BEA 13- Some Books I Can't Wait To Read

I have been very bad and haven't written any Book Expo 13 posts yet, so I'll start with some photos of the books I'm looking forward to reading that I picked up there.

I got to meet the authors of these books. Dorothea Benton Frank writes novels set in South Carolina, and The Last Original Wife is a winner. (She is very funny and really sweet too.) Lisa Scottoline spent a lot of time with every fan, she is so grateful for her readers. TIm Conway had a long line and he did not disappoint. I loved Lauren Grodstein's previous novel, A Friend of the Family, and look forward to this new one. Wiley Cash has gotten lots of love from critics and readers alike for his novel A Land More Kind Than Home, and he was very kind as well.

 These books came from Amy Einhorn and I love everything I ever read from her Penguin imprint. Seven For A Secret is the sequel to Lyndsey Faye's historical NYPD novel Gods of Gotham, which I really liked. I read Liane Moriarty's last novel, What Alice Forgot,  and can't wait to read this one. Freud's Mistress and its authors Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman are new to me.

These are some of the buzzy books from BEA, the ones everyone was talking about. I'm most excited about Lookaway, Lookaway, a Southern novel by Wilton Barnhardt , Jason Mott's The Returned (which is already being made into a fall ABC series) and Unremarried Widow.

Echoing back to previous classics, Havisham tells the story of Miss Havisham from Dicken's Great Expectations, and Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch pays homage to that British classic.

 Harper Collins gave some bloggers a special Fall Preview, and all of these sound fantastic. Joshilyn Jackson even made an appearance and intrigued us all with her description of her novel, Someone Else's Love Story.

 This is my Irish collection. I got to meet Alice McDermott, who like me is Irish-Catholic and attended SUNY Oswego. It was a real thrill to talk to her. Malachy McCourt signed copies of he and his late brother Frank's (Angela's Ashes) play, A Couple of Blaguards. He spent a long time chatting with each of us in his  line. (Anyone remember him as Kevin, the bartender on the ABC soap Ryan's Hope?)

 There are some fantastic books coming from some big authors this fall. Andre Dubus III has a collection of linked stories in Dirty Love, E.L. Doctorow's Andrew's Brain sounds interesting, and Ann Patchett has an essay collection This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage that I cannot wait to read, I love everything she writes. I got to meet Wally Lamb at a blogger party, and he was so friendly. I remember vividly sobbing my eyes out reading his She's Come Undone.

 Non-fiction from some big names is here too. Alice Hoffman writes about her experience with breast cancer in Survival Lessons. Jesmyn Ward, who won the National Book Award for Salvage the Bones  has a memoir Men We Reaped, and a very kind bookseller gave me her copy of Richard Russo's memoir Elsewhere when I told her I grew up near Russo's hometown.

Novels imagining the fictional lives of real women are still popular, with Edgar Allen Poe's wife in Mrs. Poe, Zelda Fitzgerald returning again in Lee Smith's Guests on Earth, about her time in an asylum, and Ann Frank's sister in Margot.








And of course I can't wait for Adriana Trigiani's third book in
her Valentine series, The Supreme Macaroni Company,
which publishes in November. This handy coffee mug will remind me until then.

If you were lucky enough to attend BEA, what are your favorite gets?