On Thursday, May 31, BookExpo America returns to the Big Apple, and librarians on the hunt for hot galleys won’t be disappointed if my findings are any indication. Using Barbara Hoffert’s Prepub Alert contact list, I compiled a sizable list of must-gets. Without further ado, here they are by publisher:

• HarperCollins: Life on the Refrigerator Door by Alice Kuipers and Run by Ann Patchett (Truth and Beauty)
• Simon & Schuster: The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest To Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs and The 47th Samurai: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel by Stephen Hunter (Havana)
• Free Press: Redemption Falls by Joseph O’Conner (Star of the Sea)
• Crown: The 12-Second Sequence by Jorge Cruise, Look Me in the Eye by John Robinson, Switching Time by Richard Baer, and Witch’s Trinity by Erika Mailman
• Three Rivers Press: 13 Bullets by David Wellington (Monster Island)
• Harmony: Last Night I Dreamed of Peace by Dang Thuy Tram
• Shaye Areheart Books: Mad Dash by Patricia Gaffney (The Saving Graces)
• Random House: Away by Amy Bloom (A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You), Identical Strangers by Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein, Tipperary by Frank Delaney (Ireland), and The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens (The Law of Dreams)
• Ballantine: The View from Mount Joy by Lorna Landvik, Loving Frank by Nancy Horan, The Faraday Girls by Monica McInerny, and Midnight Rambler by James Swain (Loaded Dice)
• Broadway Books: Outside In by Courtney Thorne-Smith and Scream-Free Parenting by Hal Edward Runkel
• Farrar, Straus & Giroux: Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (Jesus’ Son), The Quiet Girl by Peter Hoag, Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System by Roberto Saviano
• Houghton Mifflin: Exit Ghost by Philip Roth (Everyman), Maynard and Jennica by Rudolph Delson, The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss (Wild Life), and Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer
• Clarion: Beanball by Gene Fehler
• Kingfisher: Tree Shaker: The Story of Nelson Mandela by Bill Keller and Zodiac Girls: Discount Diva by Cathy Hopkins
• Penguin: The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, Lottery by Patricia Wood, How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill, Interred with Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell, and The Russian Concubine by Kate Furnivall
• Grove/Atlantic: The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? by Francisco Goldman and The Bible: A Biography by Karen Armstrong (The Great Transformation)
• Harcourt: A Slave No More: The Emancipation of John Washington and Wallace Turnage by David W. Blight and The Spanish Bow by Andromeda Romano-Lox

Thanks to the efforts of my media-obsessed little sister, last week I had the opportunity to sit in the studio audience of The Colbert Report, Comedy Central’s often gut-busting spoof on the conservative political pundit show. The guest: actor Sean Penn. His affront to the Reagan-looking Colbert: writing (and reading) a poem condemning President Bush for our involvement in Iraq.

What twisted the TV host’s tighty whites most of all was the actor’s metaphor for Bush’s sins: “soiled and blood-soaked underwear.” To settle the score, Colbert challenged Penn to a “Meta-Free-Phor-All” moderated by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinksy. Watching this all being filmed wasn’t nearly as exciting as its implications. Colbert & Co. looked like wooden actors from my seat, I was dying of thirst (no water allowed), hungry, and needing to use the ladies’ room.

But as I tried to point out to my screaming sibling, they were promoting poetry during National Poetry Month. Colbert actually quoted Pinksy, who even took a silly swipe at Robert Frost. This had to be good for what often seems like a dying genre, though I couldn’t find any evidence of sales spikes for Pinky’s The Inferno of Dante. LJ’s Barbara Hoffert, a great supporter and writer of poetry herself, would have been proud. For her take on the best poetry of 2006, click here—and keep poetry promotion going all year long.

I’m only human in New York City, which means I often get sick of looking at human faces. In fact, I’m supposed to avoid looking at them because you never know—a tired glance could be taken as a murderous glare, a smile for an invitation to run all the bases.

But I digress. What I’m trying to say is that I love cartoons. Give me a vulnerable, gorgeous French cartoon girl like the one pictured on the cover of Capucine and Olivier Ka’s Le Philibert de Marilou, and I’m all eyes. That sounds bad, but all I mean is it’s interesting as hell to look at an artist’s rendering of humanity. 

To boot, I’m glad to blog about my first foreign-language sighting because America is a country of multiple tongues, duh. Plenty of libraries order French materials, and given the popularity of graphic novels, they should know about this notable title by Capucine and Ka. Not much information in English exists on either author, or their creation for that matter.

With the help of Google’s not-exactly-dead-on translation mechanism and my college French, however, I’ve deduced that the graphic novel tells the story of a lonely, beautiful, celibate 30-something (Marilou) whose clinical neuroses take the form of a terrific monster (Philibert) that prevents her from being happy—and cultivating a romantic relationship with a man.

The kids and critics alike seem to dig this dark story—several French teens and twentysomethings mention it on their MySpace profiles, and it appears Ka, a Lebanese-born Frenchman known for his children’s books and comics, has a reputation for intense stories. His latest graphic novel, Pourquoi j’ai tué Pierre (Why I Killed Pierre), a winner at this year’s International Comic Book Festival in Angoulême, recounts the sexual abuse Ka suffered at the hands of a priest at a summer camp when he was 12.

LJ, unfortunately, does not get in many French translations of graphic novels, a pity considering the seemingly smokin’ talent. French speakers in America, you’re one lucky piece of the library demographic. 

Every spring, this editor gets the itch to throw a party to banish the winter blues. And for the first time in nearly a decade, I’m acting on that urge and hosting some good friends tonight in my humble Brooklyn firetrap.

On the modest dinner menu, you will find both meat and vegetarian chili, cornbread, and for dessert (my favorite part of every meal), cupcakes—chocolate w/chocolate buttercream icing, vanilla w/vanilla buttercream icing, and by special request, red velvet w/cream cheese icing. For the first two varieties, I got recipes from my baking genius of a mother, who, alas, doesn’t know diddly about red velvet (she’s a damn Yankee, after all).

For that Southern delicacy, I wanted the best of the best, and the web’s many ardent cupcake bloggers all agree that Sylvia Woods of Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem blows the door off the oven with her concoction. One “Sweet Monkey Cakes” on the Cooks’ Illustrated message board swears by it, but with two minor changes (more cocoa and buttermilk!).

Last night, I tried Sweet Monkey Cake’s take, which is based on Woods’s recipe from Sylvia’s Family Soul Food Cookbook (Morrow, 1999), and I’m happy to say I got the most delectable red gems, moist with just the right amount of smoky cocoa taste. Mine aren’t probably going to look as professional as the one pictured below when they’re frosted later today, but they’re going to go down like butter—two sticks, to be exact.

April 22 is Earth Day. Appropriately enough the Santa Monica Public Library and the City of Santa Monica’s Environmental Programs Division is sponsoring a new literary award that aims to ”commend authors, illustrators, and publishers who produce quality books for adults and young people that make significant contributions to, support the ideas of, and broaden public awareness of sustainability”. The Green Prize for Sustainable Literature will be awarded in September 2007 in the categories of adult fiction, adult nonfiction, youth fiction and  youth nonfiction.

Books published in the United States during the 2006 calendar year are eligible for the prize but publishers must hurry to submit their candidates as the deadline is April 30! And this means you, Abrams publicists! One book that sprang immediately to mind as an excellent candidate in the nonfiction adult category is Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21 Century (Abrams, 2006).

Edited by environmentalist  Alex Stephens of the popular blog worldchanging.com, ”this beautifully designed volume (which comes with its own slipcover)”, as LJ reviewer editor Irwin Weintraub raved in a LJ Xpress review last December, “collects ideas and workable solutions from more than 60 contributors that demonstrate the human potential to create a better future and a sustainable planet.” 

While this volume meets the the prize’s basic sustainability criteria (future and long-term oriented, awareness of ecological and resource limitations, regional and global in scope,etc.), the sponsors of this award  strangely forgot to include sustainable requirements for the nominees’ physical production, such as  requesting that a certain percentage of the submitted title  be printed on recycled paper or on paper that comes from environmentally managed forests (see “Harry Potter Goes Green”). Fortunately, Worldchanging is ahead of the game, having been printed on environmentally friendly  New Leaf Paper. And the publisher went one step further by purchasing wind power credits equivalent to the amount of electricity used to produce the book.

Attention all librarians who have ordered the upcoming Harry Potter installment from Baker & Taylor: You won’t get the book unless you sign a special contract that can be downloaded here. The deadline, naturally, is today, and the fax line, quite predictably, is busy, busy. Good luck, mere muggles.

It’s been holding the No. 1 slot on the New York Times best seller list in hardcover advice/how-to/miscellaneous. The Divine Miss O. dedicated two episodes to it in February, sparking the biggest book reorder in history (two million!). And, oh, yeah: the old Polish lady who walks a half-dead shitzu on my street in Brooklyn was reading a copy in the park.

Inquiring minds want to know: Why wasn’t Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (BeyondWords/Atria) reviewed by your favorite library publication?Just who do I think I am not to assign this megaseller? It’s like this, book fiends: Publishers don’t submit every book to LJ; submissions get lost, stolen, or possibly eaten by feral dogs; and we certainly can’t assign everything that does land in the Bookroom. While our Xpress (that is, online-only) reviews allow for more coverage, there still aren’t enough reviewers at the ready—and not all books merit reviews. Some are simply more appropriate for LJ’s audience than others.

To be honest, I don’t remember The Secret. If it was submitted, it would’ve arrived around last September, three months before its November pub date, which means it was part of the fall deluge. I could’ve sent it to our trusty self-help columnist, Deborah Bigelow, who upon reading the press material wasn’t all that impressed by what the book purported to do. What self-respecting empowerment text doesn’t aim to “transform” or “teach”? Byrne’s credentials as a seeker/compiler of deep thoughts don’t make her unique, either.

My point is, it’s impossible to predict a best seller in the MySpaced-out age. Books with million-dollar publicity campaigns flop like dead fish. All that is certain is that Oprah has the Midas touch, and we Book Review editors don’t get fair warning. Ta.

So I didn’t assign this book. I didn’t even handle the galley, but I didn’t have to do either to know it’s more bloggable than Hilary Clinton catching herpes. A Book Addict’s Treasury by Julie Rugg and Lynda Murphy (April, Frances Lincoln; see LJ 4/15/07 for the complete review) seems to go beyond your Roget’s by ”following the threads of ideas in what can often resemble a conversation between authors from different centuries.” The quotes, 350 in total, come from the likes of Erasmus, Edith Wharton, Umberto Eco, Descartes, and Groucho Marx and consider every imaginable aspect of the writing life.

To quote the irreverent press release, “Indeed, if you buy only one book this year, this one is probably not for you.” Sounds like my kind of pulp. Fans of this kind of anthology might also like these recommended reads from our Book Review database: Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, Maureen Corrigan’s Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, and Anna Quindlen’s How Reading Changed My Life.

The imageless, emerald green cover and 1970s-looking typeface would not give away the genre, nor would the title, Spadek, a Polish word, I gathered, judging from the blonde woman reader and the fact that I was riding the L train. Making matters more frustrating were her manicured fingers obscuring the author’s name. What was this book, and why was it resisting my sighting?!

Finally, I caught a break: a seat opened up next to the woman, and I managed to swipe it before an iPodded-out hipster. Playing it cool was not an option at this point (not that I’m capable). I dropped down and leaned in for an obvious glance at the oddly yellowed interior pages. Patricia Cabot, Patricia Cabot…an American writer, a Midwestern girl if there ever was one.

Patricia Cabot, better known as Meg Cabot (LJ has only reviewed Boy Meets Girl and Size 12 Is Not Fat), was born in Indiana in 1967, and before I could translate the book title, I went out on a limb and guessed I was dealing with a romance or chick lit. How couldn’t I with an author photo like this (Cabot pens the best-selling Princess Diary series for YAs)?

Spadek, as it turns out, boils down to “downfall” or “descent,” nouns all too common, perhaps, in the lives of beautiful, single foreign women of more chivalrous centuries. Of course, Cabot has never penned a book with a title involving either word, so it’s still hard to determine what I sighted. My best guess? A Little Scandal (St. Martin’s, 2000). Outside detective work welcome. 

I don’t know about you librarians out there, but (and publishers are going to hate me) I suffer from “why buy the cow if the milk is free” syndrome. Surrounded by books and receiving hundreds of galleys every week, I am rarely motivated to actually buy a book. (And forget about giving books as presents. My friends have finally caught on, so a lavishly illustrated art  book from me—usually pilfered from our discarded books cart—doesn’t count as a real gift.) 

So when I want to read a book and I don’t have the galley, I turn to trusty LEO, the New York Public Library’s online catalog, to see if the library has a copy of a particular title and to place a hold on it. I was so inspired by the speeches made at last week’s NBCC awards ceremony I decide to check out some of the winners. Getting a copy of Julie Philip’s James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon was a piece of cake. There were 23 copies available in the NYPL’s branch system and three copies had been put on hold. I noticed one copy was available at the Donnell Library Branch, across the street from the Modern Museum of Art, and since I was going to a screening at MOMA, I could easily pick up that copy.

The NYPL owned only six copies of Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, of which two copies appeared to be lost or stolen. There were also two holds, and I added my name to the list, making for a grand total of three holds.

The NYPL must have had high circulating hopes for Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution because it had ordered 86 copies for its branches. Unfortunately, no one had rushed to place a hold (sorry, Simon) and I was not in the mood to read his history. On the other hand, the library obviously had not ordered enough copies of Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost : A Search for Six of Six Million (56 copies, 125 holds) and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (101 copies, 381 (wow!) holds, thanks to the Booker Award, perhaps?)

I figured that Mendelsohn’s and Desai’s books would be out in paperback by the time my name got to the top of the holds list, so I decided to try my luck with the poetry winner, Tom Jollimore’s Tom Thomson in Purgatory. Not a single copy to be found in any branch. Oh, I thought, surely those Williamsburg hipsters and bohemians would have demanded a copy for their branch in the Brooklyn Public Library system. Nada. Or perhaps the multicultural Queens Borough Library had been bold enough to order a copy. No results found, said my query search. 

I suspect in this case the libraries didn’t order Jollimore’s book, not out of a disdain for poetry, but because it had not been widely reviewed. As far as I can tell, Library Journal never even received an advance galley for review. One hopes that the NBCC award  will encourage NYPL and other area libraries to buy at least one copy for their poetry-loving patrons. Remember April is National Poetry Month! 

In my case, I am going to buy the book. Unfortunately  my local independent bookseller doesn’t carry it, so thank goodness for Amazon, which makes the long tail possible.