Comprar Con Nosotros

Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the July 22nd issue include:

Stone Arabia, by Dana Spiotta. Scribner, 2011. Print length: 256 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...another movingly fab narrative; it's as though Nabokov had writtten a rock novel." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (2 reviews). Kindle edition $10.99; Hardcover $13.20. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"Dana Spiotta’s moving and intrepid third novel, is about family, obsession, memory, and the urge to create - in isolation, at the margins of our winner-take-all culture. In the sibling relationship, 'there are no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other,' says Denise Kranis. For her and her brother, Nik, now in their forties, no relationship is more significant. They grew up in Los Angeles in the late seventies and early eighties. Nik was always the artist, always wrote music, always had a band. Now he makes his art in private, obsessively documenting the work, but never testing it in the world. Denise remains Nik’s most passionate and acute audience, sometimes his only audience. She is also her family’s first defense against the world’s fragility. Friends die, their mother’s memory and mind unravel, and the news of global catastrophe and individual tragedy haunts Denise. When her daughter, Ada, decides to make a film about Nik, everyone’s vulnerabilities seem to escalate." - Amazon.

Thick as Thieves, by Peter Spiegelman. Knopf, 2011. Print length: 320 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...well-constructed crime thriller...a complex, satisfying tale." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (26 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99; Hardcover $15.32. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"A new thriller that takes us inside a hair-raising heist, where paranoia hangs as heavy as the tropical heat, and the only law is Murphy’s. Carr - ex-CIA - is the reluctant leader of an elite crew planning a robbery of such extraordinary proportions that it will leave them all set for life. Diamonds, money-laundering, and extortion go into a timed-to-the-minute scheme that unfurls across South America, Miami, and Grand Cayman Island. Carr’s cohorts are seasoned pros, but they’re wound drum-tight: months before, the man who brought them together was killed in what Carr suspects was a setup. And there are other loose ends... Terrifically suspenseful and psychologically complex, Thick as Thieves is a rare, penetrating look into the sophisticated machinations of an unparalleled crime, and Peter Spiegelman’s most accomplished and galvanizing novel yet." - Publisher.

A Dance with Dragons, by George R. R. Martin. Bantam, 2011. Print Length: 1040 p. FANTASY. EW's slant: "By turns thrilling, funny, scary, emotionally devastating, oddly inspirational, and just plain grand..." Amazon customer rating: 3 stars (273 reviews). Kindle edition $14.99; Hardcover $18.81. Text-to-Speech: Enabled. This is book five in Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series which began with A Game of Thrones.

"In the aftermath of a colossal battle, the future of the Seven Kingdoms hangs in the balance - beset by newly emerging threats from every direction. In the east, Daenerys Targaryen, the last scion of House Targaryen, rules with her three dragons as queen of a city built on dust and death. But Daenerys has thousands of enemies, and many have set out to find her. As they gather, one young man embarks upon his own quest for the queen, with an entirely different goal in mind. From all corners, bitter conflicts reignite, intimate betrayals are perpetrated, and a grand cast of outlaws and priests, soldiers and skinchangers, nobles and slaves, will face seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Some will fail, others will grow in the strength of darkness. But in a time of rising restlessness, the tides of destiny and politics will lead inevitably to the greatest dance of all." - from the hardcover edition.

A Death in Summer, by Benjamin Black. Henry Holt and Co., 2011. Print length: 320 p. THRILLER. EW's slant: "The prose sparkles, as always...It's still a good show, but there appears to be much more misdirection than real direction. Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $11.99; Hardcover $15.26. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"On a sweltering summer afternoon, newspaper tycoon Richard Jewell - known to his many enemies as Diamond Dick - is discovered with his head blown off by a shotgun blast. But is it suicide or murder? For help with the investigation, Detective Inspector Hackett calls in his old friend Quirke, who has unusual access to Dublin's elite. Jewell's coolly elegant French wife, Françoise, seems less than shocked by her husband's death. But Dannie, Jewell's high-strung sister, is devastated, and Quirke is surprised to learn that in her grief she has turned to an unexpected friend: David Sinclair, Quirke's ambitious assistant in the pathology lab at the Hospital of the Holy Family. Further, Sinclair has been seeing Quirke's fractious daughter Phoebe, and an unlikely romance is blossoming between the two. As a record heat wave envelops the city and the secret deals underpinning Diamond Dick's empire begin to be revealed, Quirke and Hackett find themselves caught up in a dark web of intrigue and violence that threatens to end in disaster." - Amazon.

The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities , by Katharine Weber. crown, 2011. Print length: 288 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "...less a family memoir than a family biography. Which is good, because Weber's kin are more than fascinating enough to stand on their own without the embellishments of personal memory." Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $11.99; Hardcover $15.11. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Novelist Weber is the granddaughter of Broadway composer Kay Swift, who was married to banker James Warburg and had a romantic liaison with George Gershwin. Weber considers her family history to examine how the past affects the present. Much of the book concerns the author's dysfunctional relationships with her father, Sidney Kaufman, and mother, Andrea Warburg. Along the way, Weber describes a host of eccentric characters, from Zero Mostel to Ezra Pound, and her discovery of the past through FBI files on her father...A thoroughly engaging family memoir." - Bruce R. Schueneman for Library Journal.

The Devil All the Time, by Donald Ray Pollock. Doubleday, 2011. Print length: 272 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...unrepentantly dark debut novel about sexual violence, emotional violence, and plain old violence violence." Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $13.99; Hardcover $14.82. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"...an exceptionally gritty, twisted page-turner. This follow-up to 2008's Knockemstiff is set in the Midwest during the mid-century, but reads more like a gothic Western. Lawlessness roams the rural, god-fearing landscape of Ohio and West Virginia, inhabitated by the likes of Pollock's deranged-yet-compelling cast of characters - a husband and wife who take vacations to murder hitchhikers, a faux preacher and his crippled accomplice on the lam for manslaughter, and an orphan with a penchant for exacting violent justice. Needless to say, The Devil All the Time is a brutal novel, but Pollock exacts the kind of precision and control over his language that keeps the violence from ever feeling gratuitous. The three storylines eventually converge in a riveting moment that will leave readers floored and haunted." - Kevin Nguyen for Amazon.com Review.

The Inverted Forest, by John Dalton. Scribner, 2011. Print length: 336 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...a gripping, tender, and at times disturbing tale...". Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $12.99; Hardcover $16.21. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"Late on a warm summer night in rural Missouri, an elderly camp director hears a squeal of joyous female laughter and goes to investigate. At the camp swimming pool he comes upon a bewildering scene: his counselors stripped naked and engaged in a provocative celebration. The first camp session is set to start in just two days. He fires them all. As a result, new counselors must be quickly hired and brought to the Kindermann Forest Summer Camp. One of them is Wyatt Huddy, a genetically disfigured young man who has been living in a Salvation Army facility. Gentle and diligent, large and imposing, Wyatt suffers a deep anxiety that his intelligence might be subnormal. All his life he’s been misjudged because of his irregular features. But while Wyatt is not worldly, he is also not an innocent. He has escaped a punishing home life with a reclusive and violent older sister. Along with the other new counselors, Wyatt arrives expecting to care for children. To their astonishment, they learn that for the first two weeks of the camping season they will be responsible for 104 severely developmentally disabled adults, all of them wards of the state. Written with scrupulous fidelity to the strong passions running beneath the surface of camp life, The Inverted Forest is filled with yearning, desire, lust, banked hope, and unexpected devotion." - Publisher.
_______________________

Note to readers: The book prices quoted here are the Amazon.com prices in effect at the time of the blog posting. Please follow the links to the individual book to check the current price.