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Berkley Holds #1 Trade Fiction and Mass Market Fiction Slots on The New York Times Bestseller List; Penguin Group (USA) Overall Occupies Four Paperback #1 Positions

Berkley owns the top of The New York Times paperback fiction bestseller lists. For the week of May 18th, Berkley scores both the #1 trade fiction paperback, and the #1 mass market paperback: The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs (Berkley) climbs to #1 on the trade fiction list in its eighteenth week; while Invisible Prey by John Sandford (Berkley) is at #1 in its second week on the mass market list.

In addition, Three Cups of Tea by David Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (Penguin) holds at #1 on the paperback nonfiction list in its 66th week; and A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle (Plume) stays in the #1 position on the paperback advice, how-to and miscellaneous list in its fourteenth week, marking four simultaneous #1's in one week.

This is the seventh time this year that Penguin Group (USA) has owned four or more #1 slots in a single week, an industry best in 2008.

Last Wednesday (5/7), authors Tom Farley, Jr. and Tanner Colby had their first big signing for their new book The Chris Farley Show at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble. On hand with the authors to celebrate Chris Farley's comic brilliance and touch upon the late comic's personal demons were Farley childhood friend Mike Cleary and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" writers Brian Stack and Kevin Dorff.

(Top Left: Authors Tanner Colby and Tom Farley, Jr., Far Left: Brian Stack and Kevin Dorff, Right: Mike Cleary, Tom Farley, Jr., Brian Stack, Kevin Dorff, and Tanner Colby)

View more information on The Chris Farley Show.

Harlan Coben, Hold Tight, New York Times, best seller, book party, celebration, cake, mystery, Penguin Books, books

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Nor will you meet with this fate:

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Laurie Viera Rigler is our guest blogger during the week of May 12th. If you have any questions for her add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict:

After nursing a broken engagement with Jane Austen novels and Absolut, Courtney Stone wakes up and finds herself not in her Los Angeles bedroom or even in her own body, but inside the bedchamber of a woman in Regency England. Who but an Austen addict like herself could concoct such a fantasy?

Not only is Courtney stuck in another woman's life, she is forced to pretend she actually is that woman; and despite knowing nothing about her, she manages to fool even the most astute observer. But not even her level of Austen mania has prepared Courtney for the chamber pots and filthy coaching inns of nineteenth-century England, let alone the realities of being a single woman who must fend off suffocating chaperones, condom-less seducers, and marriages of convenience.

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Here's how it went. We requested fresh samples, because perfumes are often reformulated, sometimes nightmarishly. We considered it abdication of duty to go on memory and old bottles. Most companies were happy to send—some, not. Many promised and never delivered. (Comme des Garçons, why?) Some were so rude I wanted to slap their parents. (DelRae Roth, were you having a bad hair year?) Anyone too French, too Italian, or too impervious to my particular charms was phoned by Luca. At the end, we took field trips to test ones we missed. In total, we reviewed about 1,500 scents, 300 more than promised, and we still get emails scolding, "You forgot ____!" (Send suggestions to mail@perfumestheguide.com.)

We both find luxury and exclusivity tawdry and tiresome, so we were gleefully immune to packaging and press releases, except in a few cases. (Mona di Orio called herself a "great beauty" and a "living Modigliani" on her own website where she boasted of being "Edmund" Roudnitska's student, and who were we to deny her the trouble she asked for?) We believe strongly in testing on paper first. Good scents can improve on skin, horrible scents never, and they don't wash off: not with soap, hot water, bleach, though I haven't tried fire or amputation. We put scents that passed the paper test on skin, smelled them over hours, argued across the table about what to call them, Winston Churchill or Amy Winehouse, neighborly or vicious, diva or wallflower, neurotic or sane, confused or coherent, delicious or disgusting, spills in the laundry aisle. Our position on skin chemistry is controversial, since we judge the perfumer's art, not whether you ate a hell of a lot of garlic last night, though no one should buy fragrances without personal testing. Yet, despite Luca smelling like a classic buttery European and me like an odorless East Asian, we noticed no tremendous differences in scent development, and we used the paper test as a control. Still, I hear some people sweat vinegar and have trouble.

» Harlan Coben joins us to discuss his novel, Hold Tight.

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Harlan Coben stopped by the Penguin office last week to celebrate and toast his new book, Hold Tight, debuting at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The Dutton team surprised Harlan with a giant cake that was almost as sweet as getting the number one spot!

As always, Harlan was charming, personable, and so very grateful for everyone's hard work.

We're so proud he's part of the Dutton family!

(Harlan Coben, Penguin Group (USA) President Susan Petersen Kennedy, and Dutton President and Publisher Brian Tart are all smiles at the party.)

Harlan Coben, Hold Tight, New York Times, best seller, book party, celebration, cake, mystery, Penguin Books, books

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ELASTIC GIRL: Everyone is special.
DASH: That's just another way of saying nobody is special.
-The Incredibles

Would people buy and read a book full of critical opinions written by two people passionate about the art of perfume? Would they accept that perfume was something worth loving when done well-which is to say, something worth loathing when done badly? Would they indulge the informed but idiosyncratic declarations of two obsessed weirdos prone to both panegyrics and lame jokes? Would they issue a call for our heads? Or would they yawn and consider it all beneath notice? There was one way to find out: write the damn thing, one smelly spritz at a time.

I met Luca via his blog, Perfume Notes, which he kept up for a few months in 2005, around the same time I was keeping up my blog, Brain Trapped in Girl's Body. (It's still up, in all its folly.) Our first collaboration was when I gave him thorough editorial feedback on his manuscript for The Secret of Scent after he explained, sheepishly, that his mother didn't read English, his wife wasn't interested in it, and his scientist friends were bad judges of literary merit. Then he stopped and I stopped blogging when our personal lives were independently unraveling, but we kept up a transatlantic correspondence that I found the source of laughter and perspective in unprecedented quality and quantity. We got to the point that we were finishing and beginning each other's sentences, and around the end of 2006 he phoned me to ask if I wouldn't consider writing a guide to perfume with him.

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Riverhead's Dinaw Mengestu Wins 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize First Fiction Award for The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Riverhead Books is thrilled that Dinaw Mengestu's critically-acclaimed debut novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, has won the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize First Fiction Award, announced this past weekend at the LA Times Book Festival. Dinaw's novel was also a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, in addition to being chosen as the newest selection for this year's Seattle Reads program. Dinaw will be in Seattle for five days in early May participating in ongoing events in support of the Seattle Reads program.

Ron Currie, author of God is Dead (Viking/Penguin), has won the NYPL 2008 Young Lions Fiction Award. The announcement was made at a ceremony at the New York Public Library this past Monday, hosted by actor Ethan Hawke. The Young Lions Fiction Award is given annually to an American writer age 35 or younger for either a novel or collection of short stories. Each year five young fiction writers, which this year also included Riverhead's Dinaw Mengestu, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, are selected as finalists by a reading committee of Young Lions members, writers, editors, and librarians. A panel of award judges, including novelists Han Ong, Helen Shulman, and last year's winner Ogla Grushin (for her Putnam/Marian Wood book, The Dream Life of Sukhanov), selected Ron Currie the winner of this year's $10,000 prize.

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Mother's Day always had the feel of something uncontroversial cooked up by the UN at the end of a long session, after difficult things are taken care of like whether 2008 is going to be the Year of the Potato or that of Sanitation (both, actually). It is in fact no such thing, more likely the remnant of an ancient rite to Cybele, and occurs on different days in each country. This pleasantly suggests that a woman of means could avoid housework and get presents most days of the year simply by dragging her family from Nicaragua (May 30) to Mongolia (June 1) and from there to Luxembourg. Like most bland rituals, it can be done either as a gesture or as a heartfelt gesture. The hard bit these days (I speak as the son of a feminist) is to locate a mother who will accept a present on that day, with all the implications it carries that no presents will be forthcoming the rest of the year. I have developed a strategy: give the MD present several days early, seemingly at random, to suggest that a mad vein of profligacy and filial piety is taking root. Then, the next day, suggest that the present will serve equally well for Mother's Day. That way, convention is respected but without any hint that this is, in fact, it for another year. This year, however, is special: in the spirit of the old saying "teach a mother to fish," a novel opportunity has emerged in the form of a brilliant guide to perfume written by myself and my co-author. It overcomes an age-old problem. Instead of spending hours trying to remember what your mother's perfume is without asking and looking silly, or smelling hundreds of celebrity fragrances trying to remember whether your Mom said Paris Hilton (or was it J-Lo?) was a nice girl, you can give the gift that keeps on taking, and help your mother embark on an online spending spree that will likely end up bankrupting the whole family. And when the UN next year cooks up a Son's Day, she'll give you the Beckham's she mistakenly clicked on, thinking it was a girly perfume on account of the cute bottle.

Tania Sanchez, Luca Turin, Perfumes, guide, scent, fashion, smell, expert, Penguin Books, books