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Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the August 6th issue include:


My Hollywood, by Mona Simpson. Knopf. Print length: 320 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "A character as rich as Lola won't easily fade from anyone's mind." Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $14.82. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"...Simpson tells a blistering story of fractured love and flailing parents. Claire, a composer and new mother, has moved to Santa Monica, Calif., so that her husband, Paul, can follow his dreams of becoming a TV comedy writer. When Paul’s job requires late nights, Claire, already overwhelmed with balancing motherhood and career, hires Lola, a middle-aged Filipina, to help with her son, William, and soon Lola’s trying to plug holes in Claire and Paul’s slowly sinking family ship. Claire and Lola narrate in alternating chapters; fragile and sometimes fierce Claire deploys a biting wit that shreds the pretensions that permeate her social life and her marriage, while Lola is more open-hearted and eager to help people, though she also draws laughs with her observations about wealthy families. The story both satirizes and earnestly assesses the failings of upper-middle-class L.A., and Simpson’s taut prose allows her to drill into the heart of relationships, often times with a single biting sentence." - Publishers Weekly.

I Curse the River of Time, by Per Petterson. Graywolf Press. Print length: 224 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...there's no denying the novel's Raymond Carver-like power..." Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $10.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Europe 1989. As communism crumbles, 37-year-old Norwegian Arvid Jansen’s life is falling apart. He’s getting a divorce, and his mother is dying of cancer. She’s traveled to her native Denmark, where she plans to live out her days. Though mother and son shared a passion for books, they were never close, and Arvid follows her there in one last attempt to connect. This is also the land of his childhood, and every place he goes triggers memories. He indulges recollections of past loves, beach vacations with his brothers, and time spent as a young Communist working in a factory... Norwegian novelist Petterson (Out Stealing Horses, 2007) deftly alternates between present and past, as Arvid searches for purpose in his life." - Allison Block for Booklist.

Composed, by Rosanne Cash. Viking. Print length: 256 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "Rare is the celebrity memoir that is so full of self-awareness and dignity." Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Cash writes compellingly about her upbringing in Southern California as the child of country legend Johnny Cash, and of her relationships with her mother and her famous stepmother, June Carter Cash. In her account of her development as an artist she shares memories of a hilarious stint as a twenty-year-old working for Columbia Records in London; recording her own first album on a German label; working her way to success; her marriage to Rodney Crowell, a union that made them Nashville's premier couple; her relationship with the country music establishment; taking a new direction in her music and leaving Nashville to move to New York; motherhood; dealing with the deaths of her parents, in part through music; the process of songwriting; and the fulfillment she has found with her current husband and musical collaborator, John Leventhal." - Amazon.

Strangers at the Feast, by Jennifer Vanderbes. Scribner. Print length: 352 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...plot machinations and excessively self-sabotaging characters ultimately sour the Feast." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (3 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"On Thanksgiving Day 2007, as the country teeters on the brink of a recession, three generations of the Olson family gather. Eleanor and Gavin worry about their daughter, a single academic, and her newly adopted Indian child, and about their son, who has been caught in the imploding real-estate bubble. While the Olsons navigate the tensions and secrets that mark their relationships, seventeen-year-old Kijo Jackson and his best friend Spider set out from the nearby housing projects on a mysterious job. A series of tragic events bring these two worlds ever closer, exposing the dangerously thin line between suburban privilege and urban poverty, and culminating in a crime that will change everyone’s life..." - Amazon.

Percival's Planet, by Michael Byers. Henry Holt. Print length: 432 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...an endearing story of underdogs, both the ragtag crew of astronomers and the tiny celestial body they're hoping to find." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (2 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"...a gloriously expansive view of Depression-era America, from the easy extravagance of the Boston Brahmins to hardscrabble rural life. At its core, this is the story of Clyde Tombaugh, an unassuming Kansas farm kid who achieves international fame for his discovery of Pluto. In addition to Clyde, there is the Harvard crowd that precedes him at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona: Alan Barber, a man of modest background who aspires to the effortless grace of his wealthy colleague, Dick Morrow, and has a crush on Dick's scholarly and daring girlfriend, Florence. Byers connects Clyde's story with a number of riveting and eventually interlinking subplots, among them an archeological dig run by the wealthy Felix DuPrie, who has turned his back on the family business to try his hand at unearthing dinosaur bones, and the touching tale of Edward Howe, a former professional boxer who pines after his gorgeous and troubled secretary..." - Publishers Weekly.

NEWLY-AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK AND KINDLE EDITIONS:

Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love, and Death in the Kitchen, by Jason Sheehan. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Print length: 368 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "...details for maddening, often absurd, and intermittently satisfying life of a culinary jack-of-all-trades." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (14 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"From his first job scraping trays at a pizzeria at age fifteen, Jason Sheehan worked on the line at all kinds of restaurants: a French colonial and an all-night diner, a crab shack just off the interstate and a fusion restaurant in a former hair salon. Restaurant work, as he describes it in exuberant, sparkling prose, is a way of life in which 'your whole universe becomes a small, hot steel box filled with knives and meat and fire.' The kitchen crew is a fraternity with its own rites: cigarettes in the walk-in freezer, sex in the basement, the wartime urgency of the dinner rush. Cooking is a series of personal challenges, from the first perfectly done mussel to the satisfaction of surgically sliced foie gras. And the kitchen itself, as he tells it, is a place in which life’s mysteries are thawed, sliced, broiled, barbecued, and fried..." - Amazon.

The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Print length: 304 p. NONFICTION. EW's slant: "...deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (79 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it the surge. 'Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences,' he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them.
Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel was with them in Bagdad, and almost every grueling step of the way." - Amazon.