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Hotlists 2008

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Booklists

Lists of books, many of which received at least one starred review (indicating a work of unusual merit) from the following review sources: Booklist , Publisher's Weekly (PW), Kirkus and Library Journal (LJ). Additional titles of interest may be included on the lists. Titles are generally listed alphabetically by author.

 

 

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Overbooked specializes in providing timely information about fiction (all genres) and readable nonfiction. Overbooked has been online since 1994. Overbooked is a work in progress . . .

Booklists and Suggested Reading

Mark Twain Stars

 

Page Modified: April 5, 2008

Fiction (all genres) and Nonfiction related to or inspired by Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens and his work.

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Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.

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Fiction

• Twice Upon a Time
  Author: Appel, Allen
  Publisher: Carroll & Graf $ 18.95 ISBN: 0881843849 Date: 1988
  The adventures of Alex Balfour, which began in Appel's first and widely applauded novel Time After Time, continue. This time Balfour inadvertently travels to the spring of 1876--where he tangles with Custer and Mark Twain and finds himself in the middle of the massacre at Little Big Horn.
  
• I Been There Before
  Author: Carkeet, David
  Publisher: HarperCollins $ 18.95 ISBN: 0060154268 Date: 1985
  As the years of Mark Twain's birth and death coincided with the two successive appearances of Halley's Comet, this book records Twain's fictive reincarnation, provoked by the comet's approach toward Earth in November, 1985.
• One Day Closer to Death: Eight Stabs at Immortality
  Author: Denton, Bradley
  Publisher: St Martins $ 23.95 ISBN: 0312181507 Date: 1998
  With his four acclaimed novels, Bradley Denton has demonstrated himself to be one of the most original and talented fantasists at work today. This new volume reprints seven imaginative visions of death and life, including a look at Lenny Bruce in the afterlife, a tale of what-might-have-been from the life of Mark Twain, and a visit to the "conflagration artist", and and adds a long chapter in the saga of Jimmy Blackburn, "Blackburn Bakes Cookies".
  
  
• Mississippi Blues
  Author: Goonan, Kathleen Ann
  Publisher: Tor $ 25.95 ISBN: 0312859171 Date: 1999
  The journey of Verity across the wonderfully altered landscape of mid-America begun in Queen City Jazz--a "New York Times" Notable Book for 1995--continues on down the river in "Mississippi Blues". "A dizzying novel that takes full advantage of the creative potential of nanotech".--"The New York Times Book Review".
  
• Mark Twain Remembers: A Novel
  Author: Hauser, Thomas
  Publisher: Barricade $ 20 ISBN: 1569801541 Date: 1999
  Veteran novelist (The Hawthorne Group) and biographer (Muhammad Ali and Company) Hauser has "commingled Mark Twain's words and ideas of my own" in this witty, elegiac novel. - Publishers Weekly review.
  
• Death on the Mississippi: A Mark Twain Mystery
  Author: Heck, Peter J.
  Publisher: Berkley $ 21.95 ISBN: 0425149382 Date: 1995
  Here is the riveting and rollicking debut mystery of Peter J. heck, featuring Mark Twain and his secretary Wentworth Cabot in the adventure of their lives. Other titles in the series include: A Connecticut Yankee in Criminal Court, The Prince and the Prosecutor, The Guilty Abroad, The Mysterious Strangler and Tom's Lawyer.
  
• The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  Author: Matthews, Greg
  Publisher: Crown $ 15.95 ISBN: 0517550571 Date: 1983
  A sequel to Twain's classic describes the experiences of Huck Finn and Jim as they head for Sacramento and the Gold Rush of 1849.
  
• Eternity Road
  Author: McDevitt, Jack
  Publisher: Prism $ 22 ISBN: 0061052086 Date: 1997
  The Roadmakers left only ruins behind - but what magnificent ruins! Their concrete highways still cross the continent. Their shattered towers still gleam on the banks of the Mississippi. Their cups and combs and jewelry are found in every Illyrian home. The lost race left behind a legend, as well - a hidden sanctuary called Haven, where a few Roadmakers hid from the mysterious Plague that destroyed their world, and where even now the secrets of their civilization might still be found. Chaka's brother was one of those who sought to find Haven and never returned. But now Chaka has inherited a rare Roadmaker artifact - a book called A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - which has inspired her to follow in his footsteps. A red-haired young woman with a hunter's eyes, Chaka gathers an unlikely band including an aging scholar, an amateur soldier, and a mystic healer. With a reluctant leather-clad frontiersman as a guide, they set out to follow the collapsed roadways north toward the dragon-haunted ruins of Chicago and the thundering cataract Nyagra. On their journey they will encounter blood-thirsty river pirates, electronic ghosts still mourning their lost civilization, and machines that skim over the ground and even into the air. And they will learn the truth about their own mysterious past. - Publisher Marketing.
• That Fateful Lighning: A Novel of Ulysses S. Grant
  Author: Parry, Richard
  Publisher: Ballantine $ 24.95 ISBN: 0345427289 Date: 2000
  This compelling fictional portrait tells of Ulysses S. Grant's campaign on the Civil War battlefield and his struggle against time and cancer to complete the memoir now acknowledged as the finest literary achievement of any American president.
  
• Shohola Falls
  Author: Pearson, Michael
  Publisher: Syracuse Univ $ 24.95 ISBN: 0815607857 Date: 2003
  With the death of his mother and the sudden disappearance of his father, teenager Tommy Blanks is left to live alone in the Bronx on the money his father left him and what he can steal. His shoplifting eventually lands him in a Catholic Boys' Home in Upstate New York run by a demonic priest. There Tommy falls in love with a local girl, Nada, but also meets his nemesis, Adam Delano. After a school-wide brawl, Tommy escapes and is presumed dead by the local authorities when they find his hat floating in the river. Tommy is taken in by a local hermit, a Korean war veteran, who leads him to Tommy's great-great grandfather's deserted house in a nearby town. History and fiction converge with the discovery that Thomas Blankenship--Tommy's great-great grandfather--is the young man whom Mark Twain used as the prototype for Huckleberry Finn. And Tommy's life on the road as an orphan parallels Twain's resourceful Huck Finn. Eventually, his search for the facts and the meaning of his own experience leads Tommy to Chicago, the Southwest, San Francisco, and finally back home to Shohola Falls. Pearson's evocative prose works to dramatic effect in a novel that is part mystery, part bildungsroman, part love story. The book will appeal to a general audience and especially aficionados of Twain. - Publisher Marketing.
  
  
• My Jim
  Author: Rawles, Nancy
  Publisher: Crown $ 19.95 ISBN: 1400054001 Date: 2005
  Kirkus
  A spare and beautiful meditation on love and loss, this novel follows the life of Sadie, the abandoned wife of the escaped slave Jim from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
  Suggested Reading: African American Stars | Adult Books for Teens
  Updated 11.9.04
• Fires of Eden
  Author: Simmons, Dan
  Publisher: Putnam $ 22.95 ISBN: 0399139222 Date: 1994
  Real estate mogul Byron Trumbo is the owner of the Mauna Pele, a deluxe Hawaiian resort that until recently was the playground of the rich and famous. Yet instead of making money hand over fist, Trumbo has a bit of a problem: guests keep disappearing. Hoping to sell the resort to Japanese investors, he invites them to the Mauna Pele to finalize the deal - but strange and fantastic events complicate the weekend. Giant beasts capable of human speech are spotted, visitors turn up dead and dismembered, and volcanic eruptions fill the sky with smoke and flame as fast-moving lava flows dangerously close to the resort. Trumbo refuses to allow these minor inconveniences to impede his sales pitch to the Japanese. Other guests find themselves at the Mauna Pele this weekend, with agendas that extend beyond enjoying the sun and sand. For college professor Eleanor Perry, this "vacation" is a pilgrimage to a place once visited by her spinster aunt. Equipped with her aunt's diary, which details adventures with Mark Twain more than one hundred years ago, Eleanor has uncommon insight into the frightening and mystical events about to unfold. And thrice-married Cordie Stumpf, whose housewifely appearance belies her keen mind and fearless resolve, is at the resort to pursue her own goal. The two women join forces as an astonishingly self-reliant duo prepared to do battle with the immortal enemies of the volcano goddess Pele and thereby restore harmony to the island. Against the mythic backdrop of an island paradise filled with vengeful gods and brooding menace, Dan Simmons weaves a stunning tale of ancient rivalries tested in the modern world. - Publisher Marketing.
• The Mark Twain Murders
  Author: Skom, Edith
  Publisher: Council Oaks $ 12.95 ISBN: 0933031173 Date: 1989
  A killer has struck in the campus library of Midwestern University and Professor Beth Austin teams up with an FBI agent to find the murderer. As she gets close to solving the mystery, she becomes the killer's next target in this tale of the dark side of academe as full of twists as the ancient and labyrinthine university library itself.
  
• Last Girls
  Author: Smith, Lee
  Publisher: Algonquin $ 24.95 ISBN: 1565124057 Date: 2003
  On a beautiful June day in 1965, a dozen girls-classmates at a picturesque Blue Ridge women's college-launched their homemade raft (inspired by Huck Finn's) on a trip down the Mississippi. It's Girls A-Go-Go Down the Mississippi read the headline in the Paducah, Kentucky, paper. Thirty-five years later, four of those "girls" reunite to cruise the river again. This time it's on the luxury steamboat, The Belle of Natchez, and there's no publicity. This time, when they reach New Orleans, they'll give the river the ashes of a fifth rafter-beautiful Margaret ("Baby") Ballou. - Publisher Marketing.
• Huckleberry Fiend
  Author: Smith, Julie
  Publisher: Mysterious $ 15.95 ISBN: 0892962372 Date: 1987
  From the 1991 Edgar Award-winning author of New Orleans Mourning comes a witty mystery featuring writer/sleuth Paul McDonald. When his burglar friend Booker "happens" on part of Mark Twain's original manuscript of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he wants Paul to help find its rightful owner.
  

Nonfiction

• A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of Writers and Artists, 1854-1967
  Author: Cohen, Rachel
  Publisher: Random $ 25.95 ISBN: 1400061644 Date: 2004
  Booklist
  This unique American cultural history defines relationships among writers and artists who knew and influenced each other over the course of a century: 1854-1967.
  
• Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture
  Author: Fishkin, Shelley Fisher
  Publisher: Oxford $ 30 ISBN: 0195105311 Date: 1996
  PW
  Mark Twain has been called the American Cervantes, our Homer, our Tolstoy, our Shakespeare. This lively and provocative look at Twain blends personal narrative with reflections on history, literature, and popular culture to reveal who this great author really was and how we use (and abuse) his legacy today.
  
• The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography
  Author: Kaplan, Fred
  Publisher: Doubleday $ 35 ISBN: 0385477155 Date: 2003
  Booklist
  One of our most distinguished biographers offers a bold, revisionist life of the inimitable Mark Twain.
  Updated 9.22.03
• Mark Twain: A Life
  Author: Powers, Ron
  Publisher: Free $ 35 ISBN: 0743248996 Date: 2005
  PW Booklist LJ
  In the most important narrative biography of Samuel Langhorne Clemens in half a century, a Pulitzer-Prize winner brings to life the astonishing man behind one of America's most famous sons.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 8.15.05
• Mark Twain
  by Ward, Geoffrey
  Publisher: Knopf $ 24 ISBN: 0375405615 Date: 2001
  Kirkus
  From the authors of Jazz, Baseball and The Civil War: the first fully illustrated biography of one of the central figures of literature--the American titan who gave readers Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Life on the Mississippi. A companion volume to the four-hour PBS television series.
  
• Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing 1780-1910: American Travel Writing from Exploration to Art
  by Ziff, Larzer
  Publisher: Yale $ 29.95 ISBN: 0300082363 Date: 2001
  Kirkus
  Larzer Ziff traces the history of distinctively American travel writing through the stories of five great representatives. John Ledyard (1752-1789) , John Lloyd Stephens (1805-1852), Bayard Taylor (1825-1878), Mark Twain, and Henry James.
  Suggested Reading: Travel Tales

 

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