Speed Demon

Amor Towles’s first two novels, beloved of book clubs, both had somewhat slow starts—but for his third, The Lincoln Highway, sales surpassed 60,000 in its first week on shelves. The book was this month’s Read with Jenna pick for the Jenna Bush Hager Book Club, which couldn’t have hurt its chances to hit #1 overall. By comparison, it took A Gentleman in Moscow—which has since sold more than a million combined copies at outlets that report to NPD BookScan—14 weeks to push nearly as many units as The Lincoln Highway, which our starred review called a “magnificent comic road novel,” did in one.

Tucci Time

Actor Stanley Tucci’s rise to stardom has been slow but steady. The sublime 1996 foodie film Big Night—which Tucci cowrote, codirected, and costarred in—may be considered his breakthrough in Hollywood, but 2020 brought him viral internet fame and a CNN original series, Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy. And now, in 2021, he has a bona fide cookbook hit in Taste: My Life Through Food. It’s #9 in the country overall in its first week on sale.

Midwest Melody

Grunge god Dave Grohl, the Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters frontman, has the #2 book in the country this week with his memoir The Storyteller, and while sales in the Seattle area—grunge’s ancestral home—were unsurprisingly good, the book’s performance in the rest of the Pacific Northwest was a bit muted. No matter: the Midwest and Bible Belt states, it seems, love Grohl’s “soulful story,” which our starred review called “a cut above typical rock memoirs.” It saw remarkable sales per capita in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, Okla.; St. Louis and Springfield, Mo.; Milwaukee and Madison, Wis.; and elsewhere.

NEW & NOTABLE

CROSSROADS
Jonathan Franzen
#4 Hardcover Fiction
The novelist returns with his first title in half a decade to kick off a planned trilogy. Our review called it “a sweeping and masterly examination of the shifting culture of early 1970s America.”

I’LL TAKE YOUR QUESTIONS NOW
Stephanie Grisham
#3 Hardcover Nonfiction
The Trump administration’s penultimate press secretary, who famously held no official news briefings during her tenure, is the latest former administration staffer with a bestselling memoir.