She's That Girl
Elphie by Gregory Maguire soars to #3 on our hardcover fiction list. It’s the author’s “charming prequel,” per our review, to Wicked, and his first new title since the release of the blockbuster movie. First-week print unit sales defied gravity compared with sales for books in the sequel series, Another Day—not that it’s a popularity contest.
Urban Legend
Alex Aster got her big break as an author with the 2022 BookTok smash Lightlark, which launched a dark YA romantasy series. This week, her adult debut, the fake-relationship rom-com Summer in the City, tops our hardcover fiction list. The main couple’s pretend dates “take them on a whirlwind tour of famous New York sites, which will please armchair travelers,” our review said. Aster proves “as talented at handling contemporary settings as building fantasy worlds.”
All Is Vanity
Longtime magazine journalist Graydon Carter lands at #11 on our hardcover nonfiction list with When the Going Was Good, which our review said is “at once a sharp look at the art of crafting a story, a collection of fizzy anecdotes about the magazine industry, and a stirring catalog of his efforts to remake Vanity Fair in his own image.” About 40% of first-week print unit sales were in the middle Atlantic region—where you’ll find Condé Nast’s New York City mothership and whatever else is left of a once thriving industry—suggesting that the memoir found its fans among those who remember, or wish they remembered, what the book calls “the last golden age of magazines.”
Queen of the Underground
Debuting at #14 on our hardcover fiction list, Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert by RuPaul’s Drag Race season eight winner Bob the Drag Queen is “a vivacious narrative that sees Harriet Tubman magically brought back to life,” according to our starred review. “Revived in the present day along with a handful of other famous historical figures (Cleopatra has reinvented herself as an Instagram model), Harriet teams up with the narrator, legendary hip-hop producer Darnell Williams, to connect Black people to their ancestry through music.” Darnell helps Harriet and her band (the Freemans, made up of people she freed from slavery) finish their album, and she in turn helps Darnell find self-acceptance, having fallen into obscurity after being outed as gay years before. Our review deems the novel “a knockout.”
