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We need to pay attention to writers whose first books have caused a stir—Rivka Galchen and her novel Atmospheric Disturbances, for instance—and to writers who continue their distinctive work out of the limelight: A. G. Mojtabai, whose latest novel, All That Road Going, is published by Northwestern University Press. To writers with the moral heft of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (not many in that class) and to anarchic spirits like Steven Millhauser (Dangerous Laughter) and Christopher Buckley (Supreme Courtship). To poets enshrined in the Library of America, and to fine poets who won't be (D. Nurske, for instance, whose latest collection, The Border Kingdom, is out this month). To books forced on us by the pressure of events (The Canons of Jihad from the Naval Institute Press), and to books that resist that pressure. To theology, and to books about cooking. To books by Nobel Prize-winners, and to children's books (like Susan Marie Swanson's The House in the Night, winsomely illustrated by Beth Krommes).
There are books that mysteriously arrive as if summoned. Yesterday in the introduction to our weekly e-newsletter, I mentioned the surge in translation of Scandinavian mystery writers, triggered in part by the international success of Henning Mankell's series featuring police detective Kurt Wallander. Lo and behold, today's mail brought a new book from the University of Washington Press (co-published with Museum Tusculanum Press, based at the University of Copenhagen), Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Fiction, Film, and Social Change, by Andrew Nestigen, who devotes one of his six chapters to "Henning Mankell's Transnational Police Procedural." I'll be reviewing this one myself. And as we have seen before, books often arrive in clusters: both Nigel Ashton's King Hussein of Jordan: A Political Life, from Yale University Press, and Avi Shlaim's Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace, from Knopf, are scheduled to be published in September. Then there's Malcolm D. Magee's What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-Based Foreign Policy, just out from Baylor University Press, and W. Barksdale Maynard's Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to the Presidency, due in September from Yale. And speaking of Baylor, it might be nice to have sociologist Rodney Stark's What Americans Really Believe, coming in September, reviewed alongside pollster John Zogby's The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream, published in August by Random House.
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