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The Amazon and Macmillan standoff over eBook prices has almost lasted an entire week, and the online bookseller still has not reactivated the buy direct from Amazon buttons for many of Macmillan’s authors (as of this 4:11 p.m. EST writing). To help these writers stuck in the middle of a corporate struggle, GalleyCat Reviews has rounded up reviews of books from various Macmillan imprints.
First up, the great Jeanette Winterson reviewed The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith Joan Schenkar for the NY Times: “Schenkar has a wonderfully bold approach: not worrying about a linear chronology (although this is meticulously supplied in the appendices), but choosing instead to follow the emotional watercourse of Highsmith’s life, allowing her subject to find her own level–to be tidal, sullen, to flow without check, so that events in one decade naturally make an imaginative tributary into turbulence Âbefore and after.”
Next, here’s a New Yorker review of The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw: “In this wintry fable, Ida Maclaird finds her feet crystallizing into glass … The book is filled with winsome details of ‘this place and its people, as stilted and monochrome as sets and stars of precolor TV.’ But the characters’ naive inner lives, and the novel’s earnest sentimentality, can make the conceit feel as transparent as Ida’s transparent toes.”
Here’s an excerpt from a Library Journal review of Impact by Douglas Preston: “A young woman in Maine sees a meteorite streak through the sky and decides to find the crater. A scientist working on Mars data finds something so startling that he is murdered to keep the information secret … The thriller elements mix well with the science aspects of the story, and the author makes even the hard-to-grasp concepts easy to understand. Most readers will consume this in one sitting; not to be missed.”
Finally, for your weekend reading pleasure, the LA Times reviews Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed by Robert Sellers Dig it: “What you’ve got in this book is an incredibly entertaining series of anecdotes, interspersed with unpretentious and conversational interviews — all about drinking … Most of the stories are outrageously funny, although, like the ones you’re likely to hear from the guy on the next stool at your local, they may be a bit manicured.”
If you want to read more, GalleyCat Reviews has covered these books recently:
Thereby Hangs a Tail by Spencer Quinn
Happy: A Memoir by Alex Lemon
Losing the News by Alex Jones
Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
For the Soul of France by Frederick Brown
