Word: farrar
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...Peter Hoeg, a Danish novelist then new to America, was a slyly expressed contempt for what the author saw as his country's bourgeois self-satisfaction. This much relished contempt and cheerfully malign slyness are the driving forces of Hoeg's first novel, The History of Danish Dreams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 356 pages; $24), which has now been issued in the U.S. That said, there's not much similarity between the two novels. Smilla has a powerful narrative flow; Dreams is a lumpish absurdity that fuddles to a halt after several dozen pages, begins again with new characters and repeats...
Prairie Reunion by Barbara J. Scot (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 230 pages; $21) is a bittersweet homecoming story tracing the author's return in middle age to the puritannical farming community where she grew up. In Scotch Grove, Iowa, she tries to piece together the puzzle of her mother's loving stoicism in the face of her father's humiliating desertion and subsequent suicide. Structured as a patchwork of conversations, childhood recollections and lyrical encounters with the land, Scot's quietly earnest quest yields her valuable understanding of her mother's reticence and a deeper appreciation of the mysteries of family...
...notion of placing such a figure at the center of a murder story in the Paris of 1892 must have seemed both absurd and superb when writer Eric Zencey hatched it, and in his novel Panama (Farrar Straus Giroux; 375 pages; $24), that's exactly the way it turns out. Zencey, a professor of history at Goddard College in Vermont, presents an Adams pastiche that might have been recognizable to the original: a small, acute, conflicted man who emits pedantry when made nervous. He cannot praise except in negatives: on the rococo facade of the Paris Opera House "the winged...
This rule must be applied firmly in the case of Richard Powers' brilliantly imaginative new novel, Galatea 2.2 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 329 pages; $23), a book that should go immediately to the top of the year's 10-best lists. As the title suggests, one of the novel's central themes is the bringing to life, and to independent awareness, of inert, nonhuman matter. The Galatea in this reworking of the myth is not a statue but an enormously complex network of computer circuitry, and the Pygmalions-there are a couple of them-are an acerbic cyber-scientist called Lentz...
...last year for which figures are available), 64 million more than the previous year, and superstores report that their sales are growing 15% a year on average. "The great advantage to the superstores is simply that they buy more titles," says Roger Straus, president of the venerable publishing house Farrar Straus & Giroux. "More books in the best-seller echelon are being sold, and it would be unfair to say that the first-time novelist will be hurt by superstores...