These days it seems like the world has gone vampire crazy (or maybe it is just me).  After reading the entire Twilight series in a just over a month, I can’t seem to break free from the world of the undead.  Luckily there is no shortage of paranormal books available these days…here are a few Random House, Inc offerings to sink your teeth into, quench your thirst, get your blood flowing…I can do this all day, but I won’t.  Admittedly, these selections are more on the “Adult” side…Edward and Bella are a little chaste for some…

The fourth book in David Wellington’s action packed, grab-you-by-the-throat vampire series, takes place inside the jail where Laura Caxton is serving time for kidnapping and torturing a federal fugitive, a jail where Justinia Malvern, a vampire desperate for blood and revenge, is also holding court. Somehow, more vampires make their way into the prison, and the only “donor” they really want is Laura.

Available May 26th, is the newest sexy paranormal from Lara Adrian, Ashes of Midnight.  As night falls, Claire Roth flees, driven from her home by a fiery threat that seems to come from hell itself. Then, from out of the flames and ash, a vampire warrior emerges. He is Andreas Reichen, her onetime lover, now a stranger consumed by vengeance. Caught in the cross fire, Claire cannot escape his savage fury—or the hunger that plunges her into his world of eternal darkness and unending pleasure.

New from Keri Arthur, Deadly Desire.  In her seventh outing, Riley finds herself opening a truly strange can of paranomral worms. What looks to be a simple robbery/murder–with one of Jack’s friends as the victim–soon takes an odd turn as the robbers themselves start turning up dead, victims of a heart-eating zombie. With her life once more on the line, the only thing going right in Riley’s life is her relationship with Quinn. That is, until she finally meets her soulmate…

The seventh vampire novel from Raven Heart (that’s her real name, right?)  Jack McShane: lover, killer, seducer, family man, and vampire. In the shadows of Savannah, with its hip nightspots and moss-draped oak trees, Jack is trying to save humankind from a threat it doesn’t know it faces: an explosion of the otherworldly, the weird, the wanton, and the wicked.

Charlie Huston’s series of warring vampire clans continues in Every Last Drop. After a year hiding out in the Bronx, Joe is given an assignment he can’t refuse: one Clan needs him to inform on another. But he’s playing them both while keeping his eye on the prize: his girl Evie is on the Island somewhere and he’ll do anything to get her back. And in this case, “anything” means coming face to face with the horrendous secret that lies
beneath the Vampyre world.  Not only did Huston write a guest blog for us, he’ll be appearing at this year’s ALA conference in Chicago! 

Hope these suggestions will provide you with days (and nights) of reading fun, or the perfect book to suggest to one of your vampire-loving patrons.  And remember, when all else fails, you can always go back to the beginning.

With many of our department members off to the Texas Library Association conference this week, I can’t help but think back on my experience there last year. One of the best things, for me, is getting to attend the First Fiction panels at the various shows and I was fortunate enough to sit in on one with author Stephan Merrill Block last year. He is around my age and has published his first novel The Story of Forgetting last year. Talk about motivation! The paperback is out next week (4/7). Check out the awesome video on the novel below. It definitely makes me want to dive into my copy!

-Marie

Hi. My name is Marie, and I’m a “buzz book” addict.

It started with Cutting for Stone and now, unabashedly influenced by Jen’s post, I hereby declare my love for Carolyn Wall’s Sweeping Up Glass. If you are at all a To Kill a Mockingbird fan, read this. If you found Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes charming, read this. If Bastard Out of Carolina is one of your favorites, read this. If you were as enamored as I was with God of Animals by newcomer Aryn Kyle, read this. If you’ve never read any of those books but have a hankering for great characters with names like Wing and Love Alice, the hauntingly clear setting of Pope County, Kentucky and a complex narrative full of family, legacy, and wolves… read this. This gem of a book is a surprising delight. You won’t be disappointed.

-Marie

For their inaugural “One Book, One City” program, Santa Fe Springs, CA has chosen the increasingly popular Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario as their Big Read. Check out their website; they’ve done a great job centering their program around the book, inviting Sonia to speak and planning a film showing as well. The story Sonia tells is incredible and really takes the lid off some issues facing the people of South and Central America.

This one’s also available in Spanish for bilingual communities.

-David

We all know this book. We love it. Perhaps some of us have it memorized. Others (ahem…not me, of course) even own this shirt. Now, join me in my great anticipation for the movie version of Maurice Sendak’s beloved children’s classic, Where the Wild Things Are! I came across a trailer yesterday and it looks gorgeous. Directed by Spike Jonze and written by Random House’s very own Dave Eggers, this movie is definitely not one to miss. It hits theaters in October.

“Let the wild rumpus start!”

-Marie

Danbury, CT has chosen Michael Greenberg’s memoir Hurry Down Sunshine for their One Book, One Community program!

Learn more about the book here.

Take a look at other Random House, Inc. recommended titles here.

-Marie

Add this new book on the steriod controversy within America’s favorite pasttime to your lists! It is written by the NY Daily News investigative reporting team who “have broken almost every big story on Clemens and every big steroid story over the past 3 years.”

The book’s on sale date is 5/12.

AMERICAN ICON
The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime
By Teri Thompson, Nathaniel Vinton, Michael O’Keeffe, and Christian Red

Announced First Print: 100,000

ISBN: 978-0-307-27180-8

$26.95/ $33.00 CAN

-Marie

Last weekend was filled with Julia Roberts, my long-time favorite actress.  I saw her new movie, Duplicity, with Clive Owen.  And I read Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire, a first novel being published by Pantheon in June.  Julia Roberts and Columbia Pictures have already optioned the film rights for Ms. Roberts to produce and star in.  Wow! 

While Duplicity was set in New York City, and Hothouse Flower also starts out in NYC’s Union Square, you are soon transported to the jungles of the Yukatan Peninsula with not one, but two steamy romances.  The plantology included with each chapter and throughout the book is also very informative and fascinating.  Who knew the mandrake could be so deadly?!  This is a well researched page-turner!

ALA Alert!  Margot Berwin, author of Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire is joining us at ALA Annual in Chicago on July 12th.  Don’t miss her on the FOLUSA First Author panel from 1:30pm – 3:00pm.

-Erica

Hi! Here are our personal favorite upcoming books from Summer 2009. But don’t take our word for it. Read them youselves!

Dave’s Pick
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard
“Wait, WHAT are you reading?!” is the reaction I got a few times when I told my friends the title of the book flashing across my e-reader. They would ask me if I was a Satanist or something, and I would answer no, but that sort of thing just got a whole lot cooler. Who knew stealing souls could be such funny business? Well, apparently, the British can make anything funny. In the tradition of The Gone-Away World, the wit involved here is subsuming. The book’s title character is an unsmiling, perpetually annoyed spigot of hilarious nastiness, and I can’t get enough. I want Johannes to be real. A sampling: “I’m not holding a soiree either. You have a problem with sarcasm, don’t you? Now do you have anything else fascinating to impart or can I kick your wrinkly little carcass down the embankment as I so dearly wish?” This riotous send-up of the classic Faustian tale is endlessly fascinating, to the point where I kind of want to sign my soul away just to see what would happen.

Erica’s Pick
The Natural Laws of Good Luck: A Memoir of an Unlikely Marriage by Ellen Graf
Marriage today comes in many variations.  In my late twenties and a newlywed myself, I’m a bit “traditional.”  But what if I were divorced, facing middle age, and searching for love?  What would a marriage look like to me then?  For Ellen Graf, she took a chance and married a Chinese businessman, with a past of his own.  He moved from China to her upstate New York farmhouse and so began their “unconventional” marriage.  Despite the language barrier, a host of cultural misunderstandings and financial crises, Ellen and Zhong-Hua were able to face these challenges and their new life together with humor, patience, and love.  Ellen now eats rock fungus and Zhong-Hua learned how to drive, albeit often following his own rules!  At times, The Natural Laws of Good Luck can read like the funniest of humor memoirs, but at its heart is a story of acceptance, love and renewal at midlife by taking a brave leap into the unknown.  Rather inspiring, really, no matter what “type” of marriage you may have yourself.

Marie’s Pick
The Invisible Mountain by Carolina de Robertis
When author Carolina de Robertis began writing as a child, her parents begged her to put their family stories on paper. Available in August, the result of family oral tradition and lots of listening and research, is her debut novel. The Invisible Mountain is as lush in character, plot and language as the South American landscape in which it is set. More than a narrative of the Firrelli’s, a Uraguayan family with Italian roots that run deep within the Venetian canals, de Robertis’s novel traces the stories of three generations of women:  Pajarita, the baby who went missing only to be discovered in a tree; her daughter, Eva, a rebellious poet who finds love in the most unlikely of places; and Eva’s daughter, Salomé, who risks her life hiding weapons for guerilla rebels under bed. Infused into the societal and political unrest of Eva Perón’s Buenos Aires and the gleaming city of Montevideo are the bits of magical realism, sweeping sticks-in-your-mouth prose, and an addictive storyline rich in cultural significance. This striking start will delight fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende who will find themselves fully immersed in the “sharp t’s and j’s, y’s and g’s” that tie these women together.

Marcia’s Pick
Border Songs: A Novel by Jim Lynch
Even though the Advance Reading Copy (ARC) is designed to make you get a jump on the publication of the book itself – to get you to talk about the book – to spread the good word — in general, help to SELL the book — there are very few ARCs that I can remember that literally start off with four solid pages of praise.   This praise is not  all in-house either.  Most of it comes from bookstore staff across the country and contains phrases like, “a truly wonderful and thoughtful novel,” “in a class by itself,” “beautifully rendered scenes,” “curious, brilliant, often visionary characters,” and lest I built it up TOO much, I’ll close the quotes with this one: “I savored every chapter, every character, every lovely sentence, every plot twist and turn.  It is a superbly crafted novel…” Brandon Vanderkool is the heart and soul of this story.  At 6′8″ and extremely dyslexic, he doesn’t seem a likely choice to take center stage, and he does have a lot of competition from the assortment of characters populating this novel.  I won’t even attempt to describe the plot.  Suffice it to say that there’s a lot going on around the U.S./Canadian border in the Pacific Northwest and Brandon is pushed by his father into the very thick of it when he joins the Border Patrol. Also there is a perfect marriage between book and cover.  Kudos to the selection of Walton Ford’s Falling Bough (2008) as the painting which draws you into the book.

Jen’s Pick
The Rapture by Liz Jensen
The marketing copy calls it Girl Interrupted meets The Dead Zone and I have to say it is spot on.  As the novel opens, 16-year-old Bethany Krall is in a psychiatric hospital for brutally killing her mother and is assigned to Gabrielle Fox, a young therapist recently crippled in a car accident.  It seems Bethany’s previous therapist left under mysterious circumstances and Gabrielle soon understands why.  Still struggling to come to terms with life in a wheelchair, she is easily manipulated by the twisted teen who seems to have an uncanny, even spooky ability to foretell natural disasters and even knows things about Gabrielle’s life that she shouldn’t know.  Gabrielle’s skepticism turns to wary belief as Bethany’s predictions of earthquakes and hurricanes come eerily true.  She enlists the help of a geophysicist and the two attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery just as Bethany shares her most shocking and horrific revelation.  Can they convince society that Bethany’s warnings should be heeded?  Can they save the world before it is too late?  This gothic, apocalyptic novel is a mesmerizing read.  You won’t be disappointed…just scared silly.

The LA Times Blog, Jacket Copy, has posted a collection of photos of two of my favorite things: books and cats! You really need to check this out. They also have one for books and dogs!

-David