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Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the July 8th/July 15th double issue include:

The Last Werewolf, by Glen Duncan. Knopf, 2011. Print length: 304 p. THRILLER. EW's slant: "Can a novel about werewolves be both gorily pulpy and classy? Glen Duncan comes bloodily close in...a surprisingly well-written yarn about a Kant-quoting lycanthrope on the run..." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (32 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99; Hardcover $15.57. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Meet Jake. A bit on the elderly side (he turns 201 in March), but you’d never suspect it. Nonstop sex and exercise will do that for you - and a diet with lots of animal protein. Jake is a werewolf, and after the unfortunate and violent death of his one contemporary, he is now the last of his species. Although he is physically healthy, Jake is deeply distraught and lonely. Jake’s depression has carried him to the point where he is actually contemplating suicide - even if it means terminating a legend thousands of years old. It would seem to be easy enough for him to end everything. But for very different reasons there are two dangerous groups pursuing him who will stop at nothing to keep him alive..." - from the hardcover edition.

The House in France, by Gully Wells. Knopf, 2011. Print length: 320 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "...engrossingly appalling memoir..." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (8 reviews). Kindle edition $13.99; Hardcover $16.49. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Set in Provence, London, and New York, this is a daughter’s brilliant and witty memoir of her mother and stepfather - Dee Wells, the glamorous and rebellious American journalist, and A. J. Ayer, the celebrated and worldly Oxford philosopher - and the life they lived at the center of absolutely everything. Gully Wells takes us into the heart of London’s lively, liberated intellectual inner circle of the 1960s. Here are Alan Bennett, Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Bertrand Russell, Jonathan Miller, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Kennedy, and Claus von Bülow, and later in New York a completely different mix: Mayor John Lindsay, Mike Tyson, and lingerie king Fernando Sánchez. We meet Wells’s adventurous mother, a television commentator earning a reputation for her outspoken style and progressive views, and her stepfather, an icon in the world of twentieth-century philosophy, proving himself as prodigious a womanizer as he is a thinker. Woven throughout is La Migoua, the old farmhouse in France... where her parents and their friends came together every year, and where Gully herself learned some of the enduring lessons of a life well lived." - from the hardcover edition.

The Blow-Off, by Jim Knipfel. Simon & Schuster, 2011. Print length: 336 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...a weary, hilariously sardonic shake of the head at the media and the public's willingness, even outright desire, to get riled up over nothing in particular." Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $9.99; Paperback $10.20. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"Monster Stalks NYC. When a local drunk is mugged near the toxic Gowanus Canal by 'a hulking, hairy beast who smells really bad,' Hank Kalabander thinks nothing of blaming the assault on the legendary Bigfoot. His sardonic crime blotter for The Hornet, a local Brooklyn rag, often gleefully recounts the tragedies that befall the borough’s dimmer residents. But when an upstart reporter from The Eagle, a tabloid paper, lifts his piece and implicates Bigfoot in two more attacks, the crimes become local news fodder and the hunt for the 'Gowanus Beast' takes off. Pretty soon the G.B. is to blame for everything from murder and robberies to playground scuffles and a pie’s disappearance - and neighborhood watch patrols have taken to the streets. ... an astoundingly funny send-up of our current times - an intoxicating blend of sharp cultural references, wildly comical scenes, discerning commentary, and unforgettable characters. " - Amazon.

Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror, by Jason Zinoman. Penguin Press, 2011. Print length: 272 p. NONFICTION. EW's slant: "...there is plenty here to make the most knowledgeable of horror fans' head explode." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (3 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99; Hardcover $17.13. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Much has been written about the storied New Hollywood of the 1970s, but at the same time as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola were making their first classic movies, a parallel universe of directors gave birth to the modern horror film - aggressive, raw, and utterly original. By the late 1960s, horror was stuck in the past, confined mostly to drive-in theaters and exploitation houses, and shunned by critics. Shock Value tells the unlikely story of how the much-disparaged horror film became an ambitious art form while also conquering the multiplex. Directors such as Wes Craven, Roman Polanski, John Carpenter, and Brian De Palma - counterculture types operating largely outside the confines of Hollywood - revolutionized the genre, exploding taboos and bringing a gritty aesthetic, confrontational style, and political edge to horror. Zinoman recounts how these directors produced such classics as Rosemary's Baby, Carrie, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween, creating a template for horror that has been imitated relentlessly but whose originality has rarely been matched." - Amazon.

French Lessons, by Ellen Sussman. Ballantine Books, 2011. Print length: 256 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "Sussman certainly knows her way around a boudoir scene - and when those boudoirs are in Paris, well, you end up with some sizzling escapist reading." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (25 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99; Paperback $9.00. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"A single day in Paris changes the lives of three Americans as they each set off to explore the city with a French tutor, learning about language, love, and loss as their lives intersect in surprising ways. Josie, Riley, and Jeremy have come to the City of Light for different reasons: Josie, a young high school teacher, arrives in hopes of healing a broken heart. Riley, a spirited but lonely expat housewife, struggles to feel connected to her husband and her new country. And Jeremy, the reserved husband of a renowned actress, is accompanying his wife on a film shoot, yet he feels distant from her world. As they meet with their tutors - Josie with Nico, a sensitive poet; Riley with Phillippe, a shameless flirt; and Jeremy with the consummately beautiful Chantal - each succumbs to unexpected passion and unpredictable adventures." - from the trade paperback edition.

Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion, by Janet Reitman. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. Print Length: 464 p. NONFICTION. EW's slant: "...meticulously compiled expose, culled from hundreds of interviews...it reads, at times, like an extended encyclopedia entry." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (20 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99; Hardcover $16.12. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Scientology, created in 1954 by a prolific sci-fi writer named L. Ron Hubbard, claims to be the world’s fastest growing religion, with millions of members around the world and huge financial holdings. Its celebrity believers keep its profile high, and its teams of 'volunteer ministers' offer aid at disaster sites such as Haiti and the World Trade Center. But Scientology is also a notably closed faith, harassing journalists and others through litigation and intimidation, even infiltrating the highest levels of the government to further its goals. Now Janet Reitman offers the first full journalistic history of the Church of Scientology, in an evenhanded account that at last establishes the astonishing truth about the controversial religion. She traces Scientology’s development from the birth of Dianetics to today, following its metamorphosis from a pseudoscientific self-help group to a worldwide spiritual corporation with profound control over its followers and even ex-followers. Based on five years of research, unprecedented access to Church officials, confidential documents, and extensive interviews with current and former Scientologists, this is the defining book about a little-known world. Janet Reitman is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone." - Amazon.
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