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Spoils of the fall

The New York Times reports, a little breathlessly, on the busy fall book season in the U.S., with “a traffic jam of big-name authors unleashing top-drawer books.” Bookstore shelves are crammed with new books by Mitch Albom, Charles Frazier, John Grisham, John le Carré, and more, with Stephen King, Michael Crichton, and Thomas Pynchon all still to come. In non-fiction, the “star of the season” is Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, which “has moved 309,000 copies since it went on sale Sept. 30.” But not all is going swimmingly:

Among the casualties of the season have been “The Interpretation of Murder,” by Jed Rubenfeld, a literary murder mystery starring a fictionalized Sigmund Freud, has fallen well short of its publisher’s expectations. Also falling short has been “The Meaning of Night: A Confession,” by Michael Cox, published by W. W. Norton on Sept. 18. “A Spot of Bother,” by Mark Haddon, appeared briefly on the Times’s expanded best-seller list but then dropped off completely, a disappointment for an author whose last book, ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” spent 58 weeks on the paperback list.

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Click here for the New York Times article