Hurry for Harry: city readers snap up memoir

Only 10 days into the new year, and the crew at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location was having a royally busy day.

After hype, readers get hands on Prince Harry’s ‘Spare’

LONDON (AP) — After weeks of hype and days of leaks, readers got a chance to judge Prince Harry’s book for themselves when it went on sale around the world on Tuesday.

The book's publisher said “Spare” sold 400,000 copies in the U.K. in all formats — hardback, e-book and audio — on its first day.

“As far as we know, the only books to have sold more in their first day are those starring the other Harry (Potter),” said Larry Finlay, managing director of Transworld Penguin Random House. The final Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," sold more than 2.5 million copies on its first day of release, in 2007.

A few stores in Britain opened at midnight to sell copies to diehard royal devotees and the merely curious. Many said they wanted to form their own opinion of the book after days of snippets and debate on news sites and television.

Review: Janet Malcolm’s quasi-memoir on pictures and memory

“Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory,” by Janet Malcolm (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

When Janet Malcolm died 18 months ago at 86, her New Yorker colleague Ian Frazier wrote a eulogy for the magazine noting that the famed and feared journalist had been working on a series of essays based on old family photographs. “When the pieces come out as a book we’ll look at them and look at them again and never figure out how such wonders were wrought.” That moment has arrived, and Frazier was right. They are rather wondrous, revealing fascinating and confounding glimpses of an extraordinary life.

Malcolm, who was born in Prague in 1934 and fled to the U.S. with her parents and sister to escape the Nazis, was best-known for her book-length essays on journalism (“The Journalist and the Murderer”); psychoanalysis (“In the Freud Archives”); and the law (“Iphigenia in Forest Hills”).

But she started her decades-long career at the New Yorker writing about interior decoration, design and photography. She was also a photographer, publishing a study of the burdock plant that tried to portray the leaves “as clearly and as cruelly as Richard Avedon photographed individual human beings,” Frazier writes in his introduction to the new book.

Sigma Force return feels fabulously familiar

In a remote part of the world, evolution seems to have gone haywire: the human population has reverted to an earlier rung on the evolutionary ladder, while the animals and plants have progressed to heightened levels of intelligence. Commander Gray Pierce and the Sigma Force team have very little time to figure out what is going on, and to find some way to reverse the evolutionary disruption.

Misfit mid-’90s teens long to leave their mark

American novelist Kevin Wilson has made a name for himself with books that feature unusual characters and outré plots.

Bosch, Ballard in fine form in Connelly’s latest

Like every fictional homicide detective, Harry Bosch is haunted by the murder he never solved. Make that murders — a mother and father, their two little kids, all vanished until their bodies were found buried in the California desert years later.

Coastal memoir a worthwhile main course

For some people, food is just something to fill the stomach and provide nutrients; for others, food has a greater significance, as it can bring people together. For Margot Fedoruk, making food has been a way of showing love to the members of her family, just as her own parents and grandparents showed love through the meals that they prepared.

Earnest essays offer some serious insight

Whenever the word “best” gets tossed around, there are bound to be disagreements and disputes. Are these the best Canadian essays written in 2021? Editor Mireille Silcoff, who collected, chose and arranged them, seems to think so. A list of entries that were near misses, that didn’t make the final cut, is not included.

Pandemic, husband’s poor health sends U.K. couple back to walking trails

“It is solved by walking.” —Diogenes, Greek philosopher (412–323 BC)

Fans of The Salt Path will be delighted to embark on yet another hiking adventure with U.K. nature writer Raynor Winn and her courageous husband Moth.

Haruki Murakami’s insightful new non-fiction offers advice to aspiring novelists

Japan’s Haruki Murakami, who turns 74 on January 12, is one of the world’s most popular fiction writers and also one of the most private. His novels, such as Norwegian Wood and IQ84, have been translated into 50 languages and sold in the millions, but he has made it a point of not appearing too often in public, even when he lived for a time in the United States.

Belcourt’s innovative novel offers a literary reckoning for the dispossessed

Billy-Ray Belcourt’s fourth book and first novel A Minor Chorus is a spare, urgent, beautifully written autobiography of a hometown that uses a blend of forms to turn novel-writing in and of itself into a radical act attuned to decolonization, grief and love.

The Free Press literary editor picks 15 books to watch for in first half of 2023

A new year offers a chance to look ahead at the fascinating fiction and non-fiction publishers have planned for the coming months. Whether you’re looking for celebrity memoirs, thoughtful essays, scintillating story collections or immersive novels, here are 15 titles from local, national and international authors to watch out for in the first half of 2023.