If there was one magazine teaching teens wit as self-defense, making an entire generation of defensive girls verbally voracious, it was Sassy. If there was one magazine capable of being recalled as fondly as a first car, it was, blah blah blah -- that gateway drug to counter-culture and Urban Outfitters, Sassy.

UPDATE: Here's the deal report, via PM:

Beauty and health director of Teen Vogue Kara Jesella and freelance writer Marisa Meltzer's HOW SASSY CHANGED MY LIFE, paying tribute to the influential teen magazine that brought feminism to a generation of girls who couldn't find themselves in Seventeen, and who were as interested in the world around them as they were in the cute guy in study hall, a celebration of all things Sassy, to Denise Oswald at Faber, by Paula Balzer at Sarah Lazin Books (world English).

If you're not a fan of the sports section, you may have missed this week's biggest book news. The NY Daily News broke the story Sunday, reporting that Jose Canseco's soon-to-be-released memoir, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big, "claims [Canseco] introduced steroids to the game and injected fellow Bash Brother Mark McGwire in the rear end numerous times in clubhouse bathroom stalls."

He also describes watching disgraced Yankee slugger Jason Giambi and McGwire injecting each other when they both played with the Oakland A's, and says he personally taught All-Star and potential Hall of Famers Ivan (Pudge) Rodriguez, Rafael Palmeiro and Juan Gonzalez to use 'roids after he was traded to the Texas Rangers in 1992.

Palmeiro's agent, Fernando Cuza, wasted no time responding to the allegations, calling Canseco a "train wreck" in Newsday. Cuza continued: "If he could have named the pope and the president, he'd probably have named them, too."

As Cuza may have known, Canseco does, in fact, name the president, claiming that George W. Bush -- the Rangers' general managing partner in the early '90s -- must have been aware of his players' steroid use but "did nothing about it."

The NY Daily News goes on to describe the book as "an homage to steroids"; "Canseco says that he not only used them, but that all players should." In a follow-up report, the Daily News adds that the "swollen ex-slugger" predicts steroids and human growth hormone "will eventually be decriminalized and help people lead longer, healthier and sexier lives."

Scheduled for a Feb. 21 release, Juiced "is still being edited," the Daily News reports. Today's New York Times, however, reports that ReganBooks ("HarperCollins," according to the Times) plans to take advantage of this "burst of publicity" by moving the release date up to Feb. 14 -- Canseco's Valentine's day gift, no doubt, to Major League Baseball's publicists.

NEW YORK, Feb. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, announced today that it will publish A DEADLY GAME: The Untold Story of the Scott Peterson Investigation, by award-winning journalist, former judge, and legal analyst Catherine Crier with Cole Thompson.

... "A DEADLY GAME is the definitive account of this complex and disturbing case," said Judith Regan, President and Publisher of ReganBooks. "Catherine Crier's reporting goes far deeper than all previous journalistic treatments, offering countless new revelations into both Scott Peterson and the investigation that brought him to justice."

A DEADLY GAME is scheduled to go on sale on March 11, 2005.

This doesn't read as a vote of confidence in Regan's other recently-announced-definitive-account, Blood Brother: 33 Reasons My Brother, Scott Peterson, Is Guilty, set to go on sale March 1. It does, though, read as confidence in America's love for "more": 33 reasons? Why have 33 reasons when you can have 34?

As ReganBooks' Witness claims its fourth week on bestseller charts, the HarperCollins imprint announces yet another release about Scott and Laci Peterson, this time around by Anne Bird, Scott's half-sister. According to the press release,

Bird, who was put up for adoption at birth, was reunited with her biological mother, Jackie Latham Peterson, and her brother, Scott, in 1997. In her book she reveals, in shocking and riveting detail, the untold story of Scott, Laci, and the Peterson family.

Assigned the ridiculously double-entendre title Blood Brother, and subtitled "33 Reasons My Brother, Scott Peterson, Is Guilty," the book hits bookstore March 1. As for ReganBook's marketing strategy, Senior Director of Publicity Paul Olsewski gave GC a stiff "No comment."

The bigger question, though, is whether Blood Brother will enjoy Witness's wild success (119,000 copies sold and counting). According to Slate, probably not; Frey "has become a stand-in for the case's real saint, Laci Peterson," the online mag theorizes. And such simplistic transference requires the matching simplicity of a love triangle, not the complexity of a family saga.