Sorting Through the Promo Galleys

Here are some of the upcoming releases that caught my eye among the dozen or so galleys I picked up on the first day of BookExpo:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, the Susanna Clarke debut Neil Gaiman calls "unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years." Also unquestionably the hugest galley I've acquired, at 777 pages.

Shade, a new novel from Oscar winner Neil Jordan, which Alan Wall told Guardian readers he found ambitious if sometimes frustrating. Bloomsbury will also be bringing some of Jordan's earlier fiction back in new paperback editions.

Sammy's Hill, the Kristin Gore "Sex and the City on Capitol Hill" novel that's generating much buzz.

The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll, in which Jean Nathan probes the life of children's book author Dare Wright.

Men of Tomorrow, a new Gerard Jones tome on "geeks, gangsters, and the birth of the comic book" that's being billed as a "real-life Kavalier and Clay." I've been a fan of Jones since I was a teenager and he was writing comic books like The Trouble With Girls with Will Jacobs. The two of them also co-wrote one of the funniest books ever: The Beaver Papers, in which famous writers try their hand at the beloved sitcom. Like Nietzsche: "And Beaver descended alone from the house encountering no one, and all at once there stood before him Larry Mondello who bit into an apple. And thus spake Beaver unto Larry Mondello, Shared cookies make a friend, not getting in trouble together, and he punched Larry Mondello in the stomach." (I admit, I had to Google to find that quote; I do not have a copy of this 20-year-old classic, unjustly out of print.)