I knew there was something I forgot to include in last week’s BookExpo America coverage…
So, yeah, everybody wanted to get their hands on FSG‘s thick galleys for 2666, the posthumous novel from Roberto Bolaño—in fact, I heard rumors that every single mockup of the three-volume slipcase edition of the 900-page novel that went on display in the FSG booth was swiped by eager readers (who would eventually discover that their ill-gotten gains were filled with blank pages). But what else was there? I have to confess I didn’t spend as much time out on the floor as in years past, so a lot of hoopla probably got past me, but I noticed that FSG was also making a big push for Amitav Ghosh‘s Sea of Poppies, while Harcourt had big stacks of Padma Viswanathan‘s The Toss of a Lemon on hand. (America’s book reviewers being what they are, expect a dozen explanations of how the author isn’t that Viswanathan come September.) Books that were included in the official “buzz” panel, like Brunonia Barry‘s The Lace Reader, were also available in abundance, as were books for which publishers had shelled out huge, huge advances, like Grand Central‘s cat book or Doubleday‘s The Gargoyle.
But, as far as I was concerned, the big score of the weekend was all the way over at the other end of the Los Angeles Convention Center, in the children’s section, where Candlewick Press had copies of The Kingdom on the Waves, the second volume in the National Book Award-winning The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation series. If it’s half as awesome as its predecessor, that’s still a lot of awesome…