Many Websites have released their lists of 'can't miss fall reads' leading up to the holiday season - most of which tend to look like the same list regurgitated over and over - Salmon Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood, Lauren Groff.... All perfectly sound choices. All very much in the main stream. But they're not the only books out there, and as we approach the season of jólabókaflóð, I thought it might be good to spotlight some other titles ripe for the giving.
These are a few of the books that are catching my attention. Some new, some not-so-new. Some are collectible and some are just good reads. I'll try to spotlight titles over the next month that are a little out of the mainstream, perhaps more on the 'special' side, and certainly worthy of a look.
Original price: $85
Hardcover (no dust jacket issued)
Print run: unknown
Signed first editions of this book are already listing in the $100-$300 range.
Unsigned first editions can still be gotten for $60 or less.
Original price: $25
Hardcover
Print run: 200,000
Signed first editions of this book are listing in the $50 - $95 range. (Note: A Capella Books in Atlanta is selling pre-ordered, signed books for $30 - prior to Patti Smith's November 12th signing there).
Unsigned firsts can be gotten for as little as $12.
Original price: $32
Hardcover
Print run: unknown
Signed first editions are listing for $75 to $140.
Unsigned firsts are listing for $32 - $50.
Original price: $27.95
Hardcover
Print run: unknown
Signed first editions for this title list from $300 - $600.
Unsigned first editions list from $20 - $50.
Original price: $16
Softcover
Print run: unknown
Synopsis: Percival Everett's long-awaited new collection of stories, his first since 2004's Damned If I Do, finds him traversing the West with characteristic restlessness. A deaf Native American girl wanders off into the desert and is found untouched in a den of rattlesnakes. A young boy copes with the death of his sister by angling for an unnaturally large trout in the creek where she drowned. An old woman rides her horse into a mountain snowstorm and sees a long-dead beloved dog.
Original price: $16.95
Softcover
Print run: unknown
This is Richardson's debut short story collection; winner of the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize.
Synopsis: Jessica Lee Richardson’s debut collection It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides teems with double magic—families of spiders, monsters in triplicate, and panels of bleacher-sitting grandfathers (who live in a diaphragm!) cohabitate with a starker, more familiar kind of strange in a hyper real and living tapestry of teenage porn stars, lovelorn factory workers, and art world auctioneers. From a woman who awakes from a short kidnapping with an unquenchable need for risk to a concrete boat ride gone off the rails, from Los Angeles to the Bronx, from the Midwest to North Korea, these stories explore the absurd in real spaces and the real in absurd spaces, seeking a way into something else entirely.
