Manga Mania
Mangia, manga fans: last week was a big week for you. The latest volume in Tatsuya Endo’s Spy X Family series hit #1 on our overall bestseller list just before Wit Studio and CloverWorks announced the second season of its anime adaptation—plus an original movie for good measure. The latest offering from Gege Akutami’s Jujutsu Kaisen series and a deluxe edition of Kentaro Miura’s Berserk series also hit our lists (#5 overall/#4 in trade paperback and #5 in hardcover fiction, respectively), as did the latest volume in Chugong’s Solo Leveling Korean webcomic series.
‘Poverty’ Soars
“I have a deep suspicion of theories of poverty that are just letting us off the hook. The progressives have them, and the conservatives have them,” Matthew Desmond told PW in a recent profile. “I want my writing to be read by policymakers.” Policymakers or no, Desmond clearly has his readers. Poverty, by America, the latest by the author of 2017’s Evicted—which won a Pulitzer, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Galbraith—hit #2 in hardcover nonfiction in its first week, with more than four times the sales of Evicted in its first week.
Howlin’ ‘Wolf’
The definitive epic poem of Old English literature remains hot even in 2023. Bea Wolf, a graphic novel reinterpretation from American cartoonist Zach Weinersmith and French cartoonist Boulet, follows Maria Dahvana Headley’s 2020 translation of Beowulf—itself coming after Headley’s 2018 remixing of the myth in the novel The Mere Wife—selling 8,748 copies in its first week and landing at #8 on the hardcover fiction list. Our starred review called the book “a truly fresh, inventive remix that privileges childhood’s insular sensibilities alongside an unsettling truth: ‘Time lingers for no kid.’ ”
NEW & NOTABLE
COUNTDOWN
James Patterson and Brendan DuBois
#18 Overall,
#2 Hardcover Fiction
The second book in Patterson and DuBois’s Out of Sight series finds agent Amy Cornwall with only five days to save the world and four to save her family.
SMOLDER
Laurell K. Hamilton
#6 Hardcover Fiction
The latest from trailblazing supernatural romance and urban fantasy novelist Hamilton “keeps her signature blend of supernatural action and erotically charged soap opera drama on simmer” per PW’s review.
