It can be frustrating, that blithe recommendation to “wait for the paperback” when a book comes out that you think you’d like to read. Publishers know the pulse of the public’s reading interest (or at least they know sales figures), and they’ll sit on putting out the paperback until the last embers of interest in the hardcover have expired. It can be a maddeningly long wait.

But it’s a wait that’s eventually rewarded, and a few new titles in softcover were first reviewed here. Richard Price’s Lush Life, for instance (which was also reviewed in every other literary organ in the western world), was given a thorough going-over by Sam Sacks in the February 2008 issue. Sacks looked back at Price’s important early works, but also took Price’s work in television as a frame of reference for interpreting Lush Life Return to House on Haunted Hill video :

Despite his considerable reputation as a novelist, it’s no good running away from the likelihood that Lush Life is going to be read as a kind of Director’s Cut supplement to The Wire: not only is there superficially a great deal in the book to justify the connection, there is also a sense that Price is explicitly attempting in Lush Life to achieve the layered sweep of atmosphere and character for which the TV show is revered. Writing for The Wire is not like doctoring Hollywood scripts, and the prudent wall of separation bricked up to protect his novels seems in this case to have been breached. Price has said of the show that “it’s as close to a novel as anything on TV,” and Lush Life has pretty clearly drawn inspiration from it.

Ever After In our June 2008 issue, Laura Tanenbaum reviewed Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us, and no doubt did a lot of listening to the songs of Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and Carole King, the three subjects of the biography. Tanenbaum was impressed not only by Weller’s treatment of the three singers, but by the keen evocation of a landmark era in the feminist movement:

From Weller’s account, we get the sense of period in which equality still felt radical, difficult and hard to reach, yet in which popular culture actively engaged. 1970, one year before each would have a seminal record (Mitchell’s Blue, King’s Tapestry, and Simon’s Anticipation

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), was a year in which Kate Millet could be on the cover of Time, having made her name with a book in which she took on literary and countercultural icons like Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. Even Ladies Home Journal dedicated a special feature to the feminist movement after a sit-in in their offices. While only a few years before, King’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” was a daring statement of female sexuality, now Mitchell could sing matter-of-factly about the joys of unmarried cohabitation in “My Old Man.”

And for your beach bag, Emily Giffin’s Love the One You’re With is available in bright green wrappers on the front table of any nearby bookstore. In our September 2008 Bestseller issue (in which, Gore Vidal-style, we reviewed every book on the fiction bestseller list), Julie McGinley gave a frank appraisal

of what you can expect from Giffin’s book:

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Ask any woman unlikely to have read many books, and chances are she’s read one by Emily Giffin. I’ll be completely honest and admit that this is the third book I’ve read of hers: I read both Something Borrowed and Something Blue on airplanes. For me, Giffin’s books are usually the perfect travel companions; the straightforward prose and somewhat predictable sequence of events means distractions are not a hindrance, and the chick-flick storylines help pass the time.

Bend It Like Beckham movie download Here’s hoping this helps in your book shopping. And do explore more of Open Letters’ archives to learn if you’ll be repaid for your patience in waiting for other books to emerge in more affordable paperback form.

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In the 17 July issue of the London Review of Books, anomie Breaking Away divx -heart-throb Benjamin Kunkel, author of the novel Indecision and one of the founding geniuses of the literary journal n + 1, turns in a long and genuinely thoughtful review of Joseph O’Neill’s new novel Netherland, which he generally likes, with one or two rhetorical and stylistic reservations:

Hans as a narrator operates a bit like a malfunctioning camera capable of tremendous long and short-range focus, but unable to yield anything but a fuzzy middle distance.

Or this nice bit, about the novel’s celebrated cricket scenes:

The descriptions of cricket are the best thing in the book, even or perhaps especially for an American reader for whom ‘cricket’ is chiefly an insect. It’s a bit like reading about the tea ceremony in Kawabata’s The Master of Go, where ignorance of the rules only heightens the sense of their ritual beauty, or encountering Lawrence’s pre-Chatterley sex scenes, where you know what’s going on emotionally without having any clear anatomical idea. But when Hans’s accounts of the matches tempt him to philosophise, we start to understand why the novel’s cricket scenes, so enjoyable in themselves, are so unsatisfying as they connect (or fail to connect) to the rest of the story.

As Open Letters readers may be aware, our own Steve Donoghue was less than enthusiastic about Netherland when he reviewed it for our blog, and he was even less enthusiastic when he had to revisit the book because of James Wood’s glowing appraisal in The New Yorker. Kunkel’s estimation of the book is less than glowing, so Donoghue will be spared further annoyance for the nonce.

Also less than glowing, in the same LRB issue, is a delightfully provocative review of Richard Price’s novel Lush Life by Deborah Friedell, who clearly enjoys tossing rhetorical red capes in front of pawing bulls, as when she opines, “If good writing means showing, not telling, how can a novelist compete with HBO?” or merrily hands us this: “In London, in New York, when young literary things meet, book chat is gossip. The smart conversations, the ones they’ve trained for, are about TV.”

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Hee. Nice to see somebody enjoying her job. When it comes to the job of reviewing Price’s novel, her flair for the quotable continues, as when she turns to the figurative side of Price’s prose:

Book by book, his figurative language has grown increasingly ornate, his similes frequent and exuberant, if not always successful. (A friend said she nearly stopped reading Price’s new novel, Lush Life, when she came to the sentence: ‘He always imagined the slick obsidian office building that as of last year dominated the view as embarrassed, like someone exposed by an abruptly yanked shower curtain.’)

Although Friedell is generally appreciative of Price’s work, she’s not fully persuaded by his world view. Interested readers (and really, at Open Letters, we’re all interested readers) will find it instructive to re-read what our own Fiction Editor, Sam Sacks, had to say about Price’s latest – it’s a classic Sacks triple-decker, so settle in for a long, juicy read!