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A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS has finally been knocked out of first position this month by John Grisham’s PLAYING FOR PIZZA about an American footballer joining the Italian football team—a rather bizarre tradeoff. Weirdly, Grisham’s novel doesn’t appear on the L.A. Times’ list and does appear on Booksense, a list usually reserved for less mainstream titles. PLAYING FOR PIZZA is Grisham’s first non-mystery/thriller book in quite a while, basing the sports novel on a true story of getting paid with food. BRIDGE OF SIGHS by Richard Russo has appeared on the NYT and Booksense lists, six years after his last novel, EMPIRE FALLS. While I haven’t had a chance to read THE WHORE’S CHILD, his first short story collection published in 2002, I’m excited to see the reviews of BRIDGE roll out. Mixed in with the expected bestselling authors are a few new names: GARDEN SPELLS by Sarah Addison Allen, and THE SEPTEMBERS OF SHIRAZ by Dalia Sofer are both debuts. THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WOA by Junot Diaz is his first full-length novel, though Diaz has previously published numerous short stories in highly respectable literary journals. CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTIN ADDICT is also Laurie Viera Rigler’s first novel after coauthoring a film guide with Richard Roeper and a book of marriage proposals with literary agent Sheree Bykofsky. Most of the L.A. Times’ titles are reminiscent of last month with Chabon, Maupin, and Patterson’s THE QUICKIE. Meanwhile, Patterson’s even more recent book, YOU’VE BEEN WARNED, has already shot up to number three on the NYT list. It’s surprising to see Booksense’s bestseller list mimic the NYT’s list so much, with the L.A. Times spinning off in another direction entirely. Perhaps this is an indication that even the hippies that shop at independent bookstores are obsessed with James Patterson and that California is perpetually oblivious of the rest of the nation. I kid. Check out A.O. Scott from the International Herald Tribune and his review of THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO: The hero of Junot Díaz's first novel is an overweight Dominican-American man named Oscar, a "ghetto nerd" from Paterson, N.J., and a devotee of what he somewhat grandly calls "the more speculative genres." He means comic books, sword-and-sorcery novels, science fiction, role-playing games - the pop-literary storehouse of myths and fantasies that sexually frustrated, socially maladjusted guys like him are widely believed to inhabit. But of course an awful lot of serious young-to-middle-aged novelists (Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon) hang around there as well, lingering over the narratives that fed their childhood imaginations in order to infuse their ambitious, difficult stories with some of the allegorical pixie dust and epic grandiloquence the genres offer. In "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," Diaz, the author of a book of sexy, diamond-sharp stories called "Drown," shows impressive high-low dexterity, flashing his geek credentials, his street wisdom and his literary learning with equal panache. A short epigraph from the Fantastic Four is balanced by a longer one from Derek Walcott; allusions to "Dune," "The Matrix" and (especially) "The Lord of the Rings" rub up against references to Melville and Garcia Marquez. Oscar's nickname is a Spanglish pronunciation of Oscar Wilde, whom he is said to resemble when dressed up in his Doctor Who costume for Halloween. "What more sci-fi than Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles?" Oscar wonders. And the question of how to take account of his ancestral homeland - its folklore, its politics, the diaspora that brought so many of its inhabitants to North Jersey and Upper Manhattan - is one that explicitly preoccupies Oscar's creator. The way Díaz tells it, the Dominican Republic, which occupies the Spanish-speaking half of the island where Columbus made landfall, is the kind of small country that suffers from a surfeit of history. From the start, it has been a breeding ground for outsize destinies and monstrous passions. Diaz's novel also has a wild, capacious spirit, making it feel much larger than it is. Within its relatively compact span, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" contains an unruly multitude of styles and genres. The tale of Oscar's coming-of-age is in some ways the book's thinnest layer, a young-adult melodrama draped over a multigenerational immigrant family chronicle that dabbles in tropical magic realism, punk-rock feminism, hip-hop machismo, post-postmodern pyrotechnics and enough polymorphous multiculturalism to fill up an Introduction to Cultural Studies syllabus. Holding all this together - just barely, but in the end effectively - is a voice that is profane, lyrical, learned and tireless, a riot of accents and idioms coexisting within a single personality. The voice belongs, for the most part, to Yunior, who only gradually slides from behind the curtain of apparently omniscient narration to reveal himself as a character. He's Oscar's sometime roommate at Rutgers, the would-be boyfriend of Oscar's sister, Lola, and in just about every imaginable way Oscar's opposite. While Oscar favors the stilted, thesaurus-fed diction of the fantasy-nerd autodidact ("I think she's orchidaceous"), Yunior affects a bilingual b-boy flow, punctuated by bouts of didacticism. And while Oscar falls madly and chastely in love with a succession of not-quite-attainable women, Yunior is a chronic womanizer. Though Yunior is, like Oscar, an aspiring writer, his preferred genres are more hard-boiled, "all robberies and drug deals and ... BLAU! BLAU! BLAU!" "To say I'd never in my life met a Dominican like him would be to put it mildly," Yunior explains, and in creating Oscar, Diaz has used one stereotype to subvert another. Not all Dominican men are macho peacocks, and not all sci-fi, anime and Dungeons Dragons fanatics are white boys. That this may be an obvious point doesn't diminish the skill and flair with which Diaz brings it home. But "The Brief Wondrous Life" isn't Oscar's story alone. Indeed, he often seems like a bit of an exile in the book that bears his name. The recounting of his thwarted romances, his suicide attempt, his friendships and his literary projects is interrupted - and overshadowed - by episodes of family history that reverse the migratory path from the D.R. to the U.S.A. and concentrate on the women in Oscar's family. His sister, a punk rocker, runaway and track star, is in many ways a more vivid and magnetic character than her brother, as is their mother, Beli, whose remarkable biography forms the novel's true narrative backbone. In Baní, the provincial Dominican city where she was raised, Beli was a dark-skinned beauty, a scholarship girl at a fancy private school and eventually the lover of a notorious criminal. Her son's painful, familiar passage into adulthood is set against her own transformation, shown in reverse. When we first see her, she is an angry, borderline-abusive immigrant matriarch, fighting with her daughter and furiously wearing herself out with work and worry. But later chapters show Beli as a rebellious daughter in her own right, struggling with La Inca, the poor yet respectable relative in whose home she was raised. Beli's parents - a doctor and a nurse, as La Inca never tires of reminding her - were members of the bourgeoisie who fell afoul of Rafael Trujillo, an impressively brutal dictator, even by mid-20th-century Latin American standards. As Díaz puts it in a footnote: "At first glance, he was just your typical Latin American caudillo, but his power was terminal in ways that few historians or writers have ever truly captured or, I would argue, imagined. He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator."And for just this reason Trujillo proves to be a great boon for Díaz, who washes the cities and villages of his country in the 1940s and '50s in a period ambience that's violent as well as sensual and exotic. The island may be cursed and haunted, but it's also enchanted; even the bitterest memories seem softened by nostalgia. The evil spirits that are periodically invoked to explain Oscar's family's bad luck are also, for the novelist if not for his characters, lucky charms.
Read the rest of the article here. New York Times Hardcover Fiction: 1 PLAYING FOR PIZZA, by John Grisham. (Doubleday, $21.95.) An American third-string quarterback joins the Italian National Football League’s Parma Panthers. Agent: David Gernert | The Gernert Company 2 THE CHOICE, by Nicholas Sparks. (Grand Central, $24.99.) How the choices made by a North Carolina man and the neighbor with whom he falls in love play out in their lives; from the author of “At First Sight.” Agent: Theresa Park | Park Literary Group 3 YOU’VE BEEN WARNED, by James Patterson and Howard Roughan. (Little, Brown, $27.99.) An aspiring photographer working as a nanny has terrible visions. Agent: Robert Barnett | Williams & Connolly 4 A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS, by Khaled Hosseini. (Riverhead, $25.95.) A friendship between two women in Afghanistan against the backdrop of 30 years of war. Agent: Elaine Koster | Elaine Koster Agency 5 SHOOT HIM IF HE RUNS, by Stuart Woods. (Putnam, $25.95.) Stone Barrington, the New York cop turned lawyer, tracks a rogue C.I.A. agent on a Caribbean island. Agent: Anne Sibbald | Janklow & Nesbit 6 BRIDGE OF SIGHS, by Richard Russo. (Knopf, $26.95.) The entangled lives of an upstate New York couple and their best friend, from the author of “Empire Falls.” Agent: Nat Sobel | Sobel Weber Associates 7 THE ORC KING, by R. A. Salvatore. (Wizards of the Coast, $27.95.) The dark elf Drizzt Do’Urden seeks vengeance against the orcs in the first book of a new fantasy trilogy, Transitions. Agency: The Wylie Agency 8 RUN, by Ann Patchett. (Harper, $25.95.) Two young black men, adopted in childhood by the former mayor of Boston, encounter their birth mother and sister; from the author of “Bel Canto.” Agent: Lisa Bankoff | ICM 9 DEAD HEAT, by Dick Francis and Felix Francis. (Putnam, $25.95.) Someone is out to destroy a young chef’s New-market restaurant, poisoning food and setting off a bomb. Agent: Sterling Lord | Sterling Lord Literistic 10 MAKING MONEY, by Terry Pratchett. (Harper, $25.95.) In this Discworld fantasy, Moist von Lipwig takes over Ankh-Morpork’s Royal Mint. Agent: Ralph Vicinanza | Ralph Vicinanza 11 THE BONE GARDEN, by Tess Gerritsen. (Ballantine, $25.95.) A woman finds a skull in her garden, while in the 1830s, a medical student tracks a killer. Agent: Meg Ruley | Jane Rotrosen Agency 12 GARDEN SPELLS, by Sarah Addison Allen. (Bantam, $20.) Two sisters overcome their differences and claim their heritage when one returns to their North Carolina home. Agent: Andrea Cirillo, Kelly Harms | Jane Rotrosen Agency 13 PONTOON, by Garrison Keillor. (Viking, $25.95.) After the death of a good Lutheran lady in Lake Wobegon, her daughter learns about her secret life. Agent: Ellen Levine | Trident Media Group 14 JONATHAN’S STORY, by Julia London with Alina Ad-ams. (Pocket, $22.) The story behind Jonathan’s disappearance, based on the TV daytime drama “Guiding Light.” Agent: Meredith Bernstien | Meredith Bernstein Literary Agency 15 THE WHEEL OF DARKNESS, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. (Warner, $25.99.) F.B.I. agent Aloysius Pendergast helps recover a stolen Tibetan relic with evil powers. Agent: Eric Simonoff | Janklow & Nesbit Los Angeles Times Fiction: 1.A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead: $25.95) Two Afghan women struggle to survive jihad, civil war and Taliban tyranny. 2.Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic: $34.99) Harry's final quest to rout the forces of evil arrayed against him. Agent: Christopher Little | Christopher Little Agency 3.Spook Country by William Gibson (Putnam: $25.95) A writer's pursuit of a story about celebrity death scenes takes a cyber-turn for the worse. Agent: Martha Millard | Martha Millard Literary Agency 4.The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster: $26) The line between survival and criminality is blurred in post-Katrina New Orleans. Agent: Philip Spitzer | Philip Spitzer Agency 5.The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins: $26.95) Murder mystery meets alternate history in an Alaska gone Yiddish. Agent: Mary Evans | Mary Evans 6.The Burnt House by Faye Kellerman (William Morrow: $25.95) When a commuter jet crashes into an apartment building, terrorism is suspected. Agent: Carrie Feron | William Morrow 7.Sandworms of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson (Tor Books: $27.95) Humankind makes a last stand against the machine empire of Omnius. Agent: John Silbersack, Robert Gottlieb | Trident Media Group 8.The Secret Servant by Daniel Silva (Putnam: $25.95) Israeli intelligence agent Gabriel Allon seeks a young woman kidnapped by terrorists. Agent: Esther Newberg | ICM 9.The Quickie by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge (Little, Brown: $27.99) A detective with a cheating husband is caught in a web of revenge. 10.No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July (Scribner: $23) Short stories explore seduction, romance and the search for acceptance. Agent: Sarah Chalfant | The Wylie Agency 11.On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: $22) A couple face a cruel reality on their wedding night. Agent: Georges Borchardt | Georges Borchardt 12.Devil May Cry by Sherrilyn Kenyon (St. Martin's Press: $19.95) An ancient war god puts aside his grudge and joins forces with Artemis to save humanity. Agent: Julie Culver | Lowenstein-Yost 13.The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer (Ecco: $24.95) A Jewish gem trader's family struggles after he is jailed by Iran's Revolutionary Guard. Agent: David McCormick | McCormick & Williams Literary Agency 14.Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin (HarperCollins: $25.95) The sweet-spirited Southerner of "Tales of the City" returns, an older and wiser man. Agent: Amanda Urban | ICM 15.Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler (Dutton: $24.95) A Jane Austen fan awakes to find herself in an English manor in 1831. Agent: Marly Rusoff | Marly Rusoff & Associates Booksense Hardcover Fiction 1. A Thousand Splendid Suns
By Hosseini, Khaled
Splendid characters and plot indeed, once again set in Afghanistan, by the author of the wondrous The Kite Runner. A June Book Sense Pick. 2. Playing for Pizza
By Grisham, John
An American footballer takes his game to Italy. 3. Run
By Patchett, Ann
An intimate domestic drama that touches on the big themes of our day, form the author of Bel Canto. A Book Sense Pick. 4. Bridge of Sighs
By Russo, Richard
Unforgettable portrait of vanishing small-town America, from its poet laureate. A Book Sense Pick. 5. The Choice
By Sparks, Nicholas
A new moving love story from the bestselling Sparks. 6. Pontoon
By Keillor, Garrison
Top-notch Lake Wobegon homespun fun. 7. Away
By Bloom, Amy
An extraordinary trek across America, and through unsentimental emotional landscapes. Agent: Phyllis Wender | Rosenstone/Wender 8. Fire in the Blood
By Nemirovsky, Irene
This gem was newly discovered among the papers of the author of Suite Française. Agent: Joe Spieler | The Spieler Agency 9. You've Been Warned
By Patterson, James/ Roughan, Howard
A New York nanny becomes involved in a thrilling nightmare. 10. Exit Ghost
By Roth, Philip
Zuckerman returns, only to exit for good? A Book Sense Pick. Agent: Andrew Wylie | The Wylie Agency 11. Dead Heat
By Francis, Dick/ Francis, Felix
Father and son join forces to write about a mysterious day at the races. 12. Loving Frank
By Horan, Nancy
This fictionalized account of Mamah Borthwick Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright is an August 2007 Book Sense Pick. Agent: Lisa Bankoff | ICM 13. Making Money
By Pratchett, Terry
A Book Sense Notable romp through Discworld. 14. Shoot Him If He Runs
By Woods, Stuart
Stone Barrington and Holly Barker search for a rogue CIA agent. 15. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
By Diaz, Junot
There's been major critical acclaim for this sci-fi journey from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. and back.
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