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Eight Titles from Penguin Group (USA) are 2007 New York Times Notable Books

Eight Penguin Group (USA) titles are among The New York Times' Top 100 Notable books of 2007, selected by The New York Times Book Review, based on all of the reviews printed in the NYTBR since last year's selection in December. The list of all 100 books will be printed in the December 2nd issue of The New York Times Book Review. To view the list of Penguin books, plus their corresponding reviews in The New York Times, see below:

In Fiction & Poetry:

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, by Dinaw Mengestu. (Riverhead) A first novel about an Ethiopian exile in Washington, D.C., evokes loss, hope, memory and the solace of friendship. Read the review here.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz. (Riverhead) A nerdy Dominican-American yearns to write and fall in love. Read the review here.
Cheating at Canasta, by William Trevor. (Viking) Trevor's dark, worldly short stories linger in the mind long after they're finished. Read the review here.
Knots, by Nuruddin Farah. (Riverhead) After 20 years, a Somali woman returns home to Mogadishu from Canada, intent on reclaiming a family house from a warlord. Read the review here.

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One question most writers get asked is; “How did you come up with the idea for your book?” Considering my offering is a collection of other people’s maps I can’t help but feel a slight tinge of embarrassment about this line of enquiry. I always want to remind people that I’m enormously grateful to the many thousands of cartographers and designers who’ve slaved away crafting and re-drawing their maps of the world’s subway systems. It was these people; and specifically a man called Paul E. Garbutt who must have had the earliest influence over my spark of interest in the subject.

For it was he who was responsible for re-drawing the classic maps of one of the worlds most celebrated designers, in the era when I would have become aware of them the first time; the mid 1960’s.

At this time I was a somewhat annoying and fidgety child being brought up by incredibly tolerant and liberal parents in West London. Most weeks, my mother would painstakingly haul my smaller sister and I on a tortuous journey across fields (yes we had real fields in the outskirts of London), to the breezy stop of the number 140 bus (which never seemed to arrive until we threatened the invisible vehicle that we’d walk off) and eventually down clunky escalators onto the London Undergrounds’ Central Line at fifties style ‘Northolt’ station.

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Hello all. I'm Jessica Wade and I've already written an intro post, but here I just wanted to say hi as the guest blogger for Ace/Roc and explain what I'll be doing this week. My assignment is to give you all an idea about what goes on in the hallowed halls of our imprint in the course of a week.

An editor's life can vary greatly from day to day. Most people seem to think that I read all day in a comfortable chair. To that I say: hah! Sometimes I do get to read at work...but more often I read at home. The work day is full of minutiae that fills a lot of my time (Ginjer Buchanan, Ace/Roc Chieftan, calls it "getting nibbled to death by ducks" or alternately "like herding cats"). I read a lot of emails. Authors ask me for things, other departments ask me for things, agents ask me for things from other departments for authors. I send a lot of emails. I read and route cover copy. I write Title Information Sheets. I cover conference books. I fill out more forms than you could possibly imagine. I request checks. I try to stay on top of what's hot in the genre by reading trade publications like Locus magazine and checking out bestseller lists. (Incidentally, urban fantasy and military science fiction are super hot right now! See, I know my stuff!) I go to lots and lots of meetings. I answer the phone, make copies, sharpen pencils, and engage in many other glamorous pursuits. Like filing.