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Book reviews, book-related news and author interviews
URL: http://januarymagazine.blogspot.com/
Updated: 35 weeks 5 days ago

New in Paperback: The Passage by Justin Cronin

Tue, 05/31/2011 - 18:05
One of the novels we ended up talking a lot about last year was The Passage by Justin Cronin. This was the book that Entertainment Weekly described as “The Stand meets The Road,” a faintly weird comparison that, nonetheless, isn’t without some merit.“OK, I’ll put it right out there,” January Magazine contributing editor, Tony Buchsbaum, wrote when the book came out in hardcover last June, “The


Battle for Digital Dominance Heats Up

Tue, 05/31/2011 - 16:05
The numbers coming out of the book industry are staggering and tell the story. The Association of American publishers reports that, in the first part of this year, sales of electronic books increased by close to 160 per cent to $233.1 million. While sales of e-books were heating up, print book sales were tanking: diving 23.4 per cent over the same period in the previous year.In an environment


Book Expo America: Day Two

Tue, 05/31/2011 - 06:32
Day two of Book Expo America was a bit quieter than the first. The aisles weren’t as frantic -- though there’s always a sort of running of the bulls as people rush to get the galleys they crave -- and the discussions seemed a bit more... whispered. The Big Book I heard about was Wonderstruck, the new children’s illustrated novel by Brian Selznick, author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret.


Book Expo America: Day One

Tue, 05/31/2011 - 06:32
It: the world’s biggest publishing trade show. Attending: hundreds of publishers, from one-man tiny to conglomerate massive. In the booths: advance copies of books, by the thousand, all for the collecting. Me: a kid in a candy store.This year’s Book Expo America -- BEA for those in the industry -- started off with a bang. Thousands of people connected to the book business lined up and jammed into


Fiction: Then Everything Changed by Jeff Greenfield

Mon, 05/30/2011 - 15:02
Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, Brendan M. Leonard reviews Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan by Jeff Greenfield. Says Leonard: Greenfield packs Then Everything Changed with some wonderfully fresh alternative realities. His gifts as a journalist and a student of American politics lend Then Everything Changed a


Literary Festival Meet-Up Ends Long-Standing Feud

Mon, 05/30/2011 - 08:37
A meeting partially engineered by Booker-winning author Ian McEwen (Saturday, On Chesil Beach) at the Hay Festival at Hay-on-Wye in Wales has ended VS Naipaul and Paul Theroux’s 15-year-old feud. From The Telegraph:Mr Naipaul and Mr Theroux, the travel writer, first met in Uganda in 1966. Their friendship spanned three decades but came to an abrupt end after Mr Theroux discovered that one of his


New Next Week: Pacific Air by David Sears

Sun, 05/29/2011 - 19:10
Even though the book won’t be published until June 1st, today is a good day to look at Pacific Air (Da Capo) by former U.S. Navy officer and Vietnam veteran David Sears.How Fearless Flyboys, Peerless Aircraft, and Fast Flattops Conquered the Skies in the War with Japan is Pacific Air’s subtitle but could just as easily be a quite accurate sell line because it describes the book so completely.


Inappropriate Thoughts About Fictional Characters

Fri, 05/27/2011 - 18:33
If you could hook up with a character from fiction, who would it be?That’s what Nerve asked readers recently and it may not be surprising that some of the responses were surprising!Books aren’t necessarily part of Nerve’s mandate, so some of the 15 fictional characters their readers said they wouldn’t mind taking for a roll in the hay included fictional characters from film and television. 30


Happy Birthday to the Continental Op

Fri, 05/27/2011 - 16:05
Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man) was born on this day in 1894. From The Writer’s Almanac:In 1915, he got a job as a detective for the famous Pinkerton Agency, and this experience provided fodder for his later novels. He enlisted in World War I, but contracted tuberculosis, and that -- combined with his distaste over the increasing Pinkerton involvement with strike-breaking --


Art & Culture: Art + NYC: A Complete Guide to New York City Art and Artists

Fri, 05/27/2011 - 00:38
With Book Expo America behind us for another year, what are the hordes of book industry types who aren’t based in New York City going to do to fill the time they have left in the Big Apple? Granted, there’s never any shortage of fun and interesting things to do in the city that never sleeps. However, if one of the things those out-of-towners want to do is get a primo art fix, Art + NYC: A


E-Books in the Library

Tue, 05/24/2011 - 17:40
Electronic Books are adding a new wrinkle to the library business and libraries are having a tough time keeping up, says the Vancouver Sun’s Janet Steffenhagen:The book-lending business at public libraries used to be a simple affair: Buy books, catalogue them, loan them out and keep them in good repair. But that’s all changing with the soaring popularity of ebooks.According to Steffenhagen,


New Today: Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World by Lisa Bloom

Tue, 05/24/2011 - 13:42
In Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World (Vanguard), Lisa Bloom, lawyer, author, famous daughter (to women’s rights attorney, Gloria Allred) and frequent television talking head, is trying to rekindle girl power. Think is a smart book that calls on women and girls to assess what it means to be part of a culture that often rewards beauty over brains.Twenty-five


SF/F: Mind Storm by K.M. Ruiz

Tue, 05/24/2011 - 12:05
Truth be told, I liked Mind Storm (Thomas Dunne) a lot better than I thought I would. Even in a market that seems heavily saturated with post-Apocalyptic tales (is it just where we are as a culture that we’re flocking there?) Mind Storm stands out and even above.Two Hundred and Fifty years from now, Threnody Corwin is a soldier-slave to the human government. Threnody is of the human class known


Fiction: Soldier of the Horse by Robert W. Mackay

Tue, 05/24/2011 - 07:48
Most historians agree, the First Great War was one of the most horrible conflicts in history, coming as it did at a time when new technologies -- in the forms of modern arms and chemical warfare -- were being introduced to battlefields still entrenched in the tradition of hand-to-hand combat. Some of the stories and art that came out of World War I were truly awful and thousands of young men


Pierce’s Picks

Mon, 05/23/2011 - 23:26
Regular readers know that, every week, January Magazine features a crime fiction pick from Rap Sheet editor and January senior editor J. Kingston Pierce. Pierce’s Pick this week will be of interest to an even wider than usual audience as it highlights Kiss Her Goodbye by Max Allan Collins and the late Mickey Spillane. The novel, lovingly completed by Collins and featuring Spillane’s best-known


Losing the Library: A Cultural Tragedy

Mon, 05/23/2011 - 19:40
In the current cultural and financial climate, the library as part of our community seems under constant attack. In The New York Review of Books, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Charles Simic, offers some stirring thoughts on libraries and their importance, while contemplating the impact of their potential loss on a society in peril:All across the United States, large and small cities are closing


New in Paperback: Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas

Mon, 05/23/2011 - 19:14
Out in paperback from Mariner, back in September contributing editor Sienna Powers liked Scarlett Thomas’ third novel (after The End of Mr. Y and PopCo), Our Tragic Universe. Said Powers at the time:It is apparent that Thomas thinks. A lot. About stuff. And she thinks about a lot of stuff. And those things? They’re not necessarily connected.This latest work, for instance, is about Nietzche, tarot


Cookbooks: Gluten-Free on a Shoestring: 125 Easy Recipes for Eating Well on the Cheap by Nicole Hunn

Mon, 05/23/2011 - 07:05
You don’t need me to tell you about Gluten-Free on a Shoestring (Da Capo Lifelong). If you are celiac or otherwise gluten challenged or limited, the cover alone will sell you on this book. It’s a popover. A simple popover. Nothing in it. No big deal, right? But for the many people who can’t or shouldn’t eat wheat, it’s a promise. One that, ultimately, author Nicole Hunn fulfills.The other part of


Harry Potter Finale Trailer Released

Sun, 05/22/2011 - 17:15
The final battle between good and evil will be played out when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two is released in theaters on July 15th.While we wait, Warner Bros. has been releasing a series of tantalizing trailers. The Huffington Post shares it with readers here.Warner Bros. has released the latest spot for their epic wizard finale, which features the final face off between the


Young Adult: Liberator by Richard Harland

Sun, 05/22/2011 - 16:00
Liberator (Allen & Unwin) is the sequel to the YA steampunk novel Worldshaker, which was set in a world dominated by the huge dreadnoughts, who roam the planet bearing the descendants of the various monarchies of 19th century Europe. The dreadnought Worldshaker was ruled by Queen Victoria III and her husband, Albert, in a perpetual Victorian era, not much changed from the original Victorian