The Picador Book Room

It’s Labor Day Weekend at last! Here’s what the Picador team will be reading over the long weekend.

Daniel is enjoying The Barbarian Nurseries by Hector Tobar, out next week in paperback. He also read a couple of author interviews: The Believer’s interview with Richard Price and The Paris Review’s conversation with Nicholson Baker.

PJ is taking along Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping on what is sure to be a long, traffic-ridden drive up the coast this weekend.

Alaina stumbled across a copy of Alexander Chee’s elegant and heartbreaking Edinburgh on the Picador backlist shelves earlier this week and has been quietly devastated ever since.

Gabrielle is continuing her education in noir and is almost finished with Derek Raymond’s He Died with His Eyes Open, the first book in his 1980s Factory Series.

I love the British slang and the dark places the detective goes while trying to solve a gruesome murder. Great characters in this one.

Once I finish with it, which should be today or tomorrow, I snagged a copy of humorist Alan Bennett’s memoir Writing Home from the Picador bookroom after hearing a rebroadcast of an interview he did in 1995 with CBC Radio.

Stephen is reading another future Picador title: Aifric Campbell’s completely absorbing novel cum financial thriller On the Floor.

Set in the late 80s as brilliant young men and women from modest backgrounds broke into the high flying ranks of international finance, the novel follows Geri Molloy, a whipsmart, self-destructive young Irish woman on the make who must weigh her huge ambitions against the personal costs they will exact for her to achieve them. Picador will publish the book next summer, and it will definitely appeal to readers of Michael Lewis and Bryan Burrough in its thrilling insider perspective on the world of high finance, with a gripping plot and an appealing, flawed heroine at its core.

Elizabeth just got a copy of Portrait of a Novel, Michael Gorra’s new biography of Henry James.

The book approaches “The Master” by retelling the story behind Portrait of a Lady, one of his many masterpieces. I am so excited about it, although I will probably wait till the winter holidays to really dive into it—this is something I want to savor.

James is catching up with a Picador backlist title he’s never read: The Twenty-Seventh City, Jonathan Franzen’s debut novel (1988).