Editors Offer Their Favorites at BEA Panel

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Six editors shared their favorite upcoming releases at the Editor's Buzz Panel, moderated by Granta editor John Freeman, at BookExpo America.

Chuck Adams, executive editor at Algonquin, compared Jonathan Evison's West of Here to a Robert Altman movie. "I really think this is the best book I've ever had the pleasure of working with," he said. West of Here, which tells two parallel stories set in different eras in a Washington town, also shares elements with the works of Edna Ferber, Daphne Du Maurier, and Mary Renault, Adams said. And with many short chapters, "it's for the short attention span."

Mitzi Angel, publisher at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, was equally enthusiastic about Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, which is already a bestseller in the United Kingdom. "What [Goldacre] is brilliant at is taking people to task," she said. Although the book covers some of the technical details of the scientific research that Goldacre criticizes, Angel said, "He makes it very simple, very accessible, and very funny as well."

Judy Clain, executive editor at Little, Brown, created high expectations for Emma Donoghue's Room when she introduced the book with the phrase "never since The Lovely Bones..." Room, the story of a captive mother and son and their relationship with each other and the outside world, has definite ripped-from-the-headlines overtones, and features a blurb from Audrey Niffenegger.

Cary Goldstein, associate publisher of Twelve, had perhaps the most attention-grabbing pitch for Benjamin Hale's The Education of Bruno Littlemore, the story of "the world's first talking chimpanzee" and his relationship with a human female. "It's big, it's loud, it's abrasive," Goldstein said.

Nan Graham, editor-in-chief of Scribner, described Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer as a work of history with a personal aspect. Mukherjee is "an astonishing man, and an absolutely extraordinary physician," said Graham. Several of his patients' stories are woven into the scientific and cultural history of cancer, which, she said, help "you feel you actually made the leap of understanding."

Susanna Porter, executive editor at Ballantine, noted that she was a repeat panelist: she brought book-club favorite Loving Frank to a previous Editor's Buzz. This time she shared Anne Fortier's Juliet, the story of a modern woman who discovers her family connection to the original Romeo and Juliet. Porter said the book, which is already on German bestseller lists, would appeal to fans of both The Da Vinci Code and Shakespeare.

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