New Paperbacks Just in Today!

It's Tuesday, which is the day that many publishers release their new titles. Why Tuesday, you might ask? And the answer is I have no earthly idea. I'm sure it stems from some very important publishing tradition, but I haven't a clue what it is. Perhaps someone can educate me on that score. But, what I DO know, is that we got a couple of great titles in paperback today. The first, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson, is the first in the trilogy by the Swedish author who died shortly after delivering the manuscripts for the three books. The book is a spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue, and by all accounts it is spectacular. Even more impressive, the early reports on the second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire (due out in hardback next month), are even MORE positive. So get started on the first book now so you're ready for #2!

The second book that arrived in paperback today is one of my favorites this year, from one of my favorite authors: The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars, by Andrew X. Pham. Pham is the author of Catfish and Mandala, one of our consistent top-selling memoirs at the store. [If you haven't read it yet, come in and we'll tell you all about it.] His second book is the story of his father, told in the father's voice but written by the son. The Oregonian named it one of the Top Ten National Books of 2008, when it first came out in hardback, and The New York Times Book Review had this to say: "Few books have combined the historical scope and the literary skill to give the foreign reader a sense of events from a Vietnamese perspective....Now we can add Andrew Pham's Eaves of Heaven to this list of indispensable books." Read it for the history it teaches, for the compelling portrait of Vietnam it provides, for the story it tells of the tragedies of a family, but mostly read it for the beautiful, vivid prose it uses to do all of the above.