On day one, the Adult Editors Buzz panel is the highlight of the day for most people. Six editors get a chance to talk about one book, and the room is usually packed with attendees. I love this event because the books presented are usually new to me, and I always end up wanting to read most of them.
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| Editors Panel |
This year was no different. The firstbook presented was Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (January 20200), her memoir about bridging the gap between the works of art and culture in New York City and technology in San Francisco. Anna left her low-paying job in publishing for a job in a big data startup. Farrar, Straus & Giroux editor Emily Bell called it "a deeply felt memoir of ideas" and said that it is very funny. She likened it to Michael Lewis' Wall Street book Liar's Poker.
Jonathan Cox from Simon & Schuster also presented a memoir- Saeed Jones' How We Fight For Our Lives (October 2019). Cox called essayist/poet Jones' "one of the most powerful voices of his generation", and this memoir describes Jones growing up as a black gay man, living in the South with his single mother. He has a tumultuous relationship with his mother and deeply religious grandmother. Fans of Claudia Rankine's Citizen and Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me will be drawn to this book, which he calls a "love letter to" to Jones' mother.
Sally Kim from Putnam has been involved in many terrific books- The Immortalists and Sharp Objects- and she called her book- Kiley Reid's novel Such A Fun Age (January 2020)- a cross between the book Mothers and the HBO show Insecure. It's a story about a black nanny who is accused by a security guard of kidnapping the white child in her charge. Kim called it a "good soap opera", with timely issues that beg conversation, as well as being "damn funny to read."
Crown Books editor Julian Pavia specializes in science fiction thrillers, having edited The Martian, Ready Player One and Dark Matter and his book, Rob Hart's The Warehouse (August 2019), sounds like it will be a solid hit as well. Our hero works for Cloud, a giant tech company that has its claws in every part of the American economy (if this sounds familiar, think Amazon). It's set in the near future, where climate change and a crumbling infrastructure have wreaked havoc on the country. Cloud steps in and runs much of the economy, but they are not necessarily the bad guys. They step in to a fill a vacuum. Pavia said that one of his coworkers said after reading this "it will haunt you every time you see a box on your front step."
Laura Prescott's The Secrets That We Kept (September 2019) was presented by Knopf editor Jordan Pavlin. This debut novel deals with the CIA's efforts to smuggle Dr. Zhivago author Boris Pasternak out of Russia at the height of the Cold War. The novel's most interesting characters are the CIA secretaries who become spies to aid in the mission. Pavlin called it a cross between Hidden Figures and TV's Mad Men, saying that many of the women were smarter than most of the men in the room, and they used their "invisibility to subvert behind the scenes". I am most excited to read this one, it is on the top of my TBR pile.
Jessica Williams from William Morrow presented Kate Elizabeth Russell's My Dark Vanessa (January 2020), a timely tale of a beloved high school English teacher accused of sexual abuse by a student in 2017. In 2000, 15 year-old Vanessa had an affair with this same teacher, and when the new student contacts Vanessa, she must decide what really happened back then. Was it consensual or was she coerced? Williams said that it tackles the issue of consent and complicity, and will make the reader uncomfortable reading it. She likened it to The Lovely Bones and Room.
Keep an eye out for these books, I'll review them as we get closer to publication dates.
I'm most excited about Such a Fun Age.
ReplyDeleteOh gosh. My wish list overfloweth
ReplyDelete