There are a number of Book Sense fiction bestsellers that have come close to making the national charts. They are certainly worth noting because if they follow in the footsteps of other indie top-sellers that never made a national hardcover list or that landed for just a few weeks in the lower rungs, they could rack up long tenures on the trade paperback charts. Think The Secret Life of Bees or The Time Traveler's Wife, among others. Three such titles, still on most of the regional Book Sense lists, are Marilyn Robinson's Gilead, Alice Munro's Runaway (which did hit PW's list for one week) and Annie Proulx's Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories.
Gilead received stellar reviews (PW's starred review noted that Robinson's prose "is beautiful, shimmering and precise") and fans of her fiction debut, Housekeeping, waited 23 years for the second novel. Farrar, Straus & Giroux did a 47,000 first printing and went back five more times, bringing the in-print figure to 84,000. Robinson did some touring in the Midwest and is scheduled to visit San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle later this month. Munro's story collection from Knopf had six printings, making her in-print total 103,000. Robinson's and Munro's titles were both among the New York Times's 10 best books of 2004. Knopf notes that Proulx's story collection also garnered excellent reviews, and the house launched the book with a 95,000-copy printing.
