Guest blog, or Dan Brown Dan Brown Dan Brown!

You can take the bookseller out of the bookstore, but you can't take him off the blog... at least not until his privileges (is that the word I'm looking for?) are revoked. I'm blogging across state lines tonight because I am just so excited about the man who is bringing "sexy back to a genre that had been left for dead." That's right - Dan Brown.

Well... I would be remiss not to mention Dan Brown at least once today, right? Or six times: Dan Brown, Dan Brown, Dan Brown, Dan Brown, Dan Brown, Dan Brown.

(As an aside, it might be contrary of me to question this on the release day of The Book That Will Save Publishing, but did I miss the death of the popular fiction thriller? If the genre was left for dead, as the New York Times would have it, how come no one told him, or him, or him?)

Not that I'm being a spoilsport. I'm sure The Lost Symbol will provide plenty of entertainment and will hold you over until the movie is released, but for those of you looking for books by authors whose websites do not have flash animations or blurbs with phrases like "pulse-pounding," here's a short list of some upcoming releases that may be of some interest:

I'm going to break my promise right away, because Library of America's 2-volume set of American Fantastic Tales definitely promises to get your pulse pounding.

This chronological collection features the usual suspects (Poe, Lovecraft, Straub) along with the surprising (Tennessee Williams and Nabokov, for instance), in a comprehensive survey of what is in many ways a uniquely American genre.

At $70 it's an investment, but the dent in your wallet will be more than compensated by the good feelings you'll experience knowing that you helped a non-profit organization aimed at keeping the best American literature in print.

Next up is a new translation of a book originally published 50 years ago, but no less hilarious and fresh today as it was then: Witold Gombrowicz's Pornografia. Here we have a pastoral tale of... murder, sexual predation, intrigue, and lusty farmhands.... Maybe all I'm picking are books that promise pulse-pounding action....

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't pick a book from the inspiring, challenging, unique, etc., etc., Dalkey Archive Press. (Disclaimer: scroll down.)

If my affiliation with the publisher of Jerusalem by Gonçalo M. Tavares puts any doubt into your mind as to the book, read instead what Jose Saramago, a man who likely has no idea what Dalkey Archive is, had to say about Tavares:

"Goncalo M. Tavares burst onto the Portuguese literary scene armed with an utterly original imagination that broke through all the traditional imaginative boundaries. This, combined with a language entirely his own, mingling bold invention and a mastery of the colloquial, means that it would be no exaggeration to say-with no disrespect to the young Portuguese novelists writing today-that there is very much a before Gonçalo M. Tavares and an after . . . I've predicted that in thirty years' time, if not before, he will win the Nobel Prize and I'm sure my prediction will come true."

(Please click on the cover to read an additional blurb by Saramago.)