#barbara hoffert

[libraryjournal]

Going to BookExpo next week? Librarians, get your totebags ready! Prepub Alert Editor Barbara Hoffert's 2018 BookExpo Galley & Signing Guide has arrived! Register now to download the pdf. Organized chronologically, the guide offers descriptions of over 200 key titles from publishers large and small that will be given away at the show, plus signings by authors you’ll surely want to meet. Crucially, many publishers have timed giveaways, so check the schedule and keep a timepiece handy. See you all next week in NYC at the Javits Center. 

[chenchenwrites]

Starred review from the Library Journal! Thanks Barbara Hoffert for this lovely write-up and for including my book on this list of highly recommended spring poetry releases. 

[wwnortonlibrary]

January LibraryReads List

Thank you so much for reading Dara Horn's new novel, Eternal Life, and nominating it for the January LibraryReads list!  Check out the LibraryReads website for more book suggestions and to download flyers that you can use in your displays and as reader's advisory tools.

“Ever since she made a deal to save her son's life in Roman-occupied Jerusalem, Rachel has been doomed to live eternally. When one of her grandchildren tries to study the secret of her longevity and asks for a DNA sample, her world spins out of control.”  - Kimberly McGee, Lake Travis Library, Austin, TX

"Living forever is nearly everyone's fantasy, but this fresh and arresting new work from Horn (A Guide for the Perplexed) proves that it's not really what you'd want.... In this brilliant take on the burdens of immortality, the protagonist is not so much bearing witness to the ages, as typically seen in such stories, but bearing huge personal costs Horn makes us feel acutely. Both heady time travel and a thoughtful meditation on the meaning of life; highly recommended." —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal, starred review

"Horn dexterously leaps across time, following various of Rachel’s many lives and allowing us to see her agony build through the centuries.... And yet—there is always an 'and yet' in Horn’s novels—the pull of life and of love is nearly as strong as the lure of death. In that tension, Horn constructs a deeply satisfying novel, rich not only in history and the great philosophical conundrums of living and dying but also in humor and passion." - Bill Ott, Booklist, starred review

Anyone who works in a public library is encouraged to nominate titles for the LibraryReads list!  You don't even have to write a review if you don't have time - see the LibraryReads FAQ page for more details.  There is a little time left to nominate titles for the February list - votes are due 12/20.  Here are my suggestions with links to request DRCs (*hint*DAPHNE*hint*).

Nominations for March titles are due January 20th and here's my list of suggestions with links to request DRCs.  You can also find many of these DRCs on Netgalley if that is your platform of choice.  

If you want to read even further ahead, click through for my list of April 2018 suggestions (votes due 2/20).

[omnidawn]

Shadowboxing: Library Review

"In a dazzling display, Rios blends prose poems, dramatic dialogs, and punch-in-the-gut verse to record the life of Chicano adolescent Josefo, not incidentally showing us working-class California along the way."

Joseph Rios, Shadowboxing: poems & impersonations, was reviewed in the Library Journal written by Barbara Hoffert. Shadowboxing is together a poetic portrait of Josefo, a Chicano adolescent working and becoming a poet in the farm territories of Central California.

Barbara says, "VERDICT: A one-of-a-kind debut; it's easy to imagine both experienced poetry readers and teenage newbies burrowing into this book."

Congrats to Joseph and you can read the full review here: http://bookverdict.com/details.xqy?uri=Product2017-11-15-8653832.xml

[litmuspress]

Library Journal lists Maria Attanasio's Amnesia as one of "Thirty Amazing Poetry Titles for Spring 2014"

Library Journal listed Maria Attanasio's Amnesia of the Movement of Clouds & Of Red and Black Verse as one of Thirty Amazing Poetry Titles for Spring 2014: "Two books in one, this first full-length English translation of work by contemporary Sicilian poet Attanasio bears the stamp of her studies in German Expressionist and French Surrealist poetry. The energy is fierce and inexhaustible and the run-on spill of language bright and perfectly honed, with telling juxtaposition. What it all yields: a tightly coiled sexuality and the will to live." - Barbara Hoffert

[nyrblit]

Welcome to our blog!

This will be a blog for news about NYRB Lit. In order to describe the goals and aims of this new e-book series, we'll begin with an interview that our editor, Sue Halpern, did with Barbara Hoffert at Library Journal's Prepub Alert blog:

"As a writer and a reader, Halpern understands that with the multiplicity of books out there‚ and with the struggles of libraries and indie bookstores, historically the two institutions that offer big support for book culture, as Halpern observed‚ it’s getting harder for many of us to decide what to read. One of her goals, then, is to reposition literary fiction in the market. I’d like to be involved in making literary fiction a genre. One thing that’s clear in the social media world is that people love genres, and one thing that publishers love about genre readers is that they are highly identifiable because they identify themselves.

Halpern sees the distinction between literary and commercial fiction as questionable; obviously, plenty of literary fiction is juicy good and sells like hotcakes. But literary fiction does stand out for its allegiance to language, in her felicitous phrase, as well as its commitment to ideas, to a larger sense of where we are. To find authors who rivetingly deliver that one-two punch of gorgeous words and gorgeous thought, she’s been actively soliciting agents both here and abroad‚ and shaking off the illusion that if we get a book Monday, we can publish it Tuesday. With ebooks, there’s not the physicality, but the rest of the process is the same.

NYRB Lit will publish monthly ten times a year (skipping February and August), and the books Halpern has found so far are richly promising. September brings us Whitbread Award winner Lindsay Clarke, whose The Water Theater won the 2011 Fiction Uncovered Award in the UK. Its protagonist, reporter Martin Crowther, is fighting a personal battle as he tries to convince the estranged children of his dying mentor to visit him one last time."

[libraryjournal]

In late October, nine LJ editors gathered at New York’s gothic Jefferson Market Library to select this year’s top ten best books. Our nominee list consisted of 23 carefully selected fiction and nonfiction titles. After many weeks of reading and much deliberation, the winning titles are evenly split: five works of fiction and five nonfiction; five women authors and five men. If there is a “winner among winners,” it would be Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, for which every editor voted. Certain themes leapt out: Prepub Alert Editor Barbara Hoffert noted a strong thread of “community” among the titles, both fiction and nonfiction. Irish American nuns in early 20th-century New York, “new nomads” on the fringes of society, Osage Indians under attack, politically diverse justice seekers, ghostly beings in a Washington, DC, cemetery, and Muslims in London—all contend with living, dying, and surviving in this world (no space travel titles this year). Another strong theme is parents, specifically mothers. In You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, Sherman Alexie grieves for his difficult mom; foster parents and biological mothers figure in both Shanthi Sekaran’s Lucky Boy and Benjamin Ludwig’s Ginny Moon; Roxane Gay keeps a huge secret from her loving but concerned parents in Hunger.

Check out the full list at http://lj.libraryjournal.com/bestbooks2017/.

[libraryjournal]

Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West was a Notable Book for LJ Prepub Alert editor Barbara Hoffert. http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2017/11/in-the-bookroom/you-might-also-like-lj-notable-books-of-2017/

[libraryjournal]

Going to #BEA17? Sign up here for your Galley & Signing Guide, curated by Prepub Alert editor Barbara Hoffert and now available for downloading

[libraryjournal]

The only nonfiction title on the April LibraryReads list of the top ten books favored by librarians offers a chilling look at one of the most sinister crimes in American history. Prepub Alert editor Barbara Hoffert profiles author David Grann and his book, Killers of the Flower Moon.

[omnidawn]

Library Journal Reviews & Recommends 12 Forthcoming Books of Poetry! Henry Wei Leung's Goddess of Democracy: an Occupy lyric was recommended!

Library Journal Reviews collects 12 new poetry collections that may bring "fresh perspective on the human experience."

Barbara Hoffert writes, " Leung describes events through a spray of sharp images—“Late night diaspora sweats// Exile dread”—and though headnotes to many poems helpfully give historical context, the writing never turns didactic."

Read the full review here, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/…/library-journal-reviews-… and get your copy in the link below.

Congrats Henry!

[libraryjournal]

Going to ALA Midwinter? Prepub Alert Barbara Hoffert previews the hottest ARCs and giveaways.

[libraryjournal]

I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing celebrated actor Alan Cumming, whose Not My Father’s Son, a wrenching memoir of rediscovering family, is a LibraryReads pick for October, and debut novelist Katy Simpson Smith, whose The Story of Land and Sea, a quietly affecting tale of love and death in the Revolutionary era, is an Indie Next pick for September. You can find both interviews at Prepub Alert: Video Interviews.

Library Journal presents this insightful series of video interviews with Prepub Alert‘s Barbara Hoffert and a variety of notable authors.

Fascinating conversation with Tony Award-winning actor Alan Cumming.

[libraryjournal]

These were the six winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards for publishing year 2012, announced last week at a festive event at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York. Of course I want to highlight these awards, having just wrapped up six years as awards vice president for the NBCC. More to the point, the NBCC awards are the only ones given anywhere that are chosen exclusively by practicing critics. They’re well-considered, well-debated awards by folks who read widely and have no axe to grind.

Wrapping Up the National Book Critics Circle Awards

[libraryjournal]

The National Book Critics Circle Awards, the only awards given by working critics and book review editors, are coming your way on February 28, 2013. Finalists have just been announced. As always, this year’s finalists range from immediately recognizable titles like Robert A. Caro’s The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Alfred A. Knopf), Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House), and David Ferry’s Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press)—the last two National Book Award winners—to terrific surprises like Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books), a refreshingly different work of criticism; Laurent Binet’s HHhH (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a French prize winner about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich; and Lisa Jarnot’s Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography (University of California Press), whose subject has come to have a powerful influence on the most recent generation of poets. A complete list of finalists follows; for further information, go to bookcritics.org.

From Barbara Hoffert, Boo, Ferry, Caro, Smith, Fountain, and Shadid Among Finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards

[libraryjournal]

The rest of the evening was a story about stories. In accepting the 2012 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for Goblin Secrets (Margaret K. McElderry Bks: S. & S. Children’s Publishing), William Alexander first expressed his astonished delight by exclaiming, “Okay, we now have proof that alternate universes exist,” then cited Ursula Le Guin’s comment, “The literature of imagination…offers a world large enough to contain alternatives and therefore offers hope.”

Barbara Hoffert recaps the National Book Awards ceremony over at LJ.